Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Music Emotion Recognition: The Importance of Melodic Features

We study the importance of a melodic audio (MA) feature set in music emotion recognition (MER) and compare its performance to an approach using only standard audio (SA) features. We also analyse the fusion of both types of features. Employing only SA features, the best attained performance was 46.3%, while using only MA features the best outcome was 59.1% (F- measure). A combination of SA and MA features improved results to 64%. These results might have an important impact to help break the so-called glass ceiling in MER, as most current approaches are based on SA features.
Partial fuzzy recommender system for Indian matrimony

Users of matrimony websites are facing problem of overloaded choices of partners. We have implemented Partial Fuzzy Recommender System for Indian matrimony to overcome this challenging issue. Recommender system addresses the information abundant problem by providing most suitable choices to the user. The user profile may contain vague and imprecise terms. For example, prospective bride's expectation is that the groom should be highly qualified, which is a vague term. Fuzzy system is used to overcome such issues. We have defined number of fuzzy rules post studying the context of society. In the user profile, we have considered user attributes as crisp set and fuzzy set. Crisp set refers to exact match, and fuzzy set refers to a partial match. That is why we call this “Partial Fuzz' Recommender System”. Our system provides top, n' recommendations of ideal partners to active user. The proposed system is fed data on major online Indian matrimony websites to testify the valid checks.
New antimicrobial combinations: substituted chalcones- oxacillin against methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus

Staphylococcus aureus, the most virulent Staphylococcus species, is also the prevalent pathogen isolated from hospitalized patients and the second most common from patients in outpatient settings. In general, bacteria have the genetic ability to transmit and acquire resistance to drugs, which are utilized as therapeutic agents. Related studies of antimicrobial activity indicate that crude extracts containing flavonoids, triterpenes and steroids have showed significative activity against several Staphylococcus aureus strains. Combination effects between flavonoids and antibiotics also have been reported. The aim of the present work was to investigate in vitro synergism between several chalcones substituted in combination with oxacillin, an antibiotic used conventionally against S. aureus ATCC 43 300 that is resistant to meticillin, using the kinetic turbidimetric method developed earlier. The results were satisfactory for all assayed combinations and in accordance with the mechanism of bacteriostatic inhibition previously proposed, except for 2´,4´-dihydroxy-3´-methoxychalcone – oxacillin. The best combination was 2´,3´-dihydroxychalcone -oxacillin (MIC: 11.2 µg/mL). Further investigations are needed to characterize the interaction mechanism with antibiotics. Thus, chalcones – oxacillin combination could lead to the development of new antibiotics against methicillin resistant S. aureus infection.
The Holocaust across Generations. Trauma and Its Inheritance among Descendants of Survivors

colleagues have painstakingly built the evidence base for this book. Sociologists, economists, demographers, political scientists, policy scientists, health scientists, policymakers, and students across a range of disciplines will benefit by reading it. As House remarks in the Preface, none of the evidence he presents throughout the book is particularly new. But what is new is the way that he organizes it and brings it all together so that we now have a roadmap for population health policy-making that makes sense, given the population health mess that the country is in. Unfortunately, at least right now, there is no chance that any of his policy ideas will gain political traction at the national level. Even with a different political landscape, though, the idea that health care is health policy is so firmly entrenched in U.S. society that it will be very difficult to change in meaningful ways. Indeed, the medical establishment, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies, universities, and government bureaucracies (e.g., CDC, FDA, NIH) are in part built on, and profit from, the idea that health policy consists of health care and health care only. But in early 2021, I sincerely hope the new Secretary of Health and Human Services will have House’s book prominently on her or his desk and, as a result, will recognize the paradoxical crisis we are in and help lead us down a bold new demand-oriented health policy pathway.
Toward performance optimization with CPU offloading for virtualized multi-tenant data center networks

Network virtualization is an essential technique for data center operators to provide traffic isolation, differentiated service, and security enforcement for multi-tenant services. However, traditional protocols used in local area networks may not be applicable for data center networks due to the difference in network topology. Recent research suggests that layer-2-in-layer-3 tunneling protocols may be the solution to address the challenges. In this article, we find via testbed experiments that directly applying these tunneling protocols toward network virtualization only results in poor performance due to the scalability problems. Specifically, we observe that the bottlenecks actually reside inside the servers. We then propose a CPU offloading mechanism that exploits a packet steering function to balance packet processing among available CPU threads, thus greatly improving network performance. Compared to a virtualized network created based on VXLAN, our scheme improves the bandwidth for up to almost 300 percent on a 10 Gb/s link between a pair of tunnel endpoints.
Testing the assumption of annual shell ring deposition in freshwater mussels

