Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
High-degree temporal antialiasing

We propose the use of high-degree resampling filters for improved temporal antialiasing, or as the result is often called motion blur. Without temporal antialiasing, strange effects can occur within an animation, for example, wheels can appear to spin backwards at a certain speed. In a typical effort to overcome this, the camera shutter is left open over some period of time during the frame, leading to temporal box filtering. Even with a temporal box filter, aliasing can still occur. We show how a high-degree resampling filter, such as the Gaussian or cubic-spline lead to superior results in all cases, without the need for constant scrutiny and hand tweaking on the part of the animator.
Efficient Seizure Classification using Multiclass Support Vector Machine with RFE

: A new multi classification scheme based on Support Vector Machine called Hierarchical multi-class support vector machine with a new Extreme Learning Machine kernel is introduced. The Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) is used for ranking the features. Wavelets Transform based features such as Statistical Values, and Approximate Entropy have been used for the encephalogram signal classification with the emphasis on epileptic seizure detection. The feature extraction and classification are performed using the publicly available benchmarked datasets. In general support vector provides better classification accuracy, but takes more time for classification and also there is scope for a new multi classification scheme. Mitigating the problem of support vectors, here ranking of the features is done and features with low ranks are eliminated. This will speed up the classification process. Evaluation of the performance of the kernels, the accuracy of other kernels is compared using the benchmarked datasets. One of the major objectives was to examine the Hierarchical support vector with the sensitivity and specificity of encephalogram signals classification.
Silica in plants: biological, biochemical and chemical studies.

BACKGROUND The incorporation of silica within the plant cell wall has been well documented by botanists and materials scientists; however, the means by which plants are able to transport silicon and control its polymerization, together with the roles of silica in situ, are not fully understood. RECENT PROGRESS Recent studies into the mechanisms by which silicification proceeds have identified the following: an energy-dependent Si transporter; Si as a biologically active element triggering natural defence mechanisms; and the means by which abiotic toxicities are alleviated by silica. A full understanding of silica formation in vivo still requires an elucidation of the role played by the environment in which silica formation occurs. Results from in-vitro studies of the effects of cell-wall components associated with polymerized silica on mineral formation illustrate the interactions occurring between the biomolecules and silica, and the effects their presence has on the mineralized structures so formed. SCOPE This Botanical Briefing describes the uptake, storage and function of Si, and discusses the role biomolecules play when incorporated into model systems of silica polymerization as well as future directions for research in this field.
Transmission of high data rate optical signals in fog and snow conditions

A well known disadvantage of Free Space Optics (FSO) or optical wireless communication is its sensitivity on local weather conditions-primarily to fog and precipitation, resulting in substantial loss of optical signal power over the communication path. Results of a propagation study on a terrestrial Free Space Optics (FSO) link at 950nm and 850 nm on 79.8 m long path are presented. Given these wavelengths, for shorter links fog is the primary concern. For longer links, heavy rain, snow, scintillation and clouds frequently become critical issues. We address here the effects of fog and snow both theoretically and experimentally and present some useful comparisons in terms of the optical signal attenuations.
Giving Care and Perceiving Discrimination: The Social and Organizational Context of Family Responsibilities Discrimination

Abstract Purpose Discrimination against workers because of their family responsibilities can violate federal law, yet scholars know little about the context surrounding perceived family responsibilities discrimination (FRD). This chapter investigates both the types of caregiving responsibilities that put workers at risk of FRD and the organizational contexts that give rise to perceived FRD. Methodology/approach We identify features of FRD which make detecting it particularly difficult and theorize the mechanisms by which caregiving responsibilities and organizational contexts lead to perceived FRD. We draw on data from the 2008 National Study of the Changing Workforce for our empirical analysis. Findings Caregivers who provide both child and eldercare are more likely to perceive FRD than caregivers who provide one type of care, as are people who experience high levels of family-to-work interference and who spend more daily time on childcare. Certain family-friendly and meritocratic organizational contexts are associated with lower perceived FRD. Research limitations/implications We measure perceptions, not actual discrimination on the basis of family care responsibilities. Our research cannot pinpoint the factors which intensify or lessen actual discrimination, just perceptions of it. Originality/value By pinpointing the characteristics of organizations in which perceived FRD occurs, this chapter shows how organizations can create workplaces in which perceived FRD is less likely.
When the experiment is over: Deploying an incentive system to all the users

