Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fine grain of the neural representation of human spatial vision

It is widely held that in human spatial vision the visual scene is initially processed through visual filters, each of which is responsive to narrow ranges of image spatial frequencies. The physiological basis of these filters are thought to be cortical neurons with receptive fields of different sizes. The grain of the neural representation of spatial vision is much finer than had been supposed. Using laser interferometry, which effectively bypasses the demodulation of the optics of the eye, we measured discrimination of, and adaptation to, high spatial frequency laser interference fringe patterns. Spatial frequency discrimination was good right up to the visual resolution limit (average Weber fractions of 0.13 at 50 c/deg). Both contrast and spatial frequency matches made after adapting to extremely fine interference fringes strongly suggested that there existed even finer, relatively unadapted, filters (mechanisms with small receptive fields). The smallest cortical receptive fields processing spatial information in human vision are so small that they can possess receptive field centers hardly wider than single cone photoreceptors.
A rendering pipeline framework for photorealistic rendering of animated virtual objects into real scenes

In recent times, Animation and Graphics industry has grown up with rapid improvements but its development is considered slow because Computer Graphics Characters developed off screen consumes enormous amount of time, money and resources. With Photorealistic rendering special effects regarding computer graphics character/object like lighting, shadowing information can be dynamically created on screen. In Photorealistic Augmented Reality, direct or indirect view of elements of a real world are augmented through computer-generated sensory inputs in a way closely resembling a photograph. This work proposes a generic rendering pipeline framework with several stages for seamlessly integrating moving virtual objects into dynamic real time environment while the earlier work was in the track of photorealistic rendering of static virtual objects. The applied Graphics Pipeline comprises of several stages with each stage contributing its part: Shadowing, Illumination, Environment mapping, Scene Composition, and Camera effects summing up to the desired photorealistic effect. Blender and 3DS Max Software is used for Basic Mesh Modeling. OgreXMLConvertor for exporting mesh from Blender to OGRE while OgreMaxSceneExporter2.4. 8 for exporting mesh from 3D Studio Max to OGRE environment. ARToolKit supports marker based object tracking in the dynamic real scene. OpenGL and DirectX are used as an API to the graphics hardware for rendering purposes. Visual Studio 2012 provides the platform for OGRE and OpenGL coding.
Event Early Embedding: Predicting Event Volume Dynamics at Early Stage

Social media has become one of the most credible sources for delivering messages, breaking news, as well as events. Predicting the future dynamics of an event at a very early stage is significantly valuable, e.g, helping company anticipate marketing trends before the event becomes mature. However, this prediction is non-trivial because a) social events always stay with "noise'' under the same topic and b) the information obtained at its early stage is too sparse and limited to support an accurate prediction. In order to overcome these two problems, in this paper, we design an event early embedding model (EEEM) that can 1) extract social events from noise, 2) find the previous similar events, and 3) predict future dynamics of a new event. Extensive experiments conducted on a large-scale dataset of Twitter data demonstrate the capacity of our model on extract events and the promising performance of prediction by considering both volume information as well as content information.
Expression of B7‐H4 in blood of patients with gastric cancer predicts tumor progression and prognosis

B7‐H4 is a novel molecular B7 ligand that plays an important role as a negative regulator of the T cell‐mediated immune response. However, the clinical significance of B7‐H4 expression in gastric cancer remains uncertain. Here, we assessed B7‐H4 expression in blood of patients with gastric cancer to determine whether or not it can predict tumor progression and prognosis.
The International Context for Research in Educational Leadership

This overview of some aspects of the environment shaping the direction and nature of research in educational leadership in Australia, the USA and the UK commences by outlining a number of broad societal pressures, moves to the more specific international and national governmental reviews of educational research and some responses to these reviews, and finally outlines some researchers’ attempts to define the research agenda for themselves. While the societal pressures and processes employed by governments to review education and its research are similar in each country, the outcome is quite different. From the most centralized UK system we find increased attention being paid to, and funding being provided for, educational research, but only in areas that focus on government-defined policy and practice. In the less centralized Australian system there has been less attention to, and funding for, educational research. Finally, in the least centralized US system, and despite increased federal intervention, in relative terms a thousand research flowers continue to bloom and be funded. The article concludes by noting some commonalities across these societal, governmental and professional contexts.
Action Classiﬁcation With Space-Time Interest Points