We tested the assumption of annual shell ring deposition by freshwater mussels in three rivers using 17 species. In 2000, we notched shell margins, returned animals to the water, and retrieved them in 2001. In 2003, we measured shells, affixed numbered tags, returned animals, and retrieved them in 2004 and 2005. We validated deposition of a single internal annulus per year in all species and in 94% of specimens. Most unvalidated shells were old individuals with tightly crowded rings. Handling produced a conspicuous disturbance ring in all specimens and often resulted in shell damage. Observed growth was similar to but slightly lower than growth predicted by von Bertalanffy length-at-age models developed independently from shell annuli; further, handling specimens in 2 consecutive years reduced growth more than handling only once. These results show that mussels are extremely sensitive to handling. Brief handling does not likely increase short-term mortality, but repeated handling could decrease long-term .
Cryptanalysis of the Smart-Vercauteren and Gentry-Halevi's Fully Homomorphic Encryption

For the fully homomorphic encryption schemes in [SV10, GH11], this paper presents attacks to solve equivalent secret key and directly recover plaintext from ciphertext for lattice dimensions n=2048 by using lattice reduction algorithm. According to the average-case behavior of LLL in [NS06], their schemes are also not secure for n=8192.
Efficient Learning of Communication Profiles from IP Flow Records

The task of network traffic monitoring has evolved drastically with the ever-increasing amount of data flowing in large scale networks. The automated analysis of this tremendous source of information often comes with using simpler models on aggregated data (e.g. IP flow records) due to time and space constraints. A step towards utilizing IP flow records more effectively are stream learning techniques. We propose a method to collect a limited yet relevant amount of data in order to learn a class of complex models, finite state machines, in real-time. These machines are used as communication profiles to fingerprint, identify or classify hosts and services and offer high detection rates while requiring less training data and thus being faster to compute than simple models.
Kinetics of Macrophage Recruitment and Turnover in Peritoneal Inflammatory Exudates Induced by Salmonella or Thioglycollate Broth

Kinetics of peritoneal macrophage turnover during infection of mice with Salmonella enteritidis or following injection with thioglycollate broth or other peritoneal stimulants has been studied. Single intravenous injections of tritiated thymidine were given and the cells were examined by autoradiography. Maximum labelling of small adherent peritoneal macrophages occurred when 3H‐thymidine was given 1 d after Salmonella and the cells were harvested 1 d later. Labelled cells decreased at later times despite maintenance of high numbers of macrophages in the exudates. Results from experiments in which labelled peritoneal cells were reinjected indicated that small, monocyte‐enriched, labelled cells were not the major source of the large macrophages. Similar labelling at 2 d was observed using heat‐killed Corynebacterium parvum or lipopolysaccharide (LPS) as ip stimulants.
Feasibility Study of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as an Intervention for Mild Cognitive Impairment in Elderly Indonesians

Center for Ageing Studies, Universitas Indonesia, Depok, Indonesia; Faculty of Psychology, Universitas Indonesia, Depok, Indonesia; Department of Clinical Psychology and Experimental Psychopathology, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands; Faculty of Psychology, Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia, Jakarta, Indonesia; Faculty of Health Sciences, Universitas Dhyana Pura, Bali, Indonesia
Two gravitational shock waves on the AdS3 brane

A gravitational shock wave is a solution to Einstein equations describing the gravitational field of a massless particle. We obtain such a geometry for a particle moving on a AdS3 brane embedded in a AdS4 bulk (the lower dimensional version of the ``locally localized gravity'' model of Karch and Randall). In order to do this, we use two different techniques. First, we solve directly Einstein equations sourced by a massless particle. Then we boost to the speed of light the AdS3 brane black hole solution of Emparan et al. [1] while sending its mass parameter to zero. Surprisingly, we obtain two different results. We discuss the origin of these two different solutions both in the bulk and in the CFT picture. As a by-product, we derive the expression for the shock wave associated to a transversally accelerating particle in AdS4.
World Health Organization reference values for human semen characteristics.

