Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Semantic Contamination of Visual Similarity Judgments

The roles of semantic and perceptual information in cognition are of widespread interest to many researchers. However, disentangling their contributions is complicated by their overlap in real-world categories. For instance, attempts to calibrate visual similarity based on participant judgments are undermined by the possibility that semantic knowledge contaminates these judgments. This study investigated whether inverting stimuli attenuates semantic contamination of visual similarity judgments in adults and children. Participants viewed upright and inverted triads of familiar animals, and judged which of two test items looked most like the target. One test item belonged to the same category as the target, and one belonged to a different category. Test items’ visual similarity to the target either corresponded or conflicted with category membership. Across age groups, conflicting category membership reduced accuracy and slowed reaction times to a greater extent in upright than inverted triads. Therefore, inversion attenuates semantic contamination of visual similarity judgments.
Design and Control of a Flight-Style AUV with Hovering Capability

The small flight-style Delphin AUV is designed to evaluate the performance of a long range survey AUV with the additional capability to hover and manoeuvre at slow speed. Delphin’s hull form is based on a scaled version of Autosub6000, and in addition to the main thruster and control surfaces at the rear of the vehicle, Delphin is equipped with four rim driven tunnel thrusters. In order to reduce the development cycle time, Delphin was designed to use commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) sensors and thrusters interfaced to a standard PC motherboard running the control software within the MS Windows environment. To further simplify the development, the autonomy system uses the State-Flow Toolbox within the Matlab/Simulink environment. While the autonomy software is running, image processing routines are used for obstacle avoidance and target tracking, within the commercial Scorpion Vision software. This runs as a parallel thread and passes results to Matlab via the TCP/IP communication protocol. The COTS based development approach has proved effective. However, a powerful PC is required to effectively run Matlab and Simulink, and, due to the nature of the Windows environment, it is impossible to run the control in hard real-time. The autonomy system will be recoded to run under the Matlab Windows Real-Time Windows Target in the near future. Experimental results are used to demonstrating the performance and current capabilities of the vehicle are presented.
Discussion on Article 2: Use of Community Systems - Additional Explanations for the Utilization and Impact of BEC and CKP-Net

This article reports on the use of two community systems: the BEC and CKP-Net. Using an action research approach, the authors examined which design factors of community support systems influence community activity in communities that use face-to-face communication as the main mode of communication. As we look to understand how technology impacts activity (and in turn, performance), we must understand streams of research that focus on technology utilization. Utilization can be based on various factors including, but not limited to, technology acceptance and task-technology fit. One of the most cited models for understanding technology acceptance is the technology acceptance model (TAM; Davis, 1989). The TAM model was an early attempt to answer the question: What causes people to accept or reject information technology? This research brought forth two significant determinants to technology acceptance: perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. Perceived usefulness is how much a person believes that using a specific system will benefit their job performance. A system high in usefulness is one for which a user believes in the existence of a positive use-performance relationship (Davis, 1989). This relationship is a bit tenuous in both the community systems investigated in this study. However, those aspects of the community-supporting systems that appear to be the most highly related to job performance (i.e., obtaining information about workshops they need to attend or information directly related to courses one is taking) were the aspects of the systems that had the highest page-view rate. Perceived ease of use refers to how easy a person believes a system will be to use. Keeping all factors constant, a user is more likely to accept an application that is perceived to be easier to use when compared to another. In this aspect, the two community systems appear to be perceived as fairly easy to use, but this is unclear from the data that are presented in the article. The latest revised model of the TAM, termed the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (Venkatesh, Morris, Davis, & Davis, 2003), brings forth four constructs that lead to behavioral intention and usage behavior (performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions), each of which needs to be considered when trying to understand the usage pattern of the community-supporting systems and what factors will play a role in the systems' acceptance.
Religious Problem-Solving Styles within an American Religious Ideological Surround

In a previous Iranian investigation, comparative rationality analysis procedures associated with the ideological surround model of psychology and religion examined the influence of Muslim religious rationalities on responding to religious problem-solving style scales. This study extended the analysis to 306mostly Christian American university students. As in Iran, the collaborative problem-solving style was consistent with, and the self-directing style was inconsistent with, religious commitments and psychological adjustment. The deferring style had ambiguous implications in Iran, and the same was true in the United States, albeit in different ways. Religious rationalities mediated problem-solving style relationships with other variables in a manner documenting the complexity of American religious perspectives. Most generally, these data suggested that empirical attention to the incommensurable rationalities of religions and the social sciences can promote deeper insights into both.
Reconfigurable caches and their application to media processing