This project utilizes Space-Time Interest Points to classify people’s movement from videos created from the Kinect motion sensor feed for RIT’s Corobot navigation system. People are classiﬁed as ‘towards’ or ‘away’ to tell if they are an obstacle to avoid. A Harris3D detector identiﬁes points of interest and a Histogram of Oriented Spatial Gradients (HOG) and a Histogram of Optical Flow (HOF) are used to describe the detected interest points. The dataset utilized consists of videos with one or more labels relating to the two categories of ‘away’ and ‘towards’. The videos are pre-processed to a lower resolution to try to reduce the time to process them. Videos are also pre-processed with an OpenCV SVM (Support Vector Machine) using HOGs to detect people to remove false positive STIP points. The detected STIP points in the video are each classiﬁed and the video as a whole is classiﬁed as the most frequent class of classiﬁed STIP features. The results show that STIP features can provide accurate classiﬁcations for classifying people movement direction but hardware limitations prevent classiﬁcation being done quickly.
Story‐focused reading in online news and its potential for user engagement

We study the news reading behavior of several hundred thousand users on 65 highly visited news sites. We focus on a specific phenomenon: users reading several articles related to a particular news development, which we call story‐focused reading. Our goal is to understand the effect of story‐focused reading on user engagement and how news sites can support this phenomenon. We found that most users focus on stories that interest them and that even casual news readers engage in story‐focused reading. During story‐focused reading, users spend more time reading and a larger number of news sites are involved. In addition, readers employ different strategies to find articles related to a story. We also analyze how news sites promote story‐focused reading by looking at how they link their articles to related content published by them, or by other sources. The results show that providing links to related content leads to a higher engagement of the users, and that this is the case even for links to external sites. We also show that the performance of links can be affected by their type, their position, and how many of them are present within an article.
PINS: a prototype model towards thedefinition of surface games

This paper presents an in-progress work that seeks to define a field within tangible gaming: "Surface Games. " Surface Games is a classification that seeks to extend the traditional notion of board games by being played on interactive / tangible surfaces. Surface Games open up interesting new possibilities for exploring tangible interaction with respect to play. In particular, Surface Games create exciting opportunities for challenging traditional paradigms of board games such as: pre-defined boards, pre-defined playing pieces, turn-based action, and the responsibility of players for game management and rule-checking. The goal of Surface Games is to explore new interaction paradigms that bridge physical and digital gaming environments in the context of computational surfaces. This paper describes four key paradigms for computationally extending board games: surface as referee and fluid interaction, relative environments, physicality and game balance, and tangible playware and surfaces. We explore these paradigms through a prototype game - PINS - that has been designed specifically for a multitouch-tangible surface.
‘Integrative Physiology 2.0’: integration of systems biology into physiology and its application to cardiovascular homeostasis

Abstract Since the completion of the Human Genome Project and the advent of the large scaled unbiased ‘‐omics’ techniques, the field of systems biology has emerged. Systems biology aims to move away from the traditional reductionist molecular approach, which focused on understanding the role of single genes or proteins, towards a more holistic approach by studying networks and interactions between individual components of networks. From a conceptual standpoint, systems biology elicits a ‘back to the future’ experience for any integrative physiologist. However, many of the new techniques and modalities employed by systems biologists yield tremendous potential for integrative physiologists to expand their tool arsenal to (quantitatively) study complex biological processes, such as cardiac remodelling and heart failure, in a truly holistic fashion. We therefore advocate that systems biology should not become/stay a separate discipline with ‘‐omics’ as its playing field, but should be integrated into physiology to create ‘Integrative Physiology 2.0’.
Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience

Unstructured superpeer overlays are an approach to peer-to-peer systems that enables collective organization and ensures the efficient participation and use of divers peers with heterogenous capabilities and resources. Such overlays are, however, vulnerable to failures and attacks that target the superpeers in an attempt to disrupt the overlay. In this paper, we present SODAP (Self-Organized Degree Adaptation Protection), a self-organized strategy for the self-protection of the overlay, based on the local adaptation of a peer’s degree in response to disconnections, whether directly detected, or indirectly discovered with the assistance of neighbor peers. When network conditions deteriorate, the SODAP mechanism induces the creation of redundant connections to superpeers, which leads to the adjustment of the entire overlay to a topology that is more resilient to disconnection, while still allowing the system to continue exploiting heterogeneous peer capabilities. When network conditions improve, SODAP responds by reducing peer degrees to reduce redundancy and streamline the topology. We demonstrate this mechanism and evaluate its effectiveness as an extension to Myconet, a self-organized superpeer overlay for unstructured peer-to-peer networks.
The Death of State Autonomy Theory: A Review of Skocpol's Protecting Soldiers and Mothers

Adlai E. Stevenson College, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064. The author wishes to thank Walter Goldfrank, Richard Hamilton, Jeff Manza, and this journal’s Book Review Collective for their helpful comments on the first draft of this review. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States, by Theda Skocpol. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Cognitive deficits in the acute stage after subarachnoid hemorrhage.

