Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Automatic classification of ships from infrared (FLIR) images

The aim of the research presented in this paper is to find out whether automatic classification of ships from Forward Looking InfraRed images is feasible in maritime patrol aircraft. An image processing system has been developed for this task. It includes iterative shading correction and a top hat filter for the detection of the ship. It uses a segmentation algorithm based on the gray value distribution of the waves and the Hough transform to locate the waterline of the ship. A model has been developed to relate the size of the ship and the angle between waterline and horizon in image coordinates, to the real-life size and aspect angle of the ship. The model uses the camera elevation and distance to the ship. A data set was used consisting of two civil ships and four different frigates under different aspect angles and distances. From each of these ship images, 32 features were calculated, among which are the apparent size, the location of the hot spot and of the superstructures of the ship, and moment invariant functions. All features were used in feature selection processing using both the Mahalanobis and nearest neighbor (NN) criteria to forward, backward, and branch and bound feature selection procedures, to find the most significant features. Classification has been performed using a k-NN, a linear and quadratic classifier. In particular, using the 1-NN classifier, good results were achieved using a two-step classification algorithm.
Validation of the integration of technology that measures additional “vascular” indices into an ambulatory blood pressure monitoring system

Background The objective of this study was to validate the novel integration of oscillometric (Vasotens®) technology into a BPLab® ambulatory blood pressure (BP) monitoring system to measure central BP, the aortic augmentation index, and pulse wave velocity (PWV) compared with the recommended and widely accepted tonometric method. Methods The ARTERY Society guidelines for comparison of PWV measurement techniques were used as the basis for recruitment of 99 individuals (mean age 44±19 years, 52 males). The standard for comparison was the conventional “classic” SphygmoCor device. Results Accordance of the two methods was satisfactory (r=0.98, mean difference of 2.9±3.5 mmHg for central systolic BP; r=0.98, mean difference of −1.1±2.3 mmHg for central diastolic BP; r=0.83, mean difference of −2.6%±13% for aortic augmentation index; r=0.85, mean difference of 0.69±1.4 for PWV). Conclusion The performance of Vasotens algorithms using an oscillometric ambulatory BP monitoring system is feasible for accurate diagnosis, risk assessment, and evaluation of the effects of antihypertensive drugs.
Recommendation and Usage in the Digital Library

The movement from the physical to the digital library offers both dangers and opportunities. Alongside the greater quantity of online material goes the problem of quality assurance: how can be the information searcher be sure of the status of a document. We suggest that this be addressed by supporting recommendations and that the key feature that links these recommendations together i s that of usage. The main use of usage data within information science is currently that of a research tool in the form of transaction log analysis. In a digital library this data, together with other evaluations and recommendations, can enrich the existing information structure. Several approaches t o the integration of usage data are described together with their respective costs and benefits. The social implications of these possibilities are discussed with particular reference to the privacy of usage data. CSEG, Computing Department, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YR, UK Tel: +44-1524-65201 Ext 93799; Fax: +44-1524-593608; E-Mail: julie@comp.lancs.ac.uk http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/research/cseg/
Down-regulation of vascular endothelial growth factor by tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinase-2: effect on in vivo mammary tumor growth and angiogenesis.

The tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinases-2 (TIMP-2) has at least two independent functions, i.e., regulation of matrix metalloproteinases and growth promoting activity. We investigated the effects of TIMP-2 overexpression, induced by retroviral mediated gene transfer, on the in vivo development of mammary tumors in syngeneic mice inoculated with EF43.fgf-4 cells. The EF43.fgf-4 cells established by stably infecting the normal mouse mammary EF43 cells with a retroviral expression vector for the fgf-4 oncogene, are highly tumorigenic and overproduce vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF). Despite a promotion of the in vitro growth rate of EF43.fgf-4 cells overexpressing timp-2, the in vivo tumor growth was delayed. At day 17 post-cell injection, the volume of tumor derived from TIMP-2-overexpressing cells was reduced by 80% as compared with that obtained with control cells. Overexpression of TIMP-2 was associated with a down-regulation of VEGF expression in vitro and in vivo, a reduction of vessel size, density, and blood supply in the induced tumors. In addition, TIMP-2 completely inhibited the angiogenic activity of EF43.fgf-4 cell-conditioned medium in vitro using a rat aortic ring model. Our findings suggest that overexpression of TIMP-2 delays growth and angiogenesis of mammary carcinoma in vivo and that down-regulation of VEGF expression may play an important role in this TIMP-2-mediated antitumoral and antiangiogenic effects. Finally the in vivo delivery of TIMP-2, as assessed by i.v. injection of recombinant adenoviruses vectors, significantly reduced the growth of the EF43.fgf-4-induced tumors. This effect of TIMP-2 was shown to be equally comparable with that of angiostatin, a known potent inhibitor of angiogenesis.
Supervised Ranking for Pronoun Resolution: Some Recent Improvements

