Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Nuclear Medicine Imaging in Pediatric Neurology

Nuclear medicine imaging can provide important complementary information in the management of pediatric patients with neurological diseases. Pre-surgical localization of the epileptogenic focus in medically refractory epilepsy patients is the most common indication for nuclear medicine imaging in pediatric neurology. In patients with temporal lobe epilepsy, nuclear medicine imaging is particularly useful when magnetic resonance imaging findings are normal or its findings are discordant with electroencephalogram findings. In pediatric patients with brain tumors, nuclear medicine imaging can be clinically helpful in the diagnosis, directing biopsy, planning therapy, differentiating tumor recurrence from post-treatment sequelae, and assessment of response to therapy. Among other neurological diseases in which nuclear medicine has proved to be useful are patients with head trauma, inflammatory-infectious diseases and hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy.
TABSH: Tag-based stochastic hardware

Many popular and emerging applications are error tolerant by nature: their operations are considered “correct” even if the underlying hardware, to a certain extent, is erroneous. Under these circumstances, fault-correction mechanisms turn out to be unnecessary. This gave birth to “stochastic processors” that are under-designed and allow results not to be fully correct. Relaxing the hardware correctness requirements as a way to reduce energy consumption is a major trend first because of the emergence of green electronics and second the boom in portable devices with limited battery capacity. In this paper, we present TABSH, a SIMD Tag-Based Stochastic Hardware, and we compare its energy figures to a SISD processor, and show up to 65% energy saving per instruction.
A multibiometrics-based CAPTCHA for improved online security

CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) have been a common tool for preventing unauthorized access to websites for over a decade, but increasingly sophisticated optical character recognition algorithms and attack strategies have rendered traditional CAPTCHAs insecure. In this paper, we propose a new CAPTCHA incorporating multiple biometric modalities. Users are asked to identify faces, eyes, and fingerprints in a complex composite image. With over 1,900 volunteers and 30,000+ attempts, the proposed approach achieves high human accuracy while being resistant to existing attacks on CAPTCHAs and to detection by state-of-the-art software.
A BCI-controlled robotic assistant for quadriplegic people in domestic and professional life

SUMMARY In this paper, a Brain–Computer Interface (BCI) control approach for the assistive robotic system FRIEND is presented. The objective of the robot is to assist elderly and persons with disabilities in their daily and professional life activities. FRIEND is presented here from an architectural point of view, that is, as an overall robotic device that includes many subareas of research, such as human–robot interaction, perception, object manipulation and path planning, robotic safety, and so on. The integration of the hardware and software components is described relative to the interconnections between the various elements of FRIEND and the approach used for human–machine interaction. Since the robotic system is intended to be used especially by patients suffering from a high degree of disability (e.g., patients which are quadriplegic, have muscle diseases or serious paralysis due to strokes, or any other diseases with similar consequences for their independence), an alternative non-invasive BCI has been investigated. The FRIEND–BCI paradigm is explained within the overall structure of the robot. The capabilities of the robotic system are demonstrated in three support scenarios, one that deals with Activities of daily living (ADL) and two that are taking place in a rehabilitation workshop. The proposed robot was clinically evaluated through different tests that directly measure task execution time and hardware performance, as well as the acceptance of robot by end-users.
Pathways to Stepfamily Formation in Europe : Results from the FFS MPIDR WORKING PAPER WP 2002-046 OCTOBER 2002

Increasing proportions of couples are making childbearing decisions in stepfamilies but there has been no general comparative picture across European countries on stepfamily formation. The present paper aims to fill this gap and provides a comparison of European countries using macro-level indicators that describe union formation and dissolution and childbearing. We use the individual-level data files (standard recode files) of Fertility and Family Surveys from 19 European countries. Our results highlight the different pathways to a stepfamily in Europe, and show that in most European countries a considerable proportion of women form a stepfamily in childbearing ages, which needs to be considered in studies of fertility. 1 Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Konrad-Zuse-Str. 1, D-18057 Rostock, Germany. Email: fuernkranz@demogr.mpg. de 2 Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Konrad-Zuse-Str. 1, D-18057 Rostock, Germany. Email: vikat@demogr.mpg. de 3 Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Konrad-Zuse-Str. 1, D-18057 Rostock, Germany. Email: philipov@demogr.mpg. de 4 Institute for Demography, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Prinz-Eugen-Str. 8, A-1040 Vienna, Austria. Email: henriette.engelhardt@oeaw.ac. at Demographic Research – Volume 8, Article 5 108 http://www.demographic-research.org
AN ENVISAT S-BAND ALTIMETERCAL / VAL EXPERIMENT IN THE FRAMEWORK OF THE OSCAR PROJECT