OBJECTIVE In spite of fundamentally improved medical management of subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), many patients remain mentally impaired. However, the causes of these disturbances are unclear. The present study was performed to elucidate the significance of the hemorrhage itself and related events in the neuropsychological performance of patients in the acute stage after SAH. METHODS A series of 51 patients were examined, by means of a battery of cognitive tests, 1 to 13 days (mean, 5.9 d) after SAH. Thirty-three patients had experienced ruptured aneurysms, and 18 had sustained SAH of unknown origin. Furthermore, 25 patients who had undergone surgical treatment (a mean of 5.0 d earlier) of prolapsed lumbar discs served as a control group. RESULTS The cognitive deficits of the patients after aneurysmal SAH proved to be comparable to those after spontaneous SAH of unknown origin, with the single exception of a significantly worse (P = 0.003) concentration capacity in the surgically treated group. The severity of SAH in computed tomographic scans correlated (up to r = 0.57, P < 0.001) with poor performance on tests of memory, concentration, divided attention, and perseveration. Frontal intracerebral hemorrhage led to significantly more errors in an aphasia screening test (P < 0.001) and a test of perseveration (P < 0.001). If acute hydrocephalus was present, the patients exhibited worse long-term memory (P < 0.001), showed slower reaction times (P = 0.01), and made more errors in the perseveration test (P = 0.004). Patients with intraventricular blood performed at significantly lower levels in the concentration (P = 0.001), divided attention (P = 0.01), long-term memory (P < 0.001), and perseveration (P = 0.003) tests. CONCLUSION The results emphasize that the severity of SAH (Fisher score) is the most important factor related to cognitive dysfunction, but frontal hematoma, intraventricular hemorrhage, and acute hydrocephalus were also associated with cognitive deficits, compared with patients with SAH without these findings.
Defying the Speed of Light : Wire-Exposed Architectures and Spatially-Aware Compilers

As wire-delay is becoming the most important design constraint of microprocessors, wire-expose architectures are emerging as a strong solution to maintaining the performance growth of modern processors. However, a von Neumann programming model cannot harness the power of these machines. We have developed StreamIt, a novel language as a viable common machine language for wire-exposed architectures. It abstracts away the target's granularity, memory layout, and network interconnect, while capturing the notion of replicated processors that communicate in regular patterns. With this representation, we believe that the StreamIt compiler will match the performance of C code that was hand-tailored for a given grid-based machine.
Intra-rater reliability of timed ‘up and go’ test for children diagnosed with cerebral palsy

Background: The ‘timed up and go’ (TUG) test is a quick test, used in clinical practice as an outcome measure to assess functional mobility in adults. However, little information is available for TUG test use in people with cerebral palsy (CP). Aim: To assess within-session and test-retest reliability of TUG test and to find the mean score of it with respect to the Gross Motor Function Classification System (GMFCS) in children diagnosed with CP. Methodology: An observational study of 30 children with CP of 4-12 years, those within GMFCS level I, II, and III, and an IQ>50. The sampling technique used was purposive sampling excluding children with cognitive deficit. The documented data was analyzed by using intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC). Subjects performed TUG on three occasions—at initial assessment; 30 min after initial assessment; 1 week after initial assessment. On each of these three occassions three TUG tests were performed. A mean score of the three trials was documented as a final score.
Understanding the Dynamics of Crowdfunding: Kickstarter Edits CS224N Final Project

Crowdfunding is now well-established as a platform for independent artists and entrepreneurs to reach out to the public to finance their projects. There is a fair amount of existing work which seeks to answer the question: how do you convince hundreds of people to contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars? [1][2] Such attempts have been fairly successful, and have been able to predict the success or failure of projects with accuracies from 75%-90%, using both linguistic and metadata-based features. The problem is, such work has typically used one static snapshot of the project for prediction – and worse, a snapshot scraped after the end of the project. However, such work does not examine the dynamics of the fund-raising process, and ignores the fact that projects are often edited during fund-raising. In this work, we analyse daily snapshots of close to 20,000 projects from the most popular web-based crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter, with the specific view of linguistically characterizing the edits, and seeing if we can predict the impact of the edit, or the ultimate success of the project, by linguistic analysis of its edits.
Método objetivo para analizar dos modelos de la línea de tres puntos en minibasket