Motivating user participation is an important issue for the survival of social web and social software applications. In our previous work demonstrated that a point-based incentive encourages contribution to a social networking site. This paper presents a follow-up analysis after a full deployment of the incentive mechanism to the entire user community. We address an issue uncovered in our previous experiment, we measure the long-term impact of the incentive mechanism on site content generation, and we replicate our previous result with a larger number of users. Our results will demonstrate that the incentive mechanism had a long-term effect on contribution levels and generated a second boost in contribution levels when released to a new set of users. The paper concludes with a discussion of our community’s reactions to the incentive mechanism collected through the site itself, company-internal blogs, podcasts, and forums.
Type isomorphisms in a type-assignment framework

This paper contains a full treatment of isomorphic types for languages equipped with an ML style polymorphic type inference mechanism. Surprisingly enough the results obtained contradict the common-place feeling that (the core of) ML is a subset of second order λ-calculus: we can provide an isomorphism of types that holds in the core ML language, but not in second order λ-calculus. This new isomorphism not only allows to provide a complete (and decidable) axiomatisation of all the type isomorphic in ML style languages, a relevant issue for the type as specifications paradigm in library searches, but also suggest a natural extension that in a sense completes the type-inference mechanism in ML. This extension is easy to implement and allows to get a further insight in the nature of the let polymorphic construct.
Navigation strategy for the service robot in the elevator environment

Recently, various service robot systems are introduced and offer the guidance and delivery service. However, most of them are operated on a single floor, because they do not consider the elevator environment. In this paper, we present the navigation strategy for multi-floor environment including elevator situation. Firstly, we propose the recognition method of the button and the floor number so that the robot reacts flexibly to a current elevator status. We apply adaptive threshold method to a current image in order to get a binary image and make the candidates of the button and the floor number using additional filtering method. By rejecting weak candidates using the artificial neural network, we finally get the position of button and current floor number. Secondly, we suggest the path planning algorithm for navigating in the elevator. By constructing an occupancy grid map of the inner part of the elevator, we calculate the optimal position to move and make a shortest path using the distance transform.
Direct Aqueous Mineral Carbonation of Waste Slate Using Ammonium Salt Solutions

The carbonation of asbestos-containing waste slate using a direct aqueous mineral carbonation method was evaluated. Leaching and carbonation tests were conducted on asbestos-containing waste slate using ammonium salt (CH3COONH4, NH4NO3, and NH4HSO4) solutions at various concentrations. The CH3COONH4 solution had the highest Ca-leaching efficiency (17%–35%) and the NH4HSO4 solution had the highest Mg-leaching efficiency (7%–24%) at various solid dosages and solvent concentrations. The CaCO3 content of the reacted materials based on thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) was approximately 10%–17% higher than that of the as-received material for the 1 M CH3COONH4 and the 1 M NH4HSO4 solutions. The carbonates were precipitated on the surface of chrysotile, which was contained in the waste slate reacted with CO2. These results imply that CO2 can be sequestered by a direct aqueous mineral carbonation using waste slate.
Appraisals, Emotions, and Inherited Intentional Objects

Modern appraisal theories inherited a problem from the Schachter theory: are emotions directed at intentional objects, and if so, why? On both theories the emotion is initiated by some sort of cognitive state, which according to Schachter produces a state of arousal, and according to appraisal theorists a cluster of emotion-specific states. If cognitions are components of the emotional state it may seem like we can explain why emotions inherit objects from those cognitions. In this article I focus on appraisal theories, and argue that appraisals are emotional components because they are synchronized with other emotion subsystems. However, emotions do not inherit their intentional objects from appraisals, because the appraisals that are emotional components are generic, rather than object-directed.
Masturbatory Behavior in College Youth

AbstractA number of areas of investigation are relevant to the consideration of adolescent and young adult masturbatory practices. First it is necessary to determine the incidences and rates of the activity. Currently there is a genuine lack of data on masturbatory incidences and frequencies and thus a need to do some “social accounting. ” How common is masturbation among contemporary youth? How frequently do they masturbate? These are the principle questions addressed in this paper. In addition to incidences and rates, we examine trends in masturbatory conduct: do the incidences and frequencies of the activity change over time? The specific time periods that are examined are (1) retrospectively reported high school masturbatory behavior and (2) masturbation during each year in college.
An Investigation on Linear SVM and its Variants for Text Categorization

