Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fast Algorithm of the Inter Mode Decision for H.264/AVC

The improvement in compression efficiency of H.264 has brought about the dramatic increase in computational complexity. This makes it be a must to reduce the computational complexity of algorithms in real time applications. The algorithm of the inter mode decision is key technology in H.264/AVC video coding standard. By analyzing a statistical result of percentage of optimal modes according to different video sequences and studying the texture characteristics of the current macro block, the new definitions of some parameters of image texture in time domain were found and a inter frame coding mode sets in order to reduce searching computation was defined. A fast algorithm of inter mode decision was put forward to analyze image texture with a simpler algorithm to decrease computational complexity greatly. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can improve the speed of H.264/AVC encoder dramatically without considerable performance degradation, which is helpful for real time application of H.264/AVC.
Discovering Relevant Scientific Literature on the Web

Scientific literature on the Web makes up a massive, noisy, disorganized database. Unlike large, single-source databases such as a corporate customer database, the Web database draws from many sources, each with its own organization. Also, owing to its diversity, most records in this database are irrelevant to an individual researcher. Furthermore, the database is constantly growing in content and changing in organization. All these characteristics make the Web a difficult domain for knowledge discovery. To quickly and easily gather useful knowledge from such a database, users need the help of an information filtering system that automatically extracts only relevant records as they appear in a stream of incoming records. To this end, we have developed the CiteSeer. CiteSeer is an automatic generator of digital libraries of scientific literature. It uses sophisticated acquisition, parsing, and presentation methods to eliminate most of the manual effort of finding useful publications on the Web.
\(\ell_{1, p}\)-Norm Regularization: Error Bounds and Convergence Rate Analysis of First-Order Methods

In recent years, the l1,p-regularizer has been widely used to induce structured sparsity in the solutions to various optimization problems. Currently, such l1,p-regularized problems are typically solved by first-order methods. Motivated by the desire to analyze the convergence rates of these methods, we show that for a large class of l1,p-regularized problems, an error bound condition is satisfied when p e 2 [1, 2] or p = ∞ but fails to hold for any p e (2, ∞). Based on this result, we show that many first-order methods enjoy an asymptotic linear rate of convergence when applied to l1,p-regularized linear or logistic regression with p e [1, 2] or p = ∞. By contrast, numerical experiments suggest that for the same class of problems with p e (2, ∞), the aforementioned methods may not converge linearly.
The Convertible Undeniable Multi-Signature Scheme Suitable for Digital Copyright Protection

In this paper, the convertible undeniable multi-signature scheme is proposed. An undeniable signature scheme has a property that a verifier can not authenticate the signature of the document without help of the signer. An undeniable multi-signature scheme also has similar property that the signature of the document can not be verified without co-operation of all participating signers. The proposed convertible undeniable multi-signature scheme can convert the undeniable multi-signature to the ordinary multi-signature. The authenticity of confidential document can only be verified with co-operation of all signers. If the document is no longer confidential, it can be opened to public use by converting the undeniable multi-signature on the document to the ordinary one. The proposed scheme satisfies undeniable property and can be applied to copyright protection of digital contents made by many authors.
The association between tinnitus and posttraumatic stress disorder.

PURPOSE Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) affects nearly 10% of the population, a prevalence comparable with that of tinnitus. Similarities between the way PTSD and tinnitus influence auditory behaviors include exaggerated startle responses and decreased loudness tolerance. Tinnitus loudness is often exacerbated by sounds that trigger PTSD-related anxiety. This report addresses physical and psychological relations between PTSD and tinnitus. METHOD A chart review of veterans seen over a 4-year period for tinnitus services was conducted. Case history and self-assessments of tinnitus handicap were examined in all patients. A review of the literature related to triggers and effects of PTSD was conducted to explore potential consequences related to the presence of PTSD in the Veterans Affairs Medical Center (VAMC) tinnitus population. RESULTS Chart review confirmed that 34% of the first 300 patients enrolled in the VAMC Tinnitus Clinic also carried a diagnosis of PTSD. Patient reports citing tinnitus severity, suddenness of tinnitus onset, sound-tolerance problems, and sound-triggered exacerbation of tinnitus were more common for patients with a PTSD diagnosis than patients with tinnitus only. CONCLUSIONS Several neural mechanisms linked to both tinnitus and PTSD affect auditory behaviors. Audiologists should be aware that patients with tinnitus and PTSD will require test protocols and referrals that address these powerful responses.
OPQL: A First OPM-Level Query Language for Scientific Workflow Provenance