El objetivo de este trabajo fue presentar el procedimiento seguido para la elaboracion de un sistema de categorias que permitiera analizar las acciones de juego con dos modelos diferentes de la linea de tres puntos en minibasket. Participaron seis expertos y 123 ninas de 12 equipos. La metodologia seguida para disenar el sistema de categorias fue cualitativa y siguio cuatro etapas: a) identificacion de una lista de criterios, b) delimitacion y definicion operacional de cada criterio y de sus categorias, c) perfeccionamiento del sistema de categorias y d) analisis de su validez y fiabilidad. El sistema de categorias final fue exhaustivo y mutuamente excluyente, tuvo validez de contenido y posibilito la fiabilidad de la observacion.
Intimate Partner Violence: Restorative Justice and Trauma-informed Care

The social work profession is positioned to play a critical role in redefining services for responsible parties in intimate partner violence. The traditional approaches to intimate partner violence services, which focus on confrontational rehabilitation rather than therapy, are due to undergo a shift. Models of trauma-informed care and restorative justice are promising alternatives for responsible parties and harmed parties alike. By building on the transformative work advocates have already done around intimate partner violence for harmed parties and focusing on the inclusion of the diverse identities of those we serve, we can begin to form a nuanced response to a nuanced social issue. From traumainformed care, we can learn to make space for the personal trauma histories of survivors as well as those who have harmed them. From restorative justice, we can learn about techniques that have helped bring a sense of justice and healing to individuals, families, and communities affected by intimate partner violence, including those who have perpetrated that violence.
Children and Exercise Appropriate Practices for Grades K-6

JOPERD • Volume 80 No. 4 • April 2009 T he promotion of physical activity and physical fitness are central tenets of physical education. It is often assumed that these two concepts go hand in hand, in that those who participate in regular physical activity are physically fit. However, in children, the relationship between habitual activity and fitness is not particularly strong (Payne & Morrow, 1993). Much of the disparity between activity levels and physical fitness in children can be attributed to varying rates of growth and development (Corbin, 2004). Maturation (or lack thereof) has a significant effect on how children respond to exercise. In other words, when it comes to exercise, children should not be treated as miniature adults (Corbin, 2002). An understanding of how growth and development during childhood affect fitness, of physiological responses to exercise, and of exercise programming is particularly important for physical educators working in an elementary school setting. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to review concepts of pediatric exercise physiology that are essential to physical education programs for children in grades K-6.
Clinical Features and Outcomes of 37 Argentinean Patients With Severe Granulomatosis With Polyangiitis (Wegener Granulomatosis)

BackgroundMost epidemiologic studies involving severe granulomatosis with polyangiitis (SGPA) patients have investigated populations from the northern hemisphere, whereas few studies have been conducted in South America. None of the South American studies have differentiated between localized GPA and SGPA. PurposeThe present study was designed to describe a cohort of Argentinean patients who were diagnosed with SGPA and to compare this cohort with previously well-described cohorts. MethodsWe performed a retrospective study that included 37 consecutive SGPA patients who were seen at 2 tertiary centers in Buenos Aires. ResultsNineteen patients (51.3%) were male, and 18 patients (49.7%) were female. The mean age at the onset of symptoms was 48.5 ± 12.01 years. Antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody (ANCA) was detected in 34 patients (91.89%): 32 patients (86.48%) had a cytoplasmic staining pattern, whereas 2 patients (5.40%) had a perinuclear pattern. Three patients were ANCA-negative. Twenty-four patients (64%) achieved remission, and 7 patients (19%) had response as defined by at least 50% reduction in the disease activity score. Nineteen relapses were observed in 12 patients, and 2 of the relapses were fatal. Overall, there were 14 deaths (37.83%). ConclusionsThe present series demonstrated that Argentinean patients have similar demographics, clinical manifestations, and outcomes as the cohorts from the northern hemisphere. There was less granulomatous organ involvement (ear/nose/throat, lung granulomas) in the present cohort compared with other series.