Linear Support Vector Machines (SVMs) have been used successfully to classify text documents into set of concepts. With the increasing number of linear SVM formulations and decomposition algorithms publicly available, this paper performs a study on their efficiency and efficacy for text categorization tasks. Eight publicly available implementations are investigated in terms of Break Even Point (BEP), F1 measure, ROC plots, learning speed and sensitivity to penalty parameter, based on the experimental results on two benchmark text corpuses. The results show that out of the eight implementations, SVMlin and Proximal SVM perform better in terms of consistent performance and reduced training time. However being an extremely simple algorithm with training time independent of the penalty parameter and the category for which training is being done, Proximal SVM is appealing. We further investigated fuzzy proximal SVM on both the text corpuses; it showed improved generalization over proximal SVM.
Jade - java diagnosis experiments - status and outlook

Model-based diagnosis is a successful AI technique for diagnosing physical systems but faces new challenges when applied to finding faults in software, i.e., debugging. Previous work has mostly dealt with modeling the behavior of programming languages with exploitable special properties: logic, concurrent, or functional. In this paper we describe the objectives, the current state, and the addressed research issues of the Jade project. The aim of the project is to develope the theory and practice of applying model-based diagnosis to software debugging of object-oriented programs. The Java language has been chosen as a vehicle for the project due to its relatively simple semantics, its ubiquity (if not now, then in the near future), and its imperative and object-oriented characteristics.
Semantic constraints for procedural generation of virtual worlds

Procedural generation of virtual worlds is a promising alternative to classical manual modelling approaches, which usually require a large amount of effort and expertise. However, it suffers from a number of issues; most importantly, the lack of user control over the generation process and its outcome. Because of this, the result of a procedural method is highly unpredictable, rendering it almost unusable for virtual world designers. This paper focuses on providing user control to deliver an outcome consistent with designer's intent. For this, we introduce semantic constraints, a flexible concept to express high-level designer's intent in intuitive terms as e.g. line of sight. Our constraint evaluation method is capable of detecting the context in which such a constraint is specified, automatically adapting to surrounding features of the virtual world. From experiments performed within our prototype modelling system, we can conclude that semantic constraints are another step forward in making procedural generation of virtual worlds more controllable and accessible to non-specialist designers.
Crystalls , Proteins and Isoperimetry

We attempt to formulate several mathematical problems suggested by structural patterns present in bio-molecular assemblies. Our description of these assemblies, by necessity brief, is self-contained, albeit on a superficial level. If a reader stumbles upon something confusing, this, hopefully, will become clearer at a later point in the article. 1 Is there Mathematics in Biology? Day-Night, Day-Night, Day-Night. Summer-Winter, Summer-Winter. What is the structure behind this. Where should we look to uncover it? Is it in the singing of birds, in the flows of rivers, in the changes of temperature? We know, with hindsight, what we should do. Look up into the night sky, find a few specks of light – planets – that slowly crawl amongst the unmoving stars, imagine how their routes appear if seen from the sun, invent calculus, guess differential equations for the planetary routes, unravel symmetries of these. and the world of mathematical wonders opens to you: Lie groups, algebraic varieties, symplectic manifolds. Now try: Alive-Dead, Alive-Dead, Alive-Dead,. Where do we go from here? ”. living matter, while not eluding the ”laws of physics” as established up to date, is likely to involve ”other laws of physics” hitherto unknown, which
The Host Cytokine Responses and Protective Immunity in Oropharyngeal Candidiasis

Over the last three decades, the prevalence of oropharyngeal fungal infections has increased enormously, mainly due to an increasing population of immunocompromised patients, including individuals with HIV infection, transplant recipients, and patients receiving cancer therapy. The vast majority of these infections are caused by Candida species. The presence of cytokines in infected tissues ultimately dictates the host defense processes that are specific to each pathogenic organism. During oral infection with Candida, a large number of pro-inflammatory and immunoregulatory cytokines are generated in the oral mucosa. The main sources of these cytokines are oral epithelial cells, which maintain a central role in the protection against fungal organisms. These cytokines may drive the chemotaxis and effector functions of innate and/or adaptive effector cells, such as infiltrating neutrophils and T-cells in immunocompetent hosts, and CD8+ T-cells in HIV+ hosts. Epithelial cells also have direct anti-Candida activity. Several studies have provided a potential link between lower levels of certain pro-inflammatory cytokines and susceptibility to oral C. albicans infection, suggesting that such cytokines may be involved in immune protection. The exact role of these cytokines in immune protection against oropharyngeal candidiasis is still incompletely understood and requires further investigation. Identification of such cytokines with the ability to enhance anti-fungal activities of immune effector cells may have therapeutic implications in the treatment of this oral infection in the severely immunocompromised host.
Community-Based Rehabilitation Supports for Social Inclusion and Work Participation of Young Adults with Visual Impairment in Kenya: A Case Study

