Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Journal of Neuroscience Methods Automation of 3d Reconstruction of Neural Tissue from Large Volume of Conventional Serial Section Transmission Electron Micrographs

We describe an approach for automation of the process of reconstruction of neural tissue from serial section transmission electron micrographs. Such reconstructions require 3D segmentation of individual neuronal processes (axons and dendrites) performed in densely packed neuropil. We first detect neu-ronal cell profiles in each image in a stack of serial micrographs with multi-scale ridge detector. Short breaks in detected boundaries are interpolated using anisotropic contour completion formulated in fuzzy-logic framework. Detected profiles from adjacent sections are linked together based on cues such as shape similarity and image texture. Thus obtained 3D segmentation is validated by human operators in computer-guided proofreading process. Our approach makes possible reconstructions of neural tissue at final rate of about 5 ␮m 3 /man h, as determined primarily by the speed of proofreading. To date we have applied this approach to reconstruct few blocks of neural tissue from different regions of rat brain total-ing over 1000 ␮m 3 , and used these to evaluate reconstruction speed, quality, error rates, and presence of ambiguous locations in neuropil ssTEM imaging data.
Online social networks in a post-Soviet state: how Hungarians protect and share on Facebook

As Facebook has become global, users from different cultural and socio-political contexts have joined the site. We present a case study investigating how both current and historical political events, as well as the migration from a local social networking site to Facebook, impact Hungarians' privacy attitudes on Facebook. We report the results of 19 semi-structured interviews of Hungarian Facebook users, focused on behaviors, motivations, and attitudes. Our results uncover a stark generation gap in Facebook privacy attitudes, with the youngest generation expressing little concern about personal information or intimate photos, whereas users older than 30 explain that they and their peers rarely share information on Facebook. Members of all age groups agree that political opinions should be kept off Facebook, but the motivating factors differ between generations. We also highlight how users' dissatisfaction with iWiW, the local social network, can be contrasted with the high degree of trust they have in Facebook.
The Personality Process of the Investor

The economic activity of investment is to be understood from the perspectives of economics and behavioral sciences. The behavioral process of personality is an important source of influence in determining high and low investment. The construct of economic personality explains the personality processes related to the economic context. Using the variables of financial resources and the nature of psychological processes, four different types of investors, star, realistic, greedy and sluggish may be identified. The core psychological processes of achievement motivation, locus of control, goal setting orientation, self-efficacy and risk taking behavior, expressed in positive and negative forms lead to high and low investment.
The “New” Section 504

School leaders are familiar with the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, but they also need to be legally literate about Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. This need is particularly pressing in the wake of significant recent changes in Section 504 as a result of the Americans With Disabilities Amendments Act. This case illustrates the eligibility and entitlement of a student with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder under Section 504 before and after these amendments. Would you be able to take the legally correct course of action if you were Amy Davidson? Do you have legally current and defensible answers to the discussion questions?
Reliability and construct validity of three health-related self-report scales in HIV-positive adults in rural Rwanda

Abstract Depression, low health-related quality of life, and low perceived social support have been shown to predict poor health outcomes, including HIV-related outcomes. Mental health morbidity and HIV are important public health concerns in Rwanda, where approximately half of the current population is estimated to have survived the genocide and 3% is living with HIV. We examined the reliability and construct validity of the Hopkins Symptom Checklist-15 (HSCL-15), the Medical Outcomes Study HIV Health Survey (MOS-HIV), and the Duke/UNC Functional Social Support Questionnaire (DUFSSQ), which were used to assess depression, health-related quality of life, and perceived social support, respectively, among HIV-infected adults in rural Rwanda. We also studied whether scale reliability differed by gender, literacy status, or antiretroviral therapy (ART) delivery strategy. The Kinyarwanda versions of the HSCL-15, MOS-HIV, and DUFSSQ performed well in the study population. Reliability was favorable (Cronbach's alpha coefficients ≥0.75 or above) for the scales overall and across subgroups of gender, literacy, and mode of ART delivery. The scales also demonstrated good convergent, discriminant, and known-group validity.
Ultra-Wideband Ring-Cavity Multiple-Way Parallel Power Divider

A novel ultrawideband (UWB) ring-cavity multiple-way parallel power divider is presented in this paper. The approximated equivalent-circuit model of the power-dividing unit is presented to analyze its structural parameters and electrical performance. The overall circuit model of the proposed power divider is also given. To verify its potential to accommodate large numbers of power-dividing ports, a UWB 32-way ring-cavity power divider is developed with reasonable agreement between the simulated and measured results. The measured return loss is greater than 10 dB over the entire UWB and also greater than 15 dB from 4.2 to 9.2 GHz. The average insertion loss, amplitude imbalance, phase imbalance, and group delay are around 15.4 dB (including the 15-dB power-dividing insertion loss), ±0.7 dB, ±5°, and 0.85 ns, respectively, across the UWB. In addition, the isolations between the output ports are greater than 10 dB over the UWB except for those between the adjacent output ports.
Data mining model for atmospheric pollutants from elevated point sources