Provenance, which is one kind of metadata that captures the derivation history of a data product, including its original data sources, intermediate products, and the steps that were applied to produce it, has become increasingly important in services computing and scientific workflows to validate, interpret, and analyze the result of scientific computing. Most existing systems store provenance data captured into their own provenance storages of proprietary provenance models and conduct query processing over the physical provenance storages using query languages, such as SQL, SPARQL, and Query, which are closely coupled to the underlying provenance storage strategies. In this paper, we present OPQL, an OPM-level provenance query language, that is directly defined over the Open Provenance Model (OPM). An OPQL query takes an OPM graph as input and produces an OPM graph as output. Therefore, OPQL queries are not tightly coupled to the underlying provenance storage strategies. Our main contributions are: (i) we design OPQL, including graph patterns and an OPM-based graph algebra for OPQL, that efficiently supports provenance lineage queries, (ii) we implement OPQ Lin our OPMPROV system, where the result of OPQL queries is displayed as an OPM graph via the OPMPROV browser. An experimental study is conducted to evaluate the performance and feasibility of OPQL for provenance querying. To our best knowledge, OPQL is the first OPM-level query language for scientific workflow provenance.
Dynamic Action of Carotenoids in Cardioprotection and Maintenance of Cardiac Health

Oxidative stress has been considered universally and undeniably implicated in the pathogenesis of all major diseases, including those of the cardiovascular system. Oxidative stress activate transcriptional messengers, such as nuclear factor—κB, tangibly contributing to endothelial dysfunction, the initiation and progression of atherosclerosis, irreversible damage after ischemic reperfusion, and even arrhythmia, such as atrial fibrillation. Evidence is rapidly accumulating to support the role of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and reactive nitrogen species (RNS) as intracellular signaling molecules. Despite this connection between oxidative stress and cardiovascular disease (CVD), there are currently no recognized therapeutic interventions to address this important unmet need. Antioxidants that provide a broad, “upstream” approach via ROS/RNS quenching or free radical chain breaking seem an appropriate therapeutic option based on epidemiologic, dietary, and in vivo animal model data. Short-term dietary intervention trials suggest that diets rich in fruit and vegetable intake lead to improvements in coronary risk factors and reduce cardiovascular mortality. Carotenoids are such abundant, plant-derived, fat-soluble pigments that functions as antioxidants. They are stored in the liver or adipose tissue, and are lipid soluble by becoming incorporated into plasma lipoprotein particles during transport. For these reasons, carotenoids may represent one plausible mechanism by which fruits and vegetables reduce the risk of chronic diseases as cardiovascular disease (CVD). This review paper outlines the role of carotenoids in maintaining cardiac health and cardioprotection mediated by several mechanisms including redox signaling.
Nutritional issues in older adults with wounds in a clinical setting

Background The ability for patients to access and consume sufficient quantities of nutrients to meet recommendations for wound management is vital if decline in nutritional status during hospital admission is to be prevented. This study aims to investigate menu quality, consumption patterns, and changes in nutritional status for inpatients with wounds. Methods Wound healing recommendations were compared against the nutrient content of the inpatient menu. Individual intakes were compared to estimated requirements: energy using the Schofield equation; protein using wound healing recommendations; vitamin A, C, and zinc using the recommended daily intake (RDI). Results The inpatient menu did not provide sufficient energy or zinc to meet the estimated average requirement while the ordering practices of participants allowed all RDI to be achieved except for zinc. Actual intake fell below recommendations: 62%, 41%, 55%, and 79% of patients not meeting energy, minimum protein requirements, vitamin A or zinc RDI respectively. A nonsignificant trend for weight loss, particularly fat mass, was observed over time. Conclusion Inpatients with wounds are at risk of being unable to consume sufficient quantities of nutrients important for healing and prevention of decline in nutritional status. This is despite the menu seemingly providing sufficient nutrients. More attention to education, encouragement, and supplementation are recommended.
Annotation of Hyperlinks with Semantic Meaning

Web pages in the web represent certain concepts in the domain they fall in, and the connections between them represent the relations between the concepts they represent. In the current web, people are using links blindly without knowing what these links point to, or what kind of relationship this link represents. With the advent of the semantic web, concepts and relationships among them are represented in an ontology. This can be utilized to make links more meaningful. Web pages can be searched, browsed or even reorganized based on their concept and relationship labels. Links in a webpage can render useful information about the page it is pointing to. We can annotate a webpage and its links with appropriate concepts from ontology. This paper presents a new idea of propagating concept from a webpage to the links pointing to that page or from the links to the webpage. Propagation of concepts is based on certain criteria which will be discussed later in this paper. We also propose a new idea of automated voting which is used to choose the right concept or relation from a number of concepts and relation matches.
Intracranial malignant melanoma: A report of 7 cases