A recently-proposed machine learning approach to reference resolution -- the twin-candidate approach -- has been shown to be more pormising than the traditional single-candidate approach. This paper presents a pronoun interpretation system that extends the twin-candidate framework by (1) equippmg it with the ability to identify non-referential pronouns. (2) training different models for handling different types of pronouns, and (3) incorporating linguistic knowledge sources that are generally not employed in traditional pronoun resolvers. The resulting system, when evaluated on a standard coreference corpus, outpreforms not only the original twin-candidate approach but also a state-of-the-art pronoun resolver.
Surface Cues and Robust Inference as aBasis for the Early Acquisition ofSubcategorization

How could children possibly acquire their rst subcategorization frames? The hypothesis that they directly observe the syntactic structures of the utterances they hear raises two questions. First, how can children parse input utterances reliably without already knowing the syntactic properties of the all words in them? Second, how do children survive the ungrammatical or misconstrued utterances they inevitably encounter? This paper suggests a speciic inference algorithm that substantially reduces the eeects of ungrammatical or misconstrued input. Since children must have some such inference procedure , they could use approximate cues to determine syntactic structure. In particular, they can use string-local surface cues rather than global constraints. Such cues make it possible to discover relevant syntactic structure in an utterance without already knowing all the words in it. This paper also suggests a possible set of cues for English subcategorization frames that assumes only the ability to detect the ends of utterances and knowledge of a few function morphemes and proper names. Simulation experiments on naturally occurring, child-directed English show that these cues, combined with the proposed 0 1 inference mechanism, do surprisingly well at discovering subcatego-rization frames.
How Did Latin America’s Infrastructure Fare in the era of Macroeconomic Crises?

There is a long-standing literature that shows that fiscal adjustment is often implemented through cuts in public investment, including infrastructure (Roubini and Sachs, 1989; Hicks, 1991; De Haan et al. 1996). In this respect, the present paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the evolution of infrastructure stocks, quality and spending in Latin America in order to assess whether the infrastructure sector suffer from the prolonged period of macroeconomic stabilization in the 1980s and 1990s. First, we assess trends in quantity and quality of infrastructure using data on 19 Latin American countries, and we compare them to the performance of the seven "East Asian miracle" countries. Second, we look at trends in infrastructure spending for 9 major Latin American countries on which we have country data. Here we examine to what extent changes in public infrastructure spending were linked to fiscal deficit reductions and driven by the privatization of infrastructure and increased private spending on infrastructure. Finally, we assess the relationship of infrastructure quantity and quality to the path of infrastructure spending in a panel data econometric analysis.
MIMO stream selection based on antenna layout and channel scenario

An antenna selections method that achieves the improvement of channel capacity has been proposed. The conventional method selects suitable antennas from all combinations so that the channel capacity is maximized. In the conventional method, a signal is always transmitted and received at all antennas and then it is difficult to save the power consumption. In order to solve the problem, this paper proposes a MIMO stream selection. Since the channel capacity depends on azimuth spread, AoD (Angle of Departure), AoA (Angle of Arrival), the proposed method varies the number of streams according to a channel scenario. The proposed system can decreases the power consumption due to limitations on used antennas.
Unobserved Heterogeneity, Experience Rating, and Insurance Demand

We investigate whether an insured's claims experience contains valuable information about its latent risk type. Using data on households' claims histories in auto and home insurance, we estimate the variance-covariance matrix of unobserved heterogeneity and utilize the estimates to update a priori predictions about the households' claim risk. The estimates reveal that unobserved heterogeneity is positively correlated across coverages. We then explore how households' demand for insurance would respond to experience rating under different theories of risky choice, and we discuss what our findings imply about the economic consequences of legal restrictions on experience rating.
Modelling and real-time control stabilization of a new VTOL aircraft with eight rotors

In this paper we present the dynamic model and the stabilisation of an original configuration of an small helicopter having eight rotors. This configuration is not yet presented in the literature and in our knowledge is also the first prototype of this kind of helicopters. The equations of motion for the VTOL aircraft are obtained using Euler-Lagrange approach. Due to the configuration of the aircraft the attitude dynamics are practically independent of the translational dynamics corresponding to the lateral displacements (x and y). A nonlinear control strategy based in the Lyapunov analysis is proposed to stabilize this aircraft at hover. The performance of the nonlinear control algorithm is illustrated with real-time experiments.
Abstraction in Planning via Model Checking

Planning via Model Checking is a novel approach to planning. It is based on the reformulation of a planning problem to the exploration of a nite state automaton. Automata exploration can be eeciently performed with Model Checking, a formal veriication technique widely applied in design of industrial systems. For very large domains, however, a state explosion can arise. Abstractions can be used to tackle the problem. In this paper we show how Abstraction techniques developed in classical planning can be lifted to the Planning via Model Checking paradigm.
Do Developers Focus on Severe Code Smells?

