Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Detection of Functional Change Using Cluster Trend Analysis in Glaucoma

Purpose Global analyses using mean deviation (MD) assess visual field progression, but can miss localized changes. Pointwise analyses are more sensitive to localized progression, but more variable so require confirmation. This study assessed whether cluster trend analysis, averaging information across subsets of locations, could improve progression detection. Methods A total of 133 test–retest eyes were tested 7 to 10 times. Rates of change and P values were calculated for possible re-orderings of these series to generate global analysis (“MD worsening faster than x dB/y with P < y”), pointwise and cluster analyses (“n locations [or clusters] worsening faster than x dB/y with P < y”) with specificity exactly 95%. These criteria were applied to 505 eyes tested over a mean of 10.5 years, to find how soon each detected “deterioration,” and compared using survival models. This was repeated including two subsequent visual fields to determine whether “deterioration” was confirmed. Results The best global criterion detected deterioration in 25% of eyes in 5.0 years (95% confidence interval [CI], 4.7–5.3 years), compared with 4.8 years (95% CI, 4.2–5.1) for the best cluster analysis criterion, and 4.1 years (95% CI, 4.0–4.5) for the best pointwise criterion. However, for pointwise analysis, only 38% of these changes were confirmed, compared with 61% for clusters and 76% for MD. The time until 25% of eyes showed subsequently confirmed deterioration was 6.3 years (95% CI, 6.0–7.2) for global, 6.3 years (95% CI, 6.0–7.0) for pointwise, and 6.0 years (95% CI, 5.3–6.6) for cluster analyses. Conclusions Although the specificity is still suboptimal, cluster trend analysis detects subsequently confirmed deterioration sooner than either global or pointwise analyses.
Development Of A Standard Convention City Attractiveness Scale: In Search Of Generalisability In Construct Validity Through Simultaneous EFA And Multi-Group CFA With Five Sample Data Sets

This paper addresses marketing scale development and proposes a standard ‘convention host city attractiveness’ (CHCA) scale for the study of convention tourism marketing. More specifically, it develops a standard CHCA scale and tests its proposed second-order factor construct model based on five sample data sets through simultaneous exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and multi-group confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).
Autonomous Vehicle Control and Obstacle Avoidance Concepts Oriented to Meet the Challenging Requirements of Realistic Missions

This paper presents the control and obstacle avoidance concepts for off-road autonomous vehicle. The hierarchical control system includes three levels which mimic driver's actions: activating the actuators, maintaining desired off-road path, that is bounded by natural obstacles. The main achievement of the proposed control system, proven in extensive field-tests, is operating at high speeds in harsh terrains with accuracy better than 1 meter, while maintaining vehicle dynamic stability during all maneuvers. The high performance is preserved also when driving on sparse waypoints database and in obstacle-dense environments. The obstacle avoidance algorithm was designed with emphasis on efficiency: avoidance path is constructed in real-time without slowing the vehicle down. In the Qualification-Inspection-Demonstration phase of the DARPA Grand Challenge Race 2004 the vehicle avoided all 13 obstacles in a record time of 6:45 minutes
Traumatic spinal cord injuries (SCI): a study of 104 cases.