High performance general-purpose processors are increasingly being used for a variety of application domains-scientific, engineering, databases, and more recently, media processing. It is therefore important to ensure that architectural features that use a significant fraction of the on-chip transistors are applicable across these different domains. For example, current processor designs often devote the largest fraction of on-chip transistors (up to 80%) to caches. Many workloads, however, do not make effective use of large caches; e,g. , media processing workloads which often have streaming data access patterns and large working sets. This paper proposes a new reconfigurable cache design. This design enables the cache SRAM arrays to be dynamically divided into multiple partitions that can be used for different processor activities. These activities can benefit applications that would otherwise not use the storage allocated to large conventional caches. Our design involves relatively few modifications to conventional cache design, and analysis using a modification of the CACTI analytical model shows a small impact on cache access time. We evaluate one representative use of reconfigurable caches-instruction reuse for media processing. We find this use gives IPC improvements ranging from 1.04X to 1.20X in simulation across eight media processing benchmarks.
RETRIEVAL BARE-SOIL MOISTURE USING L-BAND SAR

This paper reports a study of algorithm development and testing for soil moisture retrieval for bare fields using L-band SAR imagery. First-order surface scattering models predict that the co-polarization ratio is sensitive to soil moisture but not to surface roughness. Our previous study indicated that the measurement of (Jvv / (Jhh at L-band is proportional to soil moisture. In this study, the effect of volume scattering of soil on estimating soil moisture is evaluated. To minimize the effect of the volume scattering, an algorithm which includes both the surface and volume scattering has been developed and tested using JPL AIRSAR data. The results show that the estimation of soil moisture can be improved after removing the system noise and including the volume scattering effect at large incidence angles.
FORECASTING MESOSCALE UNCERTAINTY : SHORT-RANGE ENSEMBLE FORECAST ERROR PREDICTABILITY

All types of end users who must make weatherdependent decisions stand to benefit greatly from knowing the expected accuracy of a particular forecast a priori. Forecast accuracy varies both spatially and temporally as a result of initial state and model errors, which change as the atmospheric flow evolves. Probabilistic weather forecasts derived from numerical weather prediction (NWP) ensembles can provide crucial information about the expected forecast uncertainty. It has been theorized that ensemble spread should provide a measure of forecast uncertainty (Kalnay and Dalcher 1987; Murphy 1988; Houtekamer 1993), such that high (low) spread events correspond with high (low) forecast errors. The traditional approach to quantifying this so-called spreadskill relationship has involved finding the correlation between a measure of ensemble spread and the accuracy of a particular determinstic forecast. However, using the simple statistical arguments outlined by Houtekamer (1993, hereafter H93), there exists a theoretical limit to the strength of this type of correlation (Whitaker and Loughe 1998). From Eq. (33) in H93, the correlation between the standard deviation of perfect ensemble forecasts (σ) and the absolute error of the ensemble mean (|Ē|) is limited by the temporal spread variability. As the temporal variability in spread (β) increases, so does the spread-error correlation. In the upper limit of spread variability,
Short stature and cardiovascular disease among men and women from two southeastern New England communities.

BACKGROUND Short stature has been associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease (CHD), although the reason for the association remains unclear. Data on the relation between stature and stroke is more limited. We examined the association between stature and CHD as well as between stature and stroke in men and women from two communities in southeastern New England. METHODS Coronary heart disease and stroke events were abstracted from medical records between January 1980 and December 1991. An epidemiological diagnostic algorithm developed to measure CHD was used in the present analysis. Unadjusted relative risks (RR) and RR adjusted for age, smoking status, obesity, high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol <0.91 mmol/l, total cholesterol >6.21 mmol/l, hypertension, diabetes, education, and being foreign born were computed by gender-specific height categories separately for men (n = 2826) and women (n = 3741). RESULTS A graded inverse association between stature and risk of CHD was observed among men which persisted after adjustment for confounders. Men >69.75 inches had an 83% lower risk of CHD compared with men < or = 65 inches. In addition, the tallest men had a 67% decreased risk of stroke compared with the shortest men. No significant relation between stature and CHD or stroke was observed among women. CONCLUSIONS These data support the hypothesis that stature is inversely related to both risk of CHD and stroke at least among men. Factors which might explain this association remain to be determined.
Diazinon disrupts antipredator and homing behaviors in chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha)