The aim of the present study was to investigate the clinical diagnosis and treatment of intracranial malignant melanoma. For this purpose, the clinical manifestation, signs, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) contents, imageology, pathological features, treatment and prognosis of 7 cases of intracranial malignant melanoma were analyzed in The Chinese PLA General Hospital (Beijing, China) from 1996 to 2013. All the melanoma cases were confirmed by histopathology, and CSF cytopathology demonstrated that there were 5 cases of primary malignant melanoma and 2 cases of secondary malignant melanoma. Among the patients, 4 presented with >1 pigmented nevus in the skin, and 1 presented with skin melanoma. Intracranial malignant melanoma mostly affects middle-aged males. CSF cytopathology and imageology (particularly enhanced magnetic resonance), are important tools in the diagnosis of the disease. Particularly, when a patient presents with a pigmented nevus in the skin and an abnormal lesion in the brain, a diagnosis of intracranial malignant melanoma should be considered.
Analyzing the problem of falls among older people

Falls are a serious problem facing the elderly. The prevention of falls that contribute to disability, mainly in elderly people, is an important issue. Ensuring the greatest possible functionality for elderly people is an important element in the prevention of disability. This paper analyzes the importance of falls, risk factors for falls, and interventions to prevent falls. Recent publications as well as research regarding the prevention and rehabilitation for falls are reviewed.
Cloud Computing and Decision-Making : Determinants, Modelling and Impacts

This dissertation addresses cloud computing adoption and decision-making issues. It analyzes adoption determinants, discusses cloud services, and compares cloud providers. Cloud computing has both technical and organizational dimensions. Until recently the organizational dimension has received little attention, and cloud computing has essentially been considered from a technical perspective. However, the "cloudification" of information systems poses many economic and managerial questions that need to be evaluated. It is therefore important to enrich our understanding of phenomena related to the "virtualization" of information, through an examination of their multidimensional characteristics. Overall, this dissertation finds that perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, complexity and compatibility are key factors for cloud adoption, It know-how plays also an important role in the decision process; most small cloud providers have more stable and better computing performance than large cloud providers, the performance of CPU impact price significantly. This dissertation contributes a lot to the theoretical and managerial dimensions of cloud computing research, however, there exists more research work to do as the aforementioned research limitations from the perspective of cloud adoption and cloud decision-making. Future research will focus on the limitions of the research.
Algorithm of Creating Routing Table for WSNs

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have drawn the attention of the research community in the last few years, driven by a wealth of theoretical and practical challenges. In general, most of the applications have dense sensor deployment and low bandwidth demands, and are usually delay tolerant in WSNs. Therefore, the spatial and temporal correlation and event-to-sink along with nature of the WSNs is characterized. Therefore, the design of routing table of WSNs node is the basis of the study of simulating routing protocol, and range-free location and so on. In this paper we present the algorithm of creating routing table based on classical RIP (Routing information Protocol) and the features of nodes communication in WSNs are investigated. In order to validate our proposed algorithm, DV-Hop based on the information of routing table being created by our algorithm is simulated in MATLAB. The experiment results illustrate that our algorithm is valid.
Reflection for meaning and action as an engine for professional development across multiple early childhood teacher education contexts

ABSTRACT Drawing from sociocultural theories of learning and literature on reflection in educational contexts, this article describes reflective practices as a meaning-making and action engine to support early childhood education practitioners’ professional knowledge, skills, and dispositions. We argue that the process of reflection requires a differential approach to account for various contexts of professional learning for early childhood practitioners: preservice, in-service, and technical assistance providers/leadership. In order to conceptualize these ideals, we present a new conceptual framework of reflective practices in early childhood professional learning and provide practice examples where we as teacher educators implemented reflective practices with practitioners at different levels in the continuum of early childhood education: preservice teacher candidates, in-service teachers and technical assistance providers supporting child care directors and staff in state quality improvement initiatives.
DESIGN OF MULTILEVEL TWO DIMENSIONAL-DISCRETE WAVELET TRANSFORM FOR IMAGE PROCESSING APPLICATIONS

The design of multilevel two dimensional-discrete wavelet transform (2D-DWT) with novel Vedic multiplier is presented. To design a 2D-DWT, digital finite impulse response (FIR) filter is used to increase the image resolution and eliminate the unwanted noise present in the image. Conventional three-level 2D-DWT is designed using regular Vedic multiplier. But it consumes more area and power. And also less image resolution. So multiplier-accumulate unit (MAC) unit in the FIR filter is changed to design the efficient FIR filter. Conventional FIR filter with regular Vedic multiplier is not working, when the carry input is 1. To overcome this fault, novel Vedic multiplier is proposed and designed using less half adder and full adder. The four level 2D-DWT is applied to increase the image resolution. Simulation is carried out using matrix laboratory (Matlab2008a) and Modelsim6.3c. Synthesis and Implementation is carried out using Xilinx and field programmable gate array (FPGA) Spartan3.
Random stable looptrees