BACKGROUND Semen quality is taken as a surrogate measure of male fecundity in clinical andrology, male fertility, reproductive toxicology, epidemiology and pregnancy risk assessments. Reference intervals for values of semen parameters from a fertile population could provide data from which prognosis of fertility or diagnosis of infertility can be extrapolated. METHODS Semen samples from over 4500 men in 14 countries on four continents were obtained from retrospective and prospective analyses on fertile men, men of unknown fertility status and men selected as normozoospermic. Men whose partners had a time-to-pregnancy (TTP) of < or =12 months were chosen as individuals to provide reference distributions for semen parameters. Distributions were also generated for a population assumed to represent the general population. RESULTS The following one-sided lower reference limits, the fifth centiles (with 95th percent confidence intervals), were generated from men whose partners had TTP < or = 12 months: semen volume, 1.5 ml (1.4-1.7); total sperm number, 39 million per ejaculate (33-46); sperm concentration, 15 million per ml (12-16); vitality, 58% live (55-63); progressive motility, 32% (31-34); total (progressive + non-progressive) motility, 40% (38-42); morphologically normal forms, 4.0% (3.0-4.0). Semen quality of the reference population was superior to that of the men from the general population and normozoospermic men. CONCLUSIONS The data represent sound reference distributions of semen characteristics of fertile men in a number of countries. They provide an appropriate tool in conjunction with clinical data to evaluate a patient's semen quality and prospects for fertility.
The Flutter Shutter Paradox

Photography is the art of acquiring as many photons as possible of a given scene. In classic cameras, the aperture time is irremediably limited by the risk of a motion blur when the camera and the scene are in relative motion. Nevertheless, two recent camera concepts, the Agrawal et al. flutter shutter and the Levin et al. motion-invariant photography permit one to extend indefinitely the exposure time while guaranteeing an invertible motion blur. In this paper, a complete mathematical theory of these new technologies is proposed. Modeling the capture noise, the theory furnishes explicit formulas for the signal to noise ratio $(SNR)$ of the final image after deconvolution when the motion is uniform. It puts in evidence the existence of two variants, the analog flutter shutter and the numerical flutter shutter. The results of the resulting quantitative comparison are slightly paradoxical. First, it is shown that the best camera aperture strategies are always flutter shutters, even when the aperture time is.
Essentialism promotes children's inter-ethnic bias

The present study investigated the developmental foundation of the relation between social essentialism and attitudes. Forty-eight Jewish Israeli secular 6-year-olds were exposed to either a story emphasizing essentialism about ethnicity, or stories controlling for the salience of ethnicity or essentialism per se. After listening to a story, children's attitudes were assessed in a drawing and in an IAT task. Compared to the control conditions, children in the ethnic essentialism condition drew a Jewish and an Arab character as farther apart from each other, and the Jewish character with a more positive affect than the Arab character. Moreover, boys in the ethnic essentialism condition manifested a stronger bias in the IAT. These findings reveal an early link between essentialism and inter-group attitudes.
MultiJava: Modular Symmetric Multiple Dispatch and Extensible Classes for Java

Multiple dispatch offers several well-known advantages over the single dispatching of conventional object-oriented languages, including a simple solution to the “binary method” problem and cleaner implementations of the “strategy” and similar design patterns. Extensible classes allow one to extend the set of methods that an existing class supports without editing that class or client code. This provides, among other idioms, a simple implementation of the “visitor” design pattern. We present MultiJava, a backwardcompatible extension to Java supporting symmetric multiple dispatch and extensible classes. We adapt previous theoretical work to allow MultiJava classes to be statically typechecked modularly and safely, ruling out any link-time or run-time type errors. We also present a novel compilation scheme that operates modularly and incurs performance overhead only where multiple dispatching or extensible classes are actually used.
Cerebellar modulation of cough motor pattern in cats.

Cerebellar modulation of cough motor pattern in cats. J. Appl. Physiol. 83(2): 391-397, 1997. -The cerebellum modulates respiratory muscle activity in part via its influence on the central respiratory pattern generator. Because coughing requires well-coordinated respiratory muscle activity, studies were conducted to determine whether the cerebellum influences the centrally generated cough motor pattern. Integrated phrenic and lumbar efferent neurograms (PN and LN, respectively) were monitored in decerebrated, paralyzed, and ventilated cats. Mechanical probing of the intrathoracic trachea was used to evoke fictive coughs; i.e., large increases in PN and LN amplitudes. Cerebellectomy resulted in a decrease in the number of coughs per trial (cough frequency) and LN peak amplitudes without any consistent change in PN peak amplitudes. Cerebellar nuclei [the rostral interposed nucleus (INr) and the rostral fastigial nucleus (FNr)] known to be involved in respiratory control were ablated to determine their potential role in the cough response. Control (eupneic) respiratory frequency was not affected by cerebellectomy or INr/FNr lesions. Cough frequency was depressed by lesion of the INr but not by ablation of the FNr. No significant changes in PN and LN amplitudes were observed after lesion of either the INr or FNr. These results suggest that the cerebellum, specifically the INr, is involved in modulation of the frequency of centrally generated coughing.
Optimal Model Predictive Control of Timed Continuous Petri Nets