We discuss here a datacube model for pollutant dispersion form an elevated point source in the presence of wind gusts. The value of interest is flux of pollutant deposition versus several attributes such as pollutant type, location, geographical scale, etc. The model takes into account random variations in wind speed and instrumentation noise. We consider the case of a neutrally buoyant plume emitted from an elevated point source in a turbulent boundary layer. The results show that wind turbulence is an important factor in the dispersion plume distribution and leads to spreading the distribution due to wind mixing.
Angle Optimization of Graphs Embedded in the Plane

In this paper we study problems of drawing graphs in the plane using edge length constraints and angle optimization. Specifically we consider the problem of maximizing the minimum angle, the MMA problem. We solve the MMA problem using a spring-embedding approach where two forces are applied to the vertices of the graph: a force optimizing edge lengths and a force optimizing angles. We solve analytically the problem of computing an optimal displacement of a graph vertex optimizing the angles between edges incident to it if the degree of the vertex is at most three. We also apply a numerical approach for computing the forces applied to vertices of higher degree. We implemented our algorithm in Java and present drawings of some graphs.
Leveraging multiple tasks to regularize fine-grained classification

Fine-grained classification is an extremely challenging problem in computer vision, compounded by subtle differences in shape, pose, illumination and appearance. While convolutional neural networks have become the versatile jack-of-all-trades tool in modern computer vision, approaches for fine-grained recognition still rely on localization of keypoints and parts to learn discriminative features for recognition. In order to achieve this, most approaches use a localization module and subsequently learn classifiers for the inferred locations, thus necessitating large amounts of manual annotations for bounding boxes and keypoints. In order to tackle this problem, we aim to leverage the (taxonomic and/or semantic) relationships present among fine-grained classes. The ontology tree is a free source of labels that can be used as auxiliary tasks to train a multi-task loss. Additional tasks can act as regularizers, and increase the generalization capabilities of the network. Multiple tasks try to take the network in diverging directions, and the network has to reach a common minimum by adapting and learning features common to all tasks in its shared layers. We train a multi-task network using auxiliary tasks extracted from taxonomical or semantic hierarchies, using a novel method to update task-wise learning rates to ensure that the related tasks aid and unrelated tasks does not hamper performance on the primary task. Experiments on the popular CUB-200-2011 dataset show that employing super-classes in an end-to-end model improves performance, compared to methods employing additional expensive annotations such as keypoints and bounding boxes and/or using multi-stage pipelines.
DC optimal power flow: Uniqueness and algorithms

The optimal power flow (OPF) problem minimizes the power loss in an electrical network by optimizing the voltage and power delivered at the network nodes, and is generally hard to solve. We study the direct current special case by leveraging recent developments on the zero duality gap of OPF. We study the uniqueness of the OPF solution using differential topology especially the Poincare-Hopf Index Theorem, and characterize its global uniqueness for simple network topologies, e.g., line and mesh networks. This serves as a starting point to design local algorithms with global behavior that have low complexity and are computationally fast for practical smart power grids.
Teacher Knowledge and Understanding of Design and Technology for Children in the 3-11 Age Group: A Study Focusing on Aspects of Structures.

Introduction Teacher background knowledge and understanding has probably been an issue for providers of initial as well as in-service teacher education for as long as teachers have been formally prepared for their profession (Bennett, Summers, & Askew, 1994; Reynolds, 1989). In the UK a wealth of training documentation concerning background knowledge for teachers underpins this concern (Department for Education and Employment, 1998). The issue of teacher background knowledge in curriculum areas such as science and technology is an intense one. Matters such as teacher confidence and perceptions of a relevant knowledge base (Holroyd & Harlen 1996; Kruger, Palacio, & Summers, 1990) and the sheer pace of change in our technological and scientific environment, serve to challenge all existing and intending teachers (Rannikmäe, 1998). This article is concerned with issues surrounding the depth and level of detail of knowledge that teachers of children in the age range of three to eleven years may need in order to teach certain aspects of design and technology with confidence and accuracy. The study is focused on aspects concerning student teachers’ understanding of structures and associated scientific ideas on force. The article thus attempts to determine to what extent those who aspire to become teachers are aware of the role of certain scientific concepts in underpinning aspects of Design and Technology activity in English and Welsh schools. The article then raises questions about the implications arising for future professional and curriculum development.
Enhancement-Mode Pseudomorphic $\hbox{In}_{0.22} \hbox{Ga}_{0.78}\hbox{As}$-Channel MOSFETs With Ultrathin InAlP Native Oxide Gate Dielectric and a Cutoff Frequency of 60 GHz