Neurotoxic pesticides are known to contaminate surface waters that provide habitat for salmonids, including some listed for protection under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Despite their widespread use, the impacts of these pesticides on the neurological health of wild salmon are not well understood. Of particular concern are the organophosphate and carbamate insecticides that block synaptic transmission by inhibiting neuronal acetylcholinesterase. Here we assess the effects of diazinon, an organophosphate insecticide, on alarm pheromone in - duced antipredator responses and homing behavior in chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha ). Nominal exposure concentrations (0.1, 1.0, and 10.0 mg·L -1 ) were chosen to emulate diazinon pulses in the natural environment. In the antipredator study, diazinon had no effect on swimming behavior or visually guided food capture. However, the pesti- cide significantly inhibited olfactory-mediated alarm responses at concentrations as low as 1.0 mg·L -1 . Similarly, homing behavior was impaired at 10.0 mg·L -1 . Our results suggest that olfactory-mediated behaviors are sensitive to
An IEC61499 Execution Environment for an aJile-based Field Device

The IEC61499 standard is the first step towards the development of the next generation agile manufacturing systems where distribution, interoperability and re-configuration are between the most important requirements. Development environments that will demonstrate the applicability of this standard in industrial environments are still missing. In this paper an approach that allows the execution of IEC61499 based control applications on an industrial field device is presented. This approach allows the control engineer to design the control application in terms of function block network diagrams, and subsequently exploit the model-driven development paradigm to run the control application on a single-chip real-time Java microcontroller especially designed for real-time embedded applications.
L Evy Processes on Commutative Hypergroups

In this paper we study L evy processes on commutative hyper-groups. We show that L evy processes always admit cc adll ag versions, and that such a process has a continuous version if and only if it is Gaussian. Moreover, we present several martingale characterizations of L evy processes in terms of hypergroup characters and moment functions. For Gaussian processes on one-dimensional Sturm-Liouville hypergroups we shall present a L evy-type characterization. The strongest results will be obtained for Bessel processes.
Watching over sleep : does co-assessment of skin temperature improve accuracy of actigraphic sleep estimates ?

Based on: romeijn N, Van Someren eJW (2013) Watching over sleep: does co-assessment of skin temperature improve accuracy of actigraphic sleep estimates? To be submitted 131 Watching over sleep Abstract actigraphy is widely used as a low cost, easily implementable alternative to polysomnography (pSG) for the assessment of sleep. estimating sleep from wrist activity is however far from perfect. In particular the detection of wakefulness during immobility is problematic. Skin temperature is an easy accessible physiological variable that contains information on the state of the autonomic nervous system. The release of sympathetic vasoconstriction of the skin vasculature that occurs during sleep increases skin blood flow and consequently skin temperature. We argued that a relatively cool skin could indicate wake-related sympathetic activation and here investigated whether skin temperature could disambiguate false from true actigraphic sleep classifications during immobility. actigraphy, wrist skin temperature and a routine pSG were simultaneously recorded in 52 participants, including people with a variety of sleep disorders and people without sleep disorder. epoch-by-epoch (30-sec) actigraphic sleep-wake estimates were obtained using standard procedures and labelled as false vs. true sleep and wake classifications by comparison with pSG. Indeed, on average a lower skin temperature was recorded during false sleep classifications than during true sleep classifications. also, a higher skin temperature was recorded during false wake classifications than during true wake classifications. Mixed effect logistic regression was therefore applied to obtain discriminant functions based on two temperature thresholds: (1) the temperature below which an actigraphic sleep classification has a higher probability to be false than true according to pSG and (2) the temperature above which an actigraphic wake classification has a higher probability to be false than true according to pSG. Leave-one-out crossvalidation was applied to obtain the accuracy of actigraphic sleep-wake estimates recoded according to the application of these temperature thresholds. actigraphy alone incorrectly classified 8.1% [95% CI 8.1 – 8.2] of all epochs as sleep while pSG indicated wake and incorrectly classified 6.1% [95% CI 6.1 – 6.2] of all epochs as wake while pSG indicated sleep, resulting in an overall accuracy of 85.7% [95% CI 85.7-85.8]. The additional use of skin temperature thresholds did not significantly increase the accuracy. The results suggest that the use of skin temperature to improve the accuracy of actigraphic sleep estimates may require a temperature sensor with a shorter time constant, like an infrared sensor, or may even require direct assessment of …
Consequences of elevated temperature and pCO 2 on insect folivory at the ecosystem level: perspectives from the fossil record