The European satellite ENVISAT, following the previous ERS-1 and 2 will hold out some new features. Among those, the RA-2 altimeter will work, as previously, at 2 frequencies, but, if the Ku-band will still remain, the C-band will change for the S-band. The OSCAR project [1] concerns the use of the ENVISAT altimeter for exploring the potential of the nadir looking S-band for studying the ice sheet, sea ice, forestry, desert, canopy, hydrology or for planetology applications. The different elements of OSCAR consist in using :
Regulation of Constitutive Androstane Receptor and Its Target Genes by Fasting, cAMP, Hepatocyte Nuclear Factor α, and the Coactivator Peroxisome Proliferator-activated Receptor γ Coactivator-1α*

Animal studies reveal that fasting and caloric restriction produce increased activity of specific metabolic pathways involved in resistance to weight loss in liver. Evidence suggests that this phenomenon may in part occur through the action of the constitutive androstane receptor (CAR, NR1I3). Currently, the precise molecular mechanisms that activate CAR during fasting are unknown. We show that fasting coordinately induces expression of genes encoding peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor γ coactivator-1α (PGC-1α), CAR, cytochrome P-450 2b10 (Cyp2b10), UDP-glucuronosyltransferase 1a1 (Ugt1a1), sulfotransferase 2a1 (Sult2a1), and organic anion-transporting polypeptide 2 (Oatp2) in liver in mice. Treatments that elevate intracellular cAMP levels also produce increased expression of these genes in cultured hepatocytes. Our data show that PGC-1α interaction with hepatocyte nuclear factor 4α (HNF4α, NR2A1) directly regulates CAR gene expression through a novel and evolutionarily conserved HNF4-response element (HNF4-RE) located in its proximal promoter. Expression of PGC-1α in cells increases CAR expression and ligand-independent CAR activity. Genetic studies reveal that hepatic expression of HNF4α is required to produce fasting-inducible CAR expression and activity. Taken together, our data show that fasting produces increased expression of genes encoding key metabolic enzymes and an uptake transporter protein through a network of interactions involving cAMP, PGC-1α, HNF4α, CAR, and CAR target genes in liver. Given the recent finding that mice lacking CAR exhibit a profound decrease in resistance to weight loss during extended periods of caloric restriction, our findings have important implications in the development of drugs for the treatment of obesity and related diseases.
Societal ethics and legal system facing contemporary marketing strategies: An Australian insight

Abstract An integral function of Australian market economy is the process of matching products/services with customers’ needs, desires and preferences. This process is greatly facilitated by advertising. Advertising not only provides information for the consumers but may also be used by the advertiser to bring subconscious consumer preferences or inchoate desires to the surface and to stimulate the demand for consumption. In carrying out these tasks, the advertiser must decide the pitch of the advertisement, the appropriate media to be used, the budget, the degree of exposure of the advertisement, market segmentation and claims to be made for the product (Goldring et al, 1987). Australian firms, irrespective of their size, rely heavily on advertising to market their products and services. The degree to which firms see the crucial role of advertising in their overall marketing mix, is clearly reflected in their annual allocation of advertising expenditure. “In 1997, total Australian advertising expenditure.
Stereoscopic game design and evaluation

We report on a new game design where the goal is to make the stereoscopic depth cue sufficiently critical to success that game play should become impossible without using a stereoscopic 3D (S3D) display and, at the same time, we investigate whether S3D game play is affected by screen size. Before we detail our new game design we review previously unreported results from our stereoscopic game research over the last ten years at the Durham Visualisation Laboratory. This demonstrates that game players can achieve significantly higher scores using S3D displays when depth judgements are an integral part of the game. Method: We design a game where almost all depth cues, apart from the binocular cue, are removed. The aim of the game is to steer a spaceship through a series of oncoming hoops where the viewpoint of the game player is from above, with the hoops moving right to left across the screen towards the spaceship, to play the game it is essential to make decisive depth judgments to steer the spaceship through each oncoming hoop. To confound these judgements we design altered depth cues, for example perspective is reduced as a cue by varying the hoop's depth, radius and cross-sectional size. Results: Players were screened for stereoscopic vision, given a short practice session, and then played the game in both 2D and S3D modes on a seventeen inch desktop display, on average participants achieved a more than three times higher score in S3D than they achieved in 2D. The same experiment was repeated using a four metre S3D projection screen and similar results were found. Conclusions: Our conclusion is that games that use the binocular depth cue in decisive game judgements can benefit significantly from using an S3D display. Based on both our current and previous results we additionally conclude that display size, from cell-phone, to desktop, to projection display does not adversely affect player performance.
Some Simple Observations on the Reform of the International Monetary System