BACKGROUND Management of spinal cord injured patients is an integral part of trauma care. There is need to congregate these patients in spinal units where dedicated experts and facilities exist for better outcome of treatment and rehabilitation. The objective of this study therefore, is to promote improved quality of care in the group of patients by highlighting the deficiencies in our setting. METHODS This is a retrospective study of all traumatic spinal cord injured (SCI) seen at the National Orthopaedic Hospital, Enugu over a six-year period. Information about the demographics, aetiology, level of injury, associated injuries, time of presentation, referral hospital, state of injury, duration of hospitalization, outcome of treatment were obtained from patients' records. Data were analyzed using commercially available SPSS for windows 9. Descriptive statistics are given. RESULTS There were 104 patients, 88 males and 16 females, giving a ratio of 5.5:1. Road traffic accident, 60 (57.7%), was the commonest aetiological factor and the cervical spine, 70 (67.3%), was most often involved. Head and neck injuries were common associated injuries, 19 (18.3%) in patients with cervical spine injury. Six (5.8%) of our patients were obtunded. Most patients, 69 (66.4%), were received from private hospitals after a mean duration of 7 days. Hospitalization ranged from 1 week-120 weeks with a mean of 11 weeks. Pressure sore was the commonest complication, 30 (28.8%). Thirty six (34.4%) of patients died mainly from respiratory failure. Most of the discharged wheel bound patients (97%) were lost to follow up. CONCLUSION For better outcome we re-emphasize the need to establish and congregate these patients into regional spinal units. We also suggest a social legislation, which will be fundamental to social re-integration of these SCI and other severely disabled patients.
Resource-gathering algorithms in the game of starcraft

StarCraft is a real-time strategy game, which has a large state space, and commonly features two opposing players, capable of acting simultaneously. One of the aspects of the game is resource gathering. Each agent playing StarCraft has to gather minerals from nearby mineral field in order to produce more units. The more resources can be gathered, the larger the army is to attack the opponent and win the game. We present five algorithms that can be used for resource gathering for an intelligent agent playing the game of StarCraft: Brood War. The results reveal that improving the scheduling or the path finding improve the resource gathering considerably.
Two Architectures for Parallel Processing of Huge Amounts of Text

This paper presents two alternative NLP architectures to analyze massive amounts of documents, using parallel processing. The two architectures focus on different processing scenarios, namely batch-processing and streaming processing. The batch-processing scenario aims at optimizing the overall throughput of the system, i.e., minimizing the overall time spent on processing all documents. The streaming architecture aims to minimize the time to process real-time incoming documents and is therefore especially suitable for live feeds. The paper presents experiments with both architectures, and reports the overall gain when they are used for batch as well as for streaming processing. All the software described in the paper is publicly available under free licenses.
Q A ] 3 A ug 2 00 3 STRONGLY HOMOTOPY LIE ALGEBRAS OF ONE EVEN AND TWO ODD DIMENSION

We classify strongly homotopy Lie algebras also called L∞ algebras of one even and two odd dimension, which are related to 2|1-dimensional Z2-graded Lie algebras. What makes this case interesting is that there are many nonequivalent L∞ examples, in addition to the Z2-graded Lie algebra (or superalgebra) structures, yet the moduli space is simple enough that we can give a complete classification up to equivalence.
A Study on Microblog and Search Engine User Behaviors: How Twitter Trending Topics Help Predict Google Hot Queries

Once every five minutes, Twitter publishes a list of trending topics by monitoring and analyzing tweets from its users. Similarly, Google makes available hourly a list of hot queries that have been issued to the search engine. We claim that social trends fired by Twitter may help explain and predict web trends derived from Google. Indeed, we argue that information flooding nearly real-time across the Twitter social network could anticipate the set of topics that users will later search on the Web. In this work, we analyze the time series derived from the daily volume index of each trend, either by Twitter or Google. Our study on a real-world dataset reveals that about 26% of the trending topics raising from Twitter “asis” are also found as hot queries issued to Google. Also, we find that about 72% of the similar trends appear first on Twitter. Thus, we assess the relation between comparable Twitter and Google trends by testing three classes of time series regression models. First, we find that Google by its own is not able to effectively predict the time behavior of its trends. Indeed, we show that autoregressive models, which try to fit time series of Google trends, perform poorly. On the other hand, we validate the forecasting power of Twitter by showing that models, which use Google as the dependent variable and Twitter as the explanatory variable, retain as significant the past values of Twitter 60% of times. Moreover, we discover that a Twitter trend causes as imilar Google trend to later occur about 43% of times. In the end, we show that the very best-performing models are those using past values of both Twitter and Google.
Individualism-Collectivism