Code smells are structures in the code that suggestthe possibility of refactoring. To prioritize code smells in large-scale source code, several tools for refactoring calculate theirseverity based on software metrics. Although several metrics are known as maintainability indicators, it is still unclear whether these severity indicators are in line with developer's perception. In this paper, we investigate whether developers focus on severe code smells. The result shows that developers focus on only particular types of severe smells and refactoring do not decrease the severity of code smell significantly.
Personalized Ranking for Non-Uniformly Sampled Items

We develop an adapted version of the Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) optimization criterion (Rendle et al., 2009) that takes the non-uniform sampling of negative test items — as in track 2 of the KDD Cup 2011 — into account. Furthermore, we present a modified version of the generic BPR learning algorithm that maximizes the new criterion. We use it to train ranking matrix factorization models as components of an ensemble. Additionally, we combine the ranking predictions with rating prediction models to also take into account rating data. With an ensemble of such combined models, we ranked 8th (out of more than 300 teams) in track 2 of the KDD Cup 2011, without using the additional taxonomic information offered by the competition organizers.
Gold, Silver, and Bronze: Determining National Success in Men’s and Women’s Summer Olympic Events

Summary We add to the literature on Olympic performance by explicitly studying the determinants of women’s performance at the Games.We estimate separate models of medal production for men and women over the last four Summer Olympic Games. The production of medals is a function of capital, labor, and total factor productivity (TFP). We use real GDP per capita and population - two variables that appear in almost all Olympic studies - as proxies for capital and labor. Our measure of TFP is a vector of variables that captures a nation’s willingness and ability to marshal its resources to promote Olympic performance and variables that determine its willingness to support its women. Because the dependent variable is a count measure, we estimate the production function using a negative binomial framework. We find that the determinants of success by a nation’s women closely resemble the determinants for its men. We also show that some determinants of gold medal counts differ from the determinants of silver and bronze medals. Our findings suggest that nations can improve the medal performance of men and women by following policies that increase the political and economic participation of women.
Attribute-based data dissemination for Internet applications

The Salamander distribution system is a wide-area network data dissemination substrate that has been used daily for over a year by several groupware and webcasting Internet applications. Specifically, Salamander is designed to support push-based applications using attribute-based routing. This support provides a variety of delivery semantics ranging from collaborative group communication, used by the Upper Atmospheric Research Collaboratory (UARC) project, to basic data delivery, used by the Internet Performance Measurement and Analysis (IPMA) project. The substrate is designed to accommodate the large variation in Internet connectivity and client resources through the use of application-specific plug-in modules. This paper illustrates the architecture and design of the Salamander system driven by the needs of its set of current applications. The main architectural features described includec the attribute-based data routing mechanism, persistent data queries, negotiated push-technology, support for Application-level Quality of Service policies, and a lightweight temporal database.
Urinary tract infections in general practice patients: diagnostic tests versus bacteriological culture.

OBJECTIVES Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are common bacterial infections encountered in general practice. For the optimal treatment the general practitioner (GP) should rely on the results of diagnostic tests and recent antimicrobial susceptibility of uropathogens. PATIENTS AND METHODS In total 1993 female patients (11-70 years) with complaints of an acute uncomplicated UTI were included. The performance characteristics of the diagnostic tests used were determined and compared with the antibiotic prescription rate. The antibiotic therapy (agent and duration), the uropathogens and the antibiotic susceptibility of Escherichia coli were determined for each age group. RESULTS The positive predictive value (PPV) (96%) and the specificity (94%) of the nitrite test were high for all samples. A negative nitrite with a positive leucocyte-esterase (LE) test showed a high PPV (79%) and sensitivity (82%). When both nitrite and LE tests were negative approximately 50% of the samples were culture positive. Of the patients, 94% of those with a positive nitrite test and 71% of those with a negative nitrite and positive LE test were prescribed antibiotics, mostly nitrofurantoin and trimethoprim. Nitrofurantoin prescriptions decreased and those of fluoroquinolones increased with increasing age. Nitrofurantoin was equally prescribed for 3-7 days in all patients. Trimethoprim was mostly prescribed for 3 days in patients aged 21-50 years and for 5 days in the other patients. E. coli, the uropathogen mostly isolated, decreased in frequency with increasing age. Proteus mirabilis was found more in the oldest patients and Staphylococcus saprophyticus in the younger patients. The antimicrobial susceptibility of E. coli was not age related. The lowest percentages were found for amoxicillin (67%) and trimethoprim (77%). Fluoroquinolone resistance was emerging in the older patients. CONCLUSIONS For female patients with symptoms of an acute uncomplicated UTI a positive nitrite test or a negative nitrite test with a positive LE test confirmed UTI whereas a negative nitrite together with a negative LE test did not rule out infection. For empirical treatment GPs should take into account the changing aetiology with increasing age. Prudent use of antibiotics in general and more specifically fluoroquinolones remains recommended. As trimethoprim resistance reached 20% it might be advisable to no longer use it as therapy of first choice for acute uncomplicated UTIs in The Netherlands.
Role of net radiation on energy balance closure in heterogeneous grasslands