The demand for reform of the financial system has focused on the dollar's loss of international purchasing power (the Triffin dilemma) and its substitution by an international reserve currency that is not a national currency. The problem, however, is not the particular asset that serves as the international currency but rather the operation of the adjustment mechanism for dealing with global imbalances. In a preliminary report issued in May, the Commission of Experts of the President of the United Nations General Assembly on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System made clear that the international system suffers from an inherent tendency toward deficient aggregate demand, a reflection of the asymmetry in the international adjustment mechanism. Even the simple creation of a notional currency to be used in a clearing union (proposed by Keynes) cannot do this without some commitment to coordinated symmetric adjustment by both surplus and deficit countries. Thus, the first steps in the reform process must be (1) to offset the balance sheet losses caused by the collapse of asset values and (2) to provide an alternative source of demand to replace the U.S. consumer and an alternative source of finance to offset the deleveraging of financial institutions. This can be done through the coordinated introduction of traditional, countercyclical deficit expenditure policies, on a global scale.
Does Unemployment Risk Affect Asset Returns? The Long-Run UK Evidence

This paper examines the correlation structure between asset returns and unemployment surprises. Using UK data, it is possible to study this relationship not only over the more economically stable post WWII period, but also during the Great Depression. It is shown that the correlation between stock returns and unemployment shocks is significantly negative during the inter-war years, but not in the period since WWII. This is consistent with theoretical work that suggests that labor income risk concentrated in economic "crash" states is most likely to resolve the equity premium puzzle.
An analysis of three gigabit networking protocols for storage area networks

SCSI protocol is the protocol of choice for block storage management. Different transport mechanisms such as parallel SCSI, Fibre Channel, iSCSI and Infiniband can be used to transfer SCSI protocol data. Distance and connectivity limitations are the key drawbacks of parallel SCSI. Therefore, Fibre Channel, Infiniband and iSCSI (SCSI over TCP) are competing to emerge as the dominant next generation SCSI transport mechanism. By analyzing the different components of a network protocol, this paper evaluates whether Fibre Channel, Infiniband and iSCSI are (a) suitable for gigabit wire speeds (b) scalable across thousands of interconnected devices and (c) satisfy the needs of storage environments and storage protocols.
Reducing the peak to average ratio of multicarrier GSM and edge signals

In conventional base station solutions, the carriers transmitted are combined after the power amplifiers. An alternative to this is to combine the carriers in the digital domain. The major drawback of the digital carrier combining is a strongly varying envelope of the composite signal. The high PAR, sets strict requirements for the linearity of the power amplifier. High linearity requirements for the power amplifier leads to low power efficiency and therefore to high power consumption. In this paper, the possibility of reducing the PAR by clipping is investigated in two cases, GSM and EDGE.
School self-evaluation in action : a case study in the North-West of England

research examines the development of a self-evaluation model within a secondary school environment. The study investigates the contributing factors that influence the development of a school and suggests an evaluative model that measures pupil performance, encourages school staff to be self-reflective and enables a trustworthy indication of school attainment and improvement. Data collection included the use of surveys at the beginning and end of the investigation and also in-depth individual semi-structured interviews with school staff and local authority educational advisers. The outcome of the research provided a self-audit model that enabled judgements to be made on pupil progress across the full range of the curriculum and measured the strengths and weaknesses of the school compared with national standards. Emerging from the research was the realisation that managing the process of change was fundamental to the success of the model. It is this change process and its management that are the key findings of this research.
Routing Analysis in Wireless Mesh Network with Bandwidth Allocation

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is an important network to provide Internet access to remote areas and wireless connections in a metropolitan scale. As part of the Internet, WMN has to support diversified multimedia applications to all its users. It is essential to provide efficient Quality-of-Service (QoS) support to the networks. Searching the path with the maximum available bandwidth is one of the fundamental issues for supporting QoS in the WMN. The available path bandwidth is defined as the maximum additional rate a flow can push through saturating its path. Therefore, if the rate of traffic in a new flow on a path is no greater than the available bandwidth of this path, accepting the new traffic will not exit the bandwidth guaranteed of the existing flows. Due to interference among channel links, the bandwidth is a bottleneck metric in wired networks, is neither a defect nor additive in wireless networks. In this paper a computing path weight which captures the available path bandwidth information is proposed. This paper also show that the efficient routing protocol based on the new path weight which provides the consistency and loop-freeness to the network. The consistency property guarantees that each node makes an appropriate packet forwarding decision, so that a data packet does traverse through the exact path. The simulation experiments also show that the proposed path weight gives high-throughput paths.
An Extreme Mountain Ultra-Marathon Decreases the Cost of Uphill Walking and Running