Enhancement-mode pseudomorphic In0.22Ga0. 78As-channel MOSFETs with an ultrathin native InAlP oxide gate dielectric are demonstrated. The gate dielectric, a 3.5-nm-thick oxide grown by wet thermal oxidation from epitaxial InAlP, reduces the gate leakage below that of HFETs based on the same epitaxial structure by more than 105 times. The devices operate in enhancement mode, with 0.25-μm gate length devices exhibiting a measured threshold voltage of 0.25 V, a peak intrinsic transconductance of 245 mS/mm, and a saturation drain current density of 165 mA/mm. A record-high current gain cutoff frequency fT of 60 GHz has also been achieved. These results indicate the applicability of InAlP oxide-based InGaAs-channel MOSFETs for use in single power supply RF applications.
Taking Advantage of Editorial Metadata to Recommend Music

In this work we propose a novel approach to music recommendation based exclusively on editorial metadata. To this end, we propose to use a public database of music releases Discogs.com, which contains extensive information about artists, their releases and record labels. We rely on an explicit set of music tracks provided by the user as evidence of his/her music preferences to construct a user pro le suitable for distance-based music recommendation. We evaluate the proposed method against two purely metadata-based approaches and one approach partially based on audio content in a listening experiment with 27 participants. The results of subjective evaluation show that the proposed method is competitive to the state-of-the-art recommenders based on commercial metadata, while being easily implemented relying only on open public data.
Recommendation & mobile systems - a state of the art for tourism

Recommendation systems have been growing in number over the last fifteen years. To evolve and adapt to the demands of the actual society, many paradigms emerged giving birth to even more paradigms and hybrid approaches. These approaches contain strengths and weaknesses that need to be evaluated according to the knowledge area in which the system is going to be implemented. Mobile devices have also been under an incredible growth rate in every business area, and there are already lots of mobile based systems to assist tourists. This explosive growth gave birth to different mobile applications, each having their own advantages
On Implementing an Ontology-Based Portal for Intelligent Bankruptcy Prediction

Existing models for facilitating bankruptcy prediction are not semantics-based. The objective of this work was to design an intelligent web portal to serve as service provider for bankruptcy prediction. The portal has been conceived to help users (e.g. loan managers working in banks) to detect bankruptcy. For this purpose, the knowledge of the financial domain has been represented by means of ontology, which has been used to guide the design of the application and to supply the system with semantic capabilities. Additionally, the ontological component allows for defining an ontology-guided search engine. The reasoning engine of the proposed system executes logic rules related with well-established financial variables. These rules characterize that a firm tends (or does not tend) to bankruptcy.
On the Integration of Hardware-Abstracted Robot Skills for use in Industrial Scenarios

In this paper, we present a method for programming robust, reusable and hardware-abstracted robot skills. The goal of this work is to supply mobile robot manipulators with a library of skills that incorporate both sensing and action, which permit robot novices to easily reprogram the robots to perform new tasks, as well as provide a more clear mapping between human and robot actions. Critical to the success of this approach is the notion of hardware abstraction, that separates the skill level from the primitive level on specific systems. Leveraging a previously proposed architecture, we construct two complex skills by instantiating the necessary skill primitives on two very different mobile manipulators. The skills are parameterized by task level variables, such as object labels and environment locations, making re-tasking the skills by operators feasible.
Extracting designs of secure IPs using FPGA CAD tools

In today's competitive market, a company's success is strongly dependent on delivering sophisticated and state-of-the-art IPs prior to their competitors. To take a short cut, a company may resort to reverse engineering or pirating their competitor's IP. In this paper, we examine the feasibility of extracting the design of a secure IP from one technology and using it in another. In particular, we start by extracting the IP from an FPGA vendor tool flow and map the IP blocks to an ASIC technology. We show that there is not a significant degradation in quality compared to starting with the original source, thus showing that taking a pirated IP from an FPGA and using it in another technology is viable, and therefore worth doing. This demonstrates a clear motivation for patching a vulnerability in FPGA CAD tools. Note that the intent of this work is not to promote the piracy of IPs. Instead, the goal is to demonstrate a mechanism for extracting a design as a means towards understanding what methods of pirating are possible, and whether they can be prevented.
A Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the Interpersonal and Social Empathy Index