This paper addresses the optimal control problem of timed continuous Petri nets under infinite servers semantics. In particular, our goal is to find a control input optimizing a certain cost function that permits the evolution from an initial marking (state) to a desired steady-state. The solution we propose is based on a particular discrete-time representation of the controlled continuous Petri net system, as a certain linear constrained system. An upper bound on the sample period is given in order to preserve important information of the timed continuous net, in particular the positiveness of the markings. The reachability space of the sampled system in relation to autonomous continuous Petri nets is also studied. Based on the resulting linear constrained model, the optimal control problem is studied through model predictive control (MPC). Implicit and explicit procedures are presented together with a comparison between the two schemes. Stability of the closed-loop system is also studied.
Identity verification based on certificateless public key cryptography

Verification of claimed identity becomes a problem of growing significance nowadays, as the number of e-commerce transactions grows rapidly and new information distribution channels are created by companies and institutions of all kinds. As most of them rely or make a use of a public network, such as the Internet, security of transferred data and information in most cases requires authorization of the user. Unfortunately, most existing authentication solutions create rather weak binding with real identity of the user, while some, like ID documents, are worthless in case of electronic transactions as they are nothing more than just a piece of paper or plastic, with no real connection with the electronic system. A secure digital signature based on traditional PKI, at the same time, relies on trust migrated through commercial companies, with the help of certificates. The proposed protocol of identity verification combines national e-ID document functionality with certificateless Public Key Cryptography (CL-PKC) to provide a safe and trustful way of identity verification, joining most advantages of current systems and limiting downsides to a minimum.
Enhancing Social Communication in High-Functioning Children with Autism through a Co-Located Interface

In this paper we describe a pilot study for an intervention aimed at enhancing social skills in high functioning children with autism. We found initial evidences that the use of a social interaction and may lessen the repetitive behaviors typical of autism. These positive effects also appear to be transferred to other tasks following the intervention. We hypothesize that the effect is due to some unique characteristics of the interfaces used, in particular enforcing some tasks to be done together through the use of multiple-user GUI actions.
Turbo Equalization With Irregular Turbo Codes

We analyze a turbo equalization system that combines maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) equalization with irregular turbo codes. Our goal is to approach the information capacity limit for severe inter-symbol interference (ISI) channels. To this end, we optimize the degree profile of irregular turbo codes by maximizing the minimum distance between the mutual information transfer functions for the MAP equalizer and decoder. We show that turbo equalizers employing such optimized irregular turbo codes can approach the information capacity limit of some severe ISI channels within 0.75 dB.
Prolonged Treatments With Antiresorptive Agents and PTH Have Different Effects on Bone Strength and the Degree of Mineralization in Old Estrogen-Deficient Osteoporotic Rats

Current approved medical treatments for osteoporosis reduce fracture risk to a greater degree than predicted from change in BMD in women with postmenopausal osteoporosis. We hypothesize that bone active agents improve bone strength in osteoporotic bone by altering different material properties of the bone. Eighteen‐month‐old female Fischer rats were ovariectomized (OVX) or sham‐operated and left untreated for 60 days to induce osteopenia before they were treated with single doses of either risedronate (500 μg/kg, IV), zoledronic acid (100 μg/kg, IV), raloxifene (2 mg/kg, PO, three times per week), hPTH(1–34) (25 μg/kg, SC, three times per week), or vehicle (NS; 1 ml/kg, three times per week). Groups of animals were killed after days 60 and 180 of treatment, and either the proximal tibial metaphysis or lumbar vertebral body were studied. Bone volume and architecture were assessed by μCT and histomorphometry. Measurements of bone quality included the degree of bone mineralization (DBM), localized elastic modulus, bone turnover by histomorphometry, compression testing of the LVB, and three‐point bending testing of the femur. The trabecular bone volume, DBM, elastic modulus, and compressive bone strength were all significantly lower at day 60 post‐OVX (pretreatment, day 0 study) than at baseline. After 60 days of all of the bone active treatments, bone mass and material measurements agent were restored. However, after 180 days of treatment, the OVX + PTH group further increased BV/TV (+30% from day 60, p < 0.05 within group and between groups). In addition, after 180 days of treatment, there was more highly mineralized cortical and trabecular bone and increased cortical bone size and whole bone strength in OVX + PTH compared with other OVX + antiresorptives. Treatment of estrogen‐deficient aged rats with either antiresorptive agents or PTH rapidly improved many aspects of bone quality including microarchitecture, bone mineralization, turnover, and bone strength. However, prolonged treatment for 180 days with PTH resulted in additional gains in bone quality and bone strength, suggesting that the maximal gains in bone strength in cortical and trabecular bone sites may require a longer treatment period with PTH.