Purpose: To examine the effects of the world's most challenging mountain ultramarathon (MUM, 330 km, cumulative elevation gain of +24,000 m) on the energy cost and kinematics of different uphill gaits. Methods: Before (PRE) and immediately after (POST) the competition, 19 male athletes performed three submaximal 5-min treadmill exercise trials in a randomized order: walking at 5 km·h−1, +20%; running at 6 km·h−1, +15%; and running at 8 km·h−1, +10%. During the three trials, energy cost was assessed using an indirect calorimetry system and spatiotemporal gait parameters were acquired with a floor-level high-density photoelectric cells system. Results: The average time of the study participants to complete the MUM was 129 h 43 min 48 s (range: 107 h 29 min 24 s to 144 h 21 min 0 s). Energy costs in walking (−11.5 ± 5.5%, P < 0.001), as well as in the first (−7.2 ± 3.1%, P = 0.01) and second (−7.0 ± 3.9%, P = 0.02) running condition decreased between PRE and POST, with a reduction both in the heart rate (−11.3, −10.0, and −9.3%, respectively) and oxygen uptake only for the walking condition (−6.5%). No consistent and significant changes in the kinematics variables were detected (P-values from 0.10 to 0.96). Conclusion: Though fatigued after completing the MUM, the subjects were still able to maintain their uphill locomotion patterns noted at PRE. The decrease (improvement) in the energy costs was likely due to the prolonged and repetitive walking/running, reflecting a generic improvement in the mechanical efficiency of locomotion after ~130 h of uphill locomotion rather than constraints imposed by the activity on the musculoskeletal structure and function.
Antenatal characteristics of Roma female population in Virovitica-Podravina County, Croatia

Abstract Introduction This study reports about antenatal characteristics of Roma minority population. The study was designed to investigate data about health behaviours known to be associated with reproductive outcomes of Roma women that have very good living conditions and relatively high resource availability. Methods A retrospective study included 204 Roma and 408 non-Roma hospitalised singleton births that occurred in the Maternity Ward of the General Hospital Virovitica in the period from 1991 to 2010. Data about women’s age, marital status, smoking, reproductive health (abortions, delivery), antenatal care, perinatal complications and gestational age were taken from hospital records and analysed. Results Roma women were averagely more than three years younger than non-Roma women, only 10.8% were married. Smoking was more frequent. The average number of births of Roma and non-Roma women was similar, averagely two children per woman. The rate of induced abortions in the Roma women was higher, while the frequency of spontaneous abortions was equal. Inadequate antenatal care of Roma women was associated with two times higher incidence of perinatal complications. A higher frequency of deliveries at home without professional assistance in Roma pregnancy resulted in lower perinatal outcomes. It was confirmed that Roma mothers give birth earlier (38+6 vs. 39+4 weeks) and have a higher incidence of premature births (9.3% vs. 2.2%). Conclusions In the comparison of antenatal parameters between the two researched groups, poorer prenatal outcomes in the Roma population were found, despite full integration and considerable improvement in living standards of this ethnic Roma population.
School districts and instructional renewal

Contrary to the widespread perception of school districts as rigid bureaucracies and obstacles to reform, this volume shows how school districts can and do make essential contributions to the renewal and enhancement of American education. In this unique and very timely volume, an authoritative group of contributors presents and analyzes emerging evidence on district policy and leadership.
Evolution of the moment of inertia of three-body figure-eight choreography

We investigate three-body motion in three dimensions under the interaction potential proportional to rα (α ≠ 0) or log r, where r represents the mutual distance between bodies, with the following conditions: (I) the moment of inertia is a non-zero constant, (II) the angular momentum is zero and (III) one body is on the centre of mass at an instant. We prove that the motion which satisfies conditions (I)–(III) with equal masses for α ≠ −2, 2, 4 is impossible. And motions which satisfy the same conditions for α = 2, 4 are solved explicitly. Shapes of these orbits are not figure-eight and these motions have collision. Therefore, the moment of inertia for figure-eight choreography for α ≠ −2 is proved to be inconstant along the orbit. We also prove that the motion which satisfies conditions (I)–(III) with general masses under the Newtonian potential α = −1 is impossible.
Stochastic subspace identification of linear systems with observation outliers

We propose a diagnostic for the state space model fitting time series formed by deleting observations from the data and measuring the change in the estimates of the parameters. A method is proposed for distinguishing an observational outlier from an innovational one. Thus we present a robust subspace system identification algorithm that is less sensitive to outliers. We give a numerical result to show effectiveness of the proposed method.
Research on ship welding process planning with case-based reasoning

In order to solve the problem that the judgment for the necessity of the welding procedure qualification (WPQ) depends excessively on the experience and the accumulated process knowledge of enterprise can't be unitized effectively in the traditional welding ship process planning, according to analyzing influencing factors of the ship welding procedure, an advanced planning approach based on case-based reasoning (CBR) was proposed. With this approach combining analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and similarity system theory, the weight and similarity of each factor were calculated, and then the process-similarity was presented to assist the process designer to judge. Adopting the result of judgment, the process planning would be achieved efficiently. Finally, a case study was demonstrated to show the rationality and adaptation of this approach.