Young adults with a visual impairment (VI) experience less interaction with the community that impacts the way they relate to the world as they transition to the larger society where they face significant barriers of adjustment, exclusion, and work participation. Young adults with VI contend with cultural stigma, inequality, poor self-esteem caused by marginalization, a low quality of life (QOL), and lack of social support systems that exist beyond the home. The aim of this study was to understand the perceptions of young adults with VI in Elgeyo-Marakwet and Kisumu Counties of Kenya concerning the barriers to community inclusion and work participation that they have experienced in education, health, social, economic, and cultural settings in everyday interaction. The study sought to further understand what was perceived as barriers that young adults with VI must deal with when living with visual impairment from the perspective of a focus group composed of members of the community. This study contends that a community-based rehabilitation (CBR) strategy affords the opportunity to coordinate communities in identifying access needs and mobilize resources to address common goals within the human sociocultural environment. The concept of CBR is an effective tool in promoting social change and enabling young adults with VI to advocate for community inclusion and work participation. CBR recognizes that disability is nested in widespread poverty, unequal distribution of resources, social stigma, and unequal access to work participation. The theoretical framework of the study was based on the functional model of disability as defined by the International Classification of Functioning (ICF) that discounts the presumption that disability relegates productivity. The study utilized qualitative research case study design based on interviews, observation, document collection and photovoice; a community-based participatory research (CBPR) strategy in data collection. Photovoice is a focus group approach utilized whereby the participants took photographs of scenes and expressed their viewpoints by telling their stories of what those photographs represent in terms of their perceptions on non-participation, exclusion, or otherwise of young adults with VI. Data was organized into themes and presented in the form of narratives and visual representation through the use of tables.
Magnitude and variability of land evaporation and its components at the global scale

Abstract. A process-based methodology is applied to estimate land-surface evaporation from multi-satellite information. GLEAM (Global Land-surface Evaporation: the Amsterdam Methodology) combines a wide range of remotely-sensed observations to derive daily actual evaporation and its different components. Soil water stress conditions are defined from a root-zone profile of soil moisture and used to estimate transpiration based on a Priestley and Taylor equation. The methodology also derives evaporationfrom bare soil and snow sublimation. Tall vegetation rainfall interception is independently estimated by means of the Gash analytical model. Here, GLEAM is applied daily, at global scale and a quarter degree resolution. Triple collocation is used to calculate the error structure of the evaporation estimates and test the relative merits of two different precipitation inputs. The spatial distribution of evaporation – and its different components – is analysed to understand the relative importance of each component over different ecosystems. Annual land evaporation is estimated as 67.9 × 103 km3, 80% corresponding to transpiration, 11% to interception loss, 7% to bare soil evaporation and 2% snow sublimation. Results show that rainfall interception plays an important role in the partition of precipitation into evaporation and water available for runoff at a continental scale. This study gives insights into the relative importance of precipitation and net radiation in driving evaporation, and how the seasonal influence of these controls varies over different regions. Precipitation is recognised as an important factor driving evaporation, not only in areas that have limited soil water availability, but also in areas of high rainfall interception and low available energy.
Reverse noise measurement and use in device characterization

We review the concept of reverse noise measurements in the context of on-wafer transistor noise characterization. Several different applications of reverse noise measurements are suggested and demonstrated. Reverse measurements can be used to check measurement results, to significantly reduce the uncertainty in |Gammaopt |, to reduce the occurrence of nonphysical results, and possibly to directly measure or constrain parameters in models of transistors
Standards Competition and the Role of Intermediation in the Supply of Mobile Applications

The development of ubiquitous computing and mobile commerce is premised on an infrastructure of interoperable networks, operating systems and applications. As technologies evolve to create this infrastructure this process sometimes gives rise to a standards competition. This research examines such a competition between mobile application development platforms and the resulting intermediation services. In particular, the research describes the nature of these intermediation services and assesses the relative value they represent for standards promulgators, application buyers and suppliers. The findings of asymmetric value suggest that value chain level assessments of intermediation can provide a rich topic of research on technical and industry evolution as well as provide additional insights into the strategic aspects of standards competition for those who start them as well as those affected by them.