Three criticisms of the individualism-collectivism dichotomy are explicated. The dichotomy leads one to overlook values that inherently serve both individual and collective interests (e.g., wisdom), it ignores values that foster the goals of collectivities other than the ingroup (e.g., universal values, such as social justice), and it promotes the mistaken assumption that individualistic and collective values each form coherent syndromes that are in polar opposition. These problems are illustrated by applying a more fine-tuned analysis of ten types of values postulated to be present in all cultures (Schwartz, 1987) to data from four empirical studies. This analysis reveals meaningful group differences that are obscured by the individualism-collectivism dichotomy. As an impetus to future research, hypotheses are offered about the types of values likely to differ in importance between societies with a more collectivist (communal) social structure and those with a more individualistic (contractual) structure.
How to make content-centric networks interwork with CDN networks

The Internet architecture, based on end-to-end connections, had difficulties to efficiently deliver the always increasing number of contents. Content Delivery Networks (CDN) have been deployed to improve the delivery. Recent research works propose a new networking architecture, much more adapted to the current Internet usage (end-users just care about the contents they want and not about the endpoints that provide them). The Content-Centric Networking (CCN) aims at replacing the IP paradigm. CCN has been investigated by the research community for few years, and some demonstrators have proved its feasibility. However, less works have addressed the CDN use-case so far. In this paper, we show that the current CCN design, which does not allow negative reply, is not suitable for interconnection with the CDN service. We then propose the use of two new tables in the CCN nodes that are interconnected to the CDN servers, in order to detect possible misses in the CDN servers and subsequently forward the requests for missing contents toward the original servers instead of the CDN surrogates. The evaluations we have performed highlight that the integration of both new tables does not incur an increase of the memory requirement and thus a cost in the node. The proposed solution is thus a viable solution to make CCN network work in close cooperation with CDN networks, each one keeping its specific business models and functions: transport for CCN, storage for CDN.
Role of Tumor Necrosis Factor Alpha (TNF-α) and Interleukin-10 in the Pathogenesis of Severe Murine Monocytotropic Ehrlichiosis: Increased Resistance of TNF Receptor p55- and p75-Deficient Mice to Fatal Ehrlichial Infection

ABSTRACT Intraperitoneal (i.p.) infection with a high dose of a highly virulent Ehrlichia strain (IOE) results in a toxic shock-like syndrome characterized by severe liver injury and systemic overproduction of tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) by CD8+ T cells. We examined the role of TNF-α and TNF receptors in high-dose-IOE-induced shock/liver injury. TNF receptor (TNFR) I/II−/− mice lacking both the p55 and p75 receptors for this cytokine were more resistant to IOE-induced liver injury than their wild-type background controls. TNFR I/II−/− mice survived longer, dying between 15 and 18 days, with evidence of mild liver necrosis/apoptosis. In contrast, wild-type mice were not rescued from the lethal effect of IOE by TNF-α neutralization. TNF-α-depleted mice developed severe liver injury and succumbed to disease between days 9 and 11 postinfection, similar to sham-treated, infected wild-type mice. Although IFN-γ production in the spleens of IOE-infected TNFR I/II−/− and TNF-α-depleted mice was higher than that detected in wild-type controls, these mice had higher bacterial burdens than infected controls. Following high-dose IOE challenge, TNFR I/II−/− and TNF-α-depleted mice have an early increase in IL-10 levels in sera and spleens, which was produced mainly by adherent spleen cells. In contrast, a late burst of interleukin-10 (IL-10) was observed in control mice. Nonadherent spleen cells were the major source of IL-10 in IOE-infected wild-type mice. We conclude that TNFR I/II and TNF-α participate in Ehrlichia-induced shock and host defense by regulating liver injury and controlling ehrlichial burden. Our data suggest that fatal ehrlichiosis could be a multistep process, where TNF-α is not solely responsible for mortality.
Divergence-based spectral approximation with degree constraint as a concave optimization problem