Low energy balance closure (EBC) at a particular eddy-covariance flux site increased the uncertainties of carbon, water and energy measurements and thus hampered the urgent research of scaling up and modeling analysis through site combinations. A series of manipulative experiments were conducted in this study to explore the role of net radiation ( R n ) in the EBC in relation to spatial variability of vegetation characteristics, source area, sensor type, and dome condition in the Inner Mongolian grassland of Northern China. At all three sites, the daytime peak residual fluxes of EBC were consistently about 100 W m −2 regardless of radiometers (i.e., REBS Q7.1 or CNR1). The spatial variability in net radiation was 19 W m −2 (5% of R n ) during the day and 7 W m −2 (16%) at night, with an average of 13 W m −2 (11%) from eight plot measurements across the three sites. Net radiation results were affected more by measurement source area in unclipped heterogeneous system than in clipped homogeneous vegetation. Large area measurement significantly ( P −2 during the day and decreased by 4 W m −2 at night in unclipped treatments. With an increase in clipping intensity, net radiation decreased by 25 W m −2 (6% of R n ) at midday and 81 MJ m −2 (6%) during a growing season with heavier regular clipping than that in unclipped treatments. Additional effort in EBC between 9:00 and 15:00 LT is needed for future research because of high variation. Using this method, the EBC difference derived from the two types of net radiometers was only 6 W m −2 . Results from Q7.1 with new domes were higher during the day but lower at night than those with used domes. Overall, the inclusion of the uncertainty in available energy accounted for 60% of the 100 W m −2 shortfalls in the lack of closure. Clearly, the unclosed energy balance at these three grassland sites remains significant, with unexplored mechanisms for future research.
Corporate Collapse: Accounting, Regulatory and Ethical Failure

Part I. Accounting in Crisis - a Farce to be Reckoned With: 1. Chaos in the counting-house 2. Creative accounting - mind the GAAP Part II. The 1960s: 3. The corporate 1960s: dubious credit and tangled webs 4. Reid Murray: the archetypal failure postscript - Stanley Korman 5. H. G. Palmer: 'Gilt' by association Part III. The 1970s: 6. Going for broke in the 1970s 7. Minsec: decline of a share trader 8. Cambridge credit: other people's money 9. Uncoordinated financial strategies at Associated Securities Ltd. Part IV. The 1980s: 10. The 1980s: decade of the deal? 11. Adsteam on the rocks 12. Bond Corporation Holdings Ltd (Group): entrepreneurial rise and fall 13. Westmex Ltd: the security facade of cross guarantees Part V. The New Millennium - Life in the Farce Lane: 14. 2000s and beyond: crisis in accounting and audit 15. HIH - unfettered hubris. Part VI. Regulatory Reforms: 16. Groupthink: Byzantine structures 17. Groupthink - group therapy: consolidation accounting 18. Fatal attrition - accounting's diminishing serviceability 19. Ethos abandoned - vision lost: accounting at the professional crossroads?
The Effect of Withdrawal and Intake of Nicotine on Smokers' Ability to Ignore Distractors in a Number Parity Decision Task

Nicotine's attention enhancing effects are often attributed to enhancement of stimulus filtering by the attention networks. We investigated distractibility in 20 abstinent cigarette smokers (9 hours overnight; phase 1) and tested them again after smoking one cigarette (phase 2). Their performance was compared to 20 nonsmokers (no nicotine intake). In an auditory number parity decision task, participants had to make a forced choice “odd” or “even” decision about centrally presented numbers between 2 and 9, while ignoring laterally presented preceding or simultaneous novel distractors. In phase 1, distractors that preceded goal stimuli slowed reaction times (RTs) more than simultaneously presented distractors in both groups. In phase 2, nicotine intake speeded RTs in smokers in all conditions and reduced RT variability for simple number decisions and simultaneous distractors. Overall, there was a nonsignificant trend for smokers to be less accurate than nonsmokers. Accuracy in the simultaneous distractor condition decreased in both groups in phase 2. We argue that the observed nicotine-induced improvements on behavioral performance primarily reflect enhancement of top-down control of attention.