Abstract Paleoecological studies document the net effects of atmospheric and climate change in a natural laboratory over timescales not accessible to laboratory or ecological studies. Insect feeding damage is visible on well‐preserved fossil leaves, and changes in leaf damage through time can be compared to environmental changes. We measured percent leaf area damaged on four fossil leaf assemblages from the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, that range in age from 56.1 to 52.65 million years (Ma). We also include similar published data from three US sites 49.4 to ~45 Ma in our analyses. Regional climate was subtropical or warmer throughout this period, and the second oldest assemblage (56 Ma) was deposited during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a geologically abrupt global warming event caused by massive release of carbon into the atmosphere. Total and leaf‐chewing damage are highest during the PETM, whether considering percent area damaged on the bulk flora, the average of individual host plants, or a single plant host that occurs at multiple sites. Another fossil assemblage in our study, the 52.65 Ma Fifteenmile Creek paleoflora, also lived during a period of globally high temperature and pCO 2, but does not have elevated herbivory. Comparison of these two sites, as well as regression analyses conducted on the entire dataset, demonstrates that, over long timescales, temperature and pCO 2 are uncorrelated with total insect consumption at the ecosystem level. Rather, the most important factor affecting herbivory is the relative abundance of plants with nitrogen‐fixing symbionts. Legumes dominate the PETM site; their prevalence would have decreased nitrogen limitation across the ecosystem, buffering generalist herbivore populations against decreased leaf nutritional quality that commonly occurs at high pCO 2. We hypothesize that nitrogen concentration regulates the opposing effects of elevated temperature and CO 2 on insect abundance and thereby total insect consumption, which has important implications for agricultural practices in today's world of steadily increasing pCO 2.
Performing an event study: An exercise for finance students

ABSTRACT This exercise helps instructors teach students how to perform a simple event study. The study tests to see if stocks earn abnormal returns when added to the S&P 500. Students select a random sample of stocks that were added to the index between January 2000 and July 2015. The accompanying spreadsheet calculates cumulative abnormal returns and cumulative abnormal trading volume and plots them in separate graphs. Students are asked to analyze the data and draw conclusions. Through this exercise, students learn how to conduct an event study and determine if a statistically significant event has occurred.
Association of the consumption of common food groups and beverages with mortality from cancer, ischaemic heart disease and diabetes mellitus in Serbia, 1991–2010: an ecological study

Objectives This paper reports association between mortality rates from cancer, ischaemic heart disease and diabetes mellitus and the consumption of common food groups and beverages in Serbia. Design In this ecological study, data on both mortality and the average annual consumption of common food groups and beverages per household's member were obtained from official data-collection sources. The multivariate linear regression analysis was used to determine the strength of the associations between consumption of common food groups and beverages and mortality rates. Results Markedly increasing trends of cancer, ischaemic heart disease and diabetes mellitus mortality rates were observed in Serbia in the period 1991–2010. Mortality rates from cancer were negatively associated with consumption of vegetable oil (p=0.005) and grains (p=0.001), and same was found for ischaemic heart disease (p=0.002 and 0.021, respectively), while consumption of other dairy products showed a significant positive association (p<0.001 and p=0.032, respectively). In men and women, mortality rates from diabetes mellitus showed a significant positive association with consumption of poultry (p=0.014 and 0.004, respectively). Consumption of beef and grains showed a significant negative association with cancer mortality rates in both genders (p=0.002 and p<0.001 in men, and p<0.001 and p=0.014 in women, respectively), while consumption of cheese was negatively associated only in men (p<0.001). Mortality from diabetes mellitus showed a significant positive association with consumption of animal fat and other dairy products only in women (p=0.003 and 0.046, respectively). Conclusions Association between unfavourable mortality trends from cancer, ischaemic heart disease and diabetes mellitus, and common food groups and beverages consumption was observed and should be assessed in future analytical epidemiological studies. Promotion of healthy diet is sorely needed in Serbia.
Beyond Information Retrieval - Medical Question Answering

Physicians have many questions when caring for patients, and frequently need to seek answers for their questions. Information retrieval systems (e.g., PubMed) typically return a list of documents in response to a user's query. Frequently the number of returned documents is large and makes physicians' information seeking "practical only 'after hours' and not in the clinical settings". Question answering techniques are based on automatically analyzing thousands of electronic documents to generate short-text answers in response to clinical questions that are posed by physicians. The authors address physicians' information needs and described the design, implementation, and evaluation of the medical question answering system (MedQA). Although our long term goal is to enable MedQA to answer all types of medical questions, currently, we implemented MedQA to integrate information retrieval, extraction, and summarization techniques to automatically generate paragraph-level text for definitional questions (i.e., "What is X? "). MedQA can be accessed at http://www.dbmi. columbia.edu/~yuh9001/research/MedQA.html.