We introduce a class of random compact metric spaces $\mathscr{L}_{\alpha}$ indexed by $\alpha~\in(1,2)$ and which we call stable looptrees. They are made of a collection of random loops glued together along a tree structure, and can be informally be viewed as dual graphs of $\alpha$-stable Levy trees. We study their properties and prove in particular that the Hausdorff dimension of $ \mathscr{L}_{\alpha}$ is almost surely equal to $\alpha$. We also show that stable looptrees are universal scaling limits, for the Gromov-Hausdorff topology, of various combinatorial models. In a companion paper, we prove that the stable looptree of parameter $ \frac{3}{2}$ is the scaling limit of cluster boundaries in critical site-percolation on large random triangulations.
ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS ON THE STAR FORMATION ACTIVITY IN GALAXIES AT z ≃ 1.2 IN THE COSMOS FIELD

We investigate the relation between the star formation activity in galaxies and environment at z ≃ 1.2 in the Cosmic Evolution Survey field, using the fraction of [O ii] emitters and the local galaxy density. The fraction of [O ii] emitters appears to be almost constant over the surface density of galaxies between 0.2 and 10 Mpc−2. This trend is different from that seen in the local universe where the star formation activity is weaker in higher density regions. To understand this difference between z ∼ 1 and z ∼ 0, we study the fraction of non-isolated galaxies as a function of local galaxy density. We find that the fraction of non-isolated galaxies increases with increasing density. Our results suggest that the star formation in galaxies at z ∼ 1 is triggered by galaxy interaction and/or mergers.
Single step evolution of robot controllers for sequential tasks

The generation of robot controllers for a task requiring a sequence of elementary behaviors is still a challenge. If these behaviors are known, intermediate steps can be given to help bootstrap the search, thus leading to task decomposition or incremental approaches. The goal of this paper is to propose an alternative, within which such behaviors do not need to be known. The proposed approach relies on a classical multi-objective evolutionary algorithm and consists in designing objectives dedicated to the enhancement of evolutionary search abilities. These objectives are to be used in addition to performance objectives rewarding the efficiency, robustness, or whatever aspect a robot designer might be interested in. Two different kinds of objectives are proposed, tested and compared on a ball collecting problem. Both rely on states that can be directly extracted from the sensors and are completely independent from the genotype and phenotype. They show promising results, even with a simple direct neural network encoding.
Alcohol Consumption and Family History as Correlates of Neuroanatomy and Cognition

Neuroanatomical and cognitive differences between individuals with and without a family history of alcohol dependence (FHA) have been noted, however, results are inconsistent. Similarly, the relationship between alcohol consumption and neuroanatomy in young adults without an alcohol use disorder remains unclear. The current study examined the association between alcohol consumption and family history with neuroanatomical and cognitive outcomes in a sample of sixty-nine young adults. Participants with a recent history of heavy episodic drinking completed structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and cognitive testing (WASIII). Factorial ANOVAs were used to compare FHA and sex groups on neuroanatomy and cognition; linear regression analyses were used to examine the relationship between alcohol consumption and neuroanatomy. Neuroanatomical and cognitive outcomes did not significantly vary as a factor of FHA or sex. Alcohol consumption indices did not significantly predict neuroanatomy. Differences in data analysis and study design are hypothesized to contribute discrepancies in the literature.
Los efectos de la política de prevención del crimen y la violencia en México

El presente trabajo aborda dos elementos clave de la politica de prevencion del crimen y la violencia en Mexico. En la primera parte se examina la conformacion de la politica de prevencion en los ultimos 10 anos. En la segunda seccion, se evaluan los efectos del Programa Nacional de Prevencion del Delito (PRONAPRED) por medio de la tecnica Propensity Score Matching (pareamiento por puntaje de propension). Con datos a nivel municipal y tomando como variable de resultado la tasa de homicidio y la tasa de lesiones por arma de fuego, encontramos que el PRONAPRED solo tiene efectos significativos en la tasa de homicidio; sin embargo, estos son en la direccion contraria a la esperada. Los resultados de esta investigacion muestran que la politica de prevencion en Mexico requiere de cambios para poder cumplir con los objetivos esperados.
Graph-based Shape Representation for Object Retrieval

Shape analysis has been an area of intere st and research in image processing for a long time . Developing a discriminant shape representation and description m ethod is a concern in many applications like image retrieval systems. This paper presents a new shape repr sentation model which is based on graphs. We a lso present developed similarity measure technique to f ind correspondences between shapes. In our approach , features extracted from boundary of the shape are u sed to build up a graph. By means of a novel soluti on for attributed graph matching a new method for shape si milarity measure is built up.