The Kullback-Leibler pseudo-distance, or divergence, can be used as a criterion for spectral approximation. Unfortunately this criterion is not convex over the most general classes of rational spectra. In this work it will be shown that divergence minimization is equivalent to a costrained entropy minimization problem, whose concave structure can be exploited in order to guarantee global convergence in the most general case.
Sensory vestibular contributions to constructing internal models of self-motion

The ability to navigate in the world and execute appropriate behavioral and motor responses depends critically on our capacity to construct an accurate internal representation of our current motion and orientation in space. Vestibular sensory signals are among those that may make an essential contribution to the construction of such ‘internal models’. Movement in a gravitational environment represents a situation where the construction of internal models becomes particularly important because the otolith organs, like any linear accelerometer, sense inertial and gravitational accelerations equivalently. Otolith afferents thus provide inherently ambiguous motion information, as they respond identically to translation and head reorientation relative to gravity. Resolution of this ambiguity requires the nonlinear integration of linear acceleration and angular velocity cues, as predicted by the physical equations of motion. Here, we summarize evidence that during translations and tilts from upright the firing rates of brainstem and cerebellar neurons encode a combination of dynamically processed semicircular canal and otolith signals appropriate to construct an internal model representation of the computations required for inertial motion detection.
The Totalitarian State

A few years ago the word totalitarian was unknown. The popular use of the term has its origin in Mussolini's famous article on the Fascistic doctrine. Mussolini probably took the expression totalitarian from Hegel's Philosophy of Law, where the word is used to characterize the organic unity of the people. “Liberalism,” wrote Mussolini, “negates the state in the interest of the single individual. Fascism affirms the state as the true reality of the individual. It is for the only freedom which can seriously be considered—the freedom of the state and of the individual within the state—because for the Fascist everything is in the state, and outside of the state nothing legal or spiritual can exist or still less be of value. In this sense Fascism is totalitarian. ”
Automatic Multi-Modal Meeting Camera Selection for Video-Conferences and Meeting Browsers

In a video-conference the participants usually see the video of the speaker. However if somebody reacts (e. g. nodding) the system should switch to his video. Current systems do not support this. We formulate this camera selection as a pattern recognition problem. Then we apply HMMs to learn this behaviour. Thus our system can easily be adapted to different meeting scenarios. Furthermore, while current systems stay on the speaker, our system will switch if somebody reacts. In an experimental section we show that -compared to a desired output -a current system shows the wrong camera more than half of the time (frame error rate 53%), where our system selects the wrong camera in only a quarter of the time (FER 27%).
A dual-band enhanced harmonic rejection filter for modulators in GSM and DCS transmitters

In this paper, a dual-band enhanced harmonic rejection filter along with a quadrature modulator is designed and fabricated in 0.25/spl mu/m CMOS process. This filter is simply a Sallen-Key low pass filter with transmission zeros to provide additional harmonic rejection. The measurement results that the filter significantly suppresses the unwanted harmonics generated by the modulator by more than 30 dB and 40 dB in GSM mode and DCS mode, respectively. This IC operates at 2.7V with current consumption of 4.8mA and 5.7 mA in GSM and DCS mode, respectively.
To quiver or to shiver: increased melanization benefits thermoregulation, but reduces warning signal efficacy in the wood tiger moth