The principal purpose of this research was to gather evidence regarding the validity of scores on a multidimensional measure of empathy, the Interpersonal and Social Empathy Index (ISEI). A secondary purpose was to estimate the correlations between factors underlying scores on a measure of interpersonal empathy and scores on a measure of social empathy. An exploratory factor analysis was performed on half of the sample (n = 214) to establish the underlying factor structure. The 32-item measure yielded a 4-factor, 15-item solution. The other half of the sample (n = 236) underwent a confirmatory factor analysis to examine the subsample’s psychometric properties by comparing 3 hypothesized measurement models, and correlations between factors. A correlated 4-factor model demonstrated the best fit of all models, χ2 (84, N = 236) = 162.59, p < . 001; CFI = . 96; WRMR = . 78; RMSEA = . 06. This model suggests that key elements of interpersonal empathy are related to macro perspective-taking, which is a key component of social empathy. The findings suggest the full spectrum of social empathy includes elements of interpersonal empathy; however, additional research is needed to assess the extent of that relationship.
3D CAPTCHA: A Next Generation of the CAPTCHA

Nowadays, the Internet is now becoming a part of our everyday lives. Many services, including Email, search engine, and web board on Internet, are provided with free of charge and unintentionally turns them into vulnerability services. Many software robots or, in short term, bots are developed with purpose to use such services illegally and automatically. Thus, web sites employ human authentication mechanism called Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) to counter this attack. Unfortunately, many CAPTCHA have been already broken by bots and some CAPTCHA are difficult to read by human. In this paper, a new CAPTCHA method called 3D CAPTCHA is proposed to provide an enhanced protection from bots. This method based on assumption that human can recognize 3D character image better than Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software bots.
Virtual speech anxiety training — Effects of simulation fidelity on user experience

Realistic models in VR training applications are considered to positively influence presence and performance. The experimental study presented analyzed the effect of simulation fidelity (static vs. animated audience) on presence, perceived realism, and anxiety in a virtual speech anxiety training application. No influence on presence and perceived realism was shown, although an animated audience led to significantly higher effects in anxiety during giving a talk.
Talker-Specific Generalization of Pragmatic Inferences based on Under- and Over-Informative Prenominal Adjective Use

According to Grice’s (1975) Maxim of Quantity, rational talkers formulate their utterances to be as economical as possible while conveying all necessary information. Naturally produced referential expressions, however, often contain more or less information than what is predicted to be optimal given a rational speaker model. How do listeners cope with these variations in the linguistic input? We argue that listeners navigate the variability in referential resolution by calibrating their expectations for the amount of linguistic signal to be expended for a certain meaning and by doing so in a context- or a talker-specific manner. Focusing on talker-specificity, we present four experiments. We first establish that speakers will generalize information from a single pair of adjectives to unseen adjectives in a speaker-specific manner (Experiment 1). Initially focusing on exposure to underspecified utterances, Experiment 2 examines: (a) the dimension of generalization; (b) effects of the strength of the evidence (implicit or explicit); and (c) individual differences in dimensions of generalization. Experiments 3 and 4 ask parallel questions for exposure to over-specified utterances, where we predict more conservative generalization because, in spontaneous utterances, talkers are more likely to over-modify than under-modify.
Essential role of IPS-1 in innate immune responses against RNA viruses

IFN-β promoter stimulator (IPS)-1 was recently identified as an adapter for retinoic acid–inducible gene I (RIG-I) and melanoma differentiation-associated gene 5 (Mda5), which recognize distinct RNA viruses. Here we show the critical role of IPS-1 in antiviral responses in vivo. IPS-1–deficient mice showed severe defects in both RIG-I– and Mda5-mediated induction of type I interferon and inflammatory cytokines and were susceptible to RNA virus infection. RNA virus–induced interferon regulatory factor-3 and nuclear factor κB activation was also impaired in IPS-1–deficient cells. IPS-1, however, was not essential for the responses to either DNA virus or double-stranded B-DNA. Thus, IPS-1 is the sole adapter in both RIG-I and Mda5 signaling that mediates effective responses against a variety of RNA viruses.
Agent-supported negotiations in the e-marketplace

A key requirement for customer-oriented e-marketplaces is the personalisation and customisation of products and services, as well as personalised fulfilment. Negotiations are at the core of these processes. In this paper an e-marketplace, eAgora, is discussed. It allows buyers and sellers to engage in multi-issue negotiations. eAgora implements several protocols based on a negotiation phase model constructed for this system. Its services include a software agent that generates and critiques offers. Based on a small-scale usability testing with participants, who conducted negotiations with and without the agent, the agent's services were found useful. The users also requested additional agent's services including enhanced offer critique and partial negotiation automation.