Melanin production is often considered costly, yet beneficial for thermoregulation. Studies of variation in melanization and the opposing selective forces that underlie its variability contribute greatly to understanding natural selection. We investigated whether melanization benefits are traded off with predation risk to promote observed local and geographical variation in the warning signal of adult male wood tiger moths (Parasemia plantaginis). Warning signal variation is predicted to reduce survival in aposematic species. However, in P. plantaginis, male hindwings are either yellow or white in Europe, and show continuous variation in melanized markings that cover 20 to 90 per cent of the hindwing. We found that the amount of melanization increased from 40 to 59 per cent between Estonia (58° N) and north Finland (67° N), suggesting melanization carries thermoregulatory benefits. Our thermal measurements showed that more melanic individuals warmed up more quickly on average than less melanic individuals, which probably benefits flight in cold temperatures. With extensive field experiments in central Finland and the Alpine region, we found that more melanic individuals suffered increased predation. Together, our data suggest that warning signal efficiency is constrained by thermoregulatory benefits. Differences in relative costs and benefits of melanin probably help to maintain the geographical warning signal differences.
A data monitoring strategy based in snapshots for the score calculation in the housing distribution

In this work we discuss a strategy for detecting and monitoring changes of the key data associated with the family groups. Based on these data, the family group will be positioned inside of the ranking for access to a social housing in the province of La Pampa (Argentine). Additionally, we summarize a procedure to simulate the provincial ranking with the possible housing beneficiaries and we briefly show an web application named “ActaWS” that allow its visualization. This make more transparent the distribution scheme of social housings between the population, and it allows to register transactions of allocation of social housings based on the score of each family group. Finally, the distribution of the social housings and the associated interoperability topics, are illustrated through the ActaWS web application.
Fingerprinting Localization in Wireless Networks Based on Received-Signal-Strength Measurements: A Case Study on WiMAX Networks

This paper considers the problem of fingerprinting localization in wireless networks based on received-signal-strength (RSS) observations. First, the performance of static localization using power maps (PMs) is improved with a new approach called the base-station-strict (BS-strict) methodology, which emphasizes the effect of BS identities in the classical fingerprinting. Second, dynamic motion models with and without road network information are used to further improve the accuracy via particle filters. The likelihood-calculation mechanism proposed for the particle filters is interpreted as a soft version (called BS-soft) of the BS-strict approach applied in the static case. The results of the proposed approaches are illustrated and compared with an example whose data were collected from a WiMAX network in a challenging urban area in the capitol city of Brussels, Belgium.
Biometric Inspired Digital Image Steganography

Steganography is defined as the science of hiding or embedding ";data"; in a transmission medium. Its ultimate objectives, which are undetectability, robustness (i.e., against image processing and other attacks) and capacity of the hidden data (i.e., how much data we can hide in the carrier file), are the main factors that distinguish it from other "; sisters-in science"; techniques, namely watermarking and Cryptography. This paper provides an overview of well known Steganography methods. It identifies current research problems in this area and discusses how our current research approach could solve some of these problems. We propose using human skin tone detection in colour images to form an adaptive context for an edge operator which will provide an excellent secure location for data hiding.
Tight bounds on minimum maximum pointwise redundancy

This paper presents new lower and upper bounds for the optimal compression of binary prefix codes in terms of the most probable input symbol, where compression efficiency is determined by the nonlinear codeword length objective of minimizing maximum pointwise redundancy. This objective relates to both universal modeling and Shannon coding, and these bounds are tight throughout the interval. The upper bounds also apply to a related objective, that of dth exponential redundancy.
Tutorial: Using Confidence Curves in Medical Research

Confidence intervals represent a routinely used standard method to document the uncertainty of estimated effects. In most cases, for the calculation of confidence intervals the conventional fixed 95% confidence level is used. Confidence curves represent a graphical illustration of confidence intervals for confidence levels varying between 0 and 100%. Although such graphs have been repeatedly proposed under different names during the last 40 years, confidence curves are rarely used in medical research. In this paper, we introduce confidence curves and present a short historical review. We draw attention to the different interpretation of one‐ and two‐sided statistical inference. It is shown that these two options also have influence on the plotting of appropriate confidence curves. We illustrate the use of one‐ and two‐sided confidence curves and explain their correct interpretation. In medical research more emphasis on the choice between the one‐ and two‐sided approaches should be given. One‐ and two‐sided confidence curves are useful complements to the conventional methods of presenting study results. (© 2005 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)