Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Factors associated with deliberate self-harm among Irish adolescents

Background Deliberate self-harm (DSH) is a major public health problem, with young people most at risk. Lifetime prevalence of DSH in Irish adolescents is between 8% and 12%, and it is three times more prevalent among girls than boys. The aim of the study was to identify the psychological, life-style and life event factors associated with self-harm in Irish adolescents. Method A cross-sectional study was conducted, with 3881 adolescents in 39 schools completing an anonymous questionnaire as part of the Child and Adolescent Self-harm in Europe (CASE) study. There was an equal gender balance and 53.1% of students were 16 years old. Information was obtained on history of self-harm life events, and demographic, psychological and life-style factors. Results Based on multivariate analyses, important factors associated with DSH among both genders were drug use and knowing a friend who had engaged in self-harm. Among girls, poor self-esteem, forced sexual activity, self-harm of a family member, fights with parents and problems with friendships also remained in the final model. For boys, experiencing bullying, problems with schoolwork, impulsivity and anxiety remained. Conclusions Distinct profiles of boys and girls who engage in self-harm were identified. Associations between DSH and some life-style and life event factors suggest that mental health factors are not the sole indicators of risk of self-harm. The importance of school-related risk factors underlines the need to develop gender-specific initiatives in schools to reduce the prevalence of self-harm.
Towards A Design Simulator For Offshore Ship Bridges

The development of new design concepts for ship bridges on modern offshore vessels is a considerable challenge for engineering and design professions. Such ships perform advanced missions in extreme environmental conditions that are very different to those in which most design processes take place. Although site visits can help narrow this gap, such opportunities are limited by both funding and access constraints. We suggest the use of design simulators as tools for conceptual design, mediating collaboration between various disciplines and users. This paper reports on work in progress, in which we analyse and explore possibilities and challenges regarding the use of a simulator for the design of ship bridges, comparing the nature of conceptual design with the current use and capabilities of existing maritime simulators. Through this analysis, we suggest there is potential for combining training simulators with tools and techniques from conceptual design processes in ship bridge design. We also discuss some challenges regarding the effective use of simulators as a design tool.
An OFDMA based concurrent multiuser MAC for upcoming IEEE 802.11ax

Recently, IEEE drew up a new task group named TGax to draft out the standard IEEE 802.11ax for next generation WLANs. However, the average throughput is very low due to the current medium access control (MAC) protocol. A promising solution for this problem is to draw Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) into IEEE 802.11ax to enable multiuser access. The key challenges of adopting OFDMA are synchronization and overhead reduction. In this paper, we propose an OFDMA based Multiple Access for IEEE 802.11ax (OMAX) protocol to solve both two challenges above. The whole channel physical channel sensing and fast backoff are adopted to ensure synchronization, while enhanced RTS/CTS mechanism and new frame structure are designed to reduce overhead. Moreover, the mathematic model of OMAX is formulated, and the performance of OMAX is analyzed. The analysis and simulation result indicate that the proposed OMAX protocol increases the throughput to 160%.
Mapping of circular or elliptical vegetation community patches: A comparative use of SPOT-5, ALOS And ZY-3 imagery

Vegetation patches are one of the important components of arid and semi-arid ecosystems. Monitoring and mapping vegetation patches are essential for studying its succession mechanism. This study is aimed at comparing the differences between SPOT-5, ALOS and ZY-3 imagery and then showing the potential of them in recognizing vegetation patches. In this study, we deal with the three kinds of images with the method of object-oriented classification so as to extract circular or elliptical vegetation community patches of the two study areas. The results show that SPOT-5 imagery is of the highest segmentation accuracy, followed by ZY-3, and then ALOS. Then detailed analysis is carried out from four perspectives, which are statistical results of bands, NDVI distribution, image information entropy and sharpness and the conclusion is that the segmentation accuracy of each image is related to its NDVI distribution and articulation. Besides, ZY-3 imagery has the most balanced wave energy, the highest grey level and the richest information of the three. With good display effect and low price, ZY-3 imagery will be of great application potential in the field of remote sensing of vegetation.
Fusion of multiple parameterisations for DNN-based sinusoidal speech synthesis with multi-task learning

It has recently been shown that deep neural networks (DNN) can improve the quality of statistical parametric speech synthesis (SPSS) when using a source-filter vocoder. Our own previous work has furthermore shown that a dynamic sinusoidal model (DSM) is also highly suited to DNN-based SPSS, whereby sinusoids may either be used themselves as a “direct parameterisation” (DIR), or they may be encoded using an “intermediate spectral parameterisation” (INT). The approach in that work was effectively to replace a decision tree with a neural network. However, waveform parameterisation and synthesis steps that have been developed to suit HMMs may not fully exploit DNN capabilities. Here, in contrast, we investigate ways to combine INT and DIR at the levels of both DNN modelling and waveform generation. For DNN training, we propose to use multi-task learning to model cepstra (from INT) and log amplitudes (from DIR) as primary and secondary tasks. Our results show combining these improves modelling accuracy for both tasks. Next, during synthesis, instead of discarding parameters from the second task, a fusion method using harmonic amplitudes derived from both tasks is applied. Preference tests show the proposed method gives improved performance, and that this applies to synthesising both with and without global variance parameters.
Knowledge Economies: Clusters, Learning and Cooperative Advantage

This book traces the theoretical explanation for clusters back to the work of classical economists and their more modern disciples, who saw economic development as a process involving serious imbalances in the exploitation of resources. Initially, natural resource endowments explained the formation of nineteenth and early twentieth-century industrial districts. Today, geographical concentrations of scientific and creative knowledge are the key resource. But these require a support system, ranging from major injections of basic research funding, to varieties of financial investment and management, tothe provision of specialist incubators, for economic value to be realised. These are also specialised forms of knowledge that contribute to a serious imbalance in the distribution of economic opportunity.
Perfect equalization for DMT systems without guard interval

We propose a new, low-complexity frequency-domain equalizer for discrete multitone (DMT) systems, which, in the absence of a guard interval, utilizes existing redundancy in the frequency-domain to completely eliminate intersymbol and interchannel interference. A perfect reconstruction condition is derived for the noise-free case leading to a sparse equalizer matrix structure. It is furthermore shown that under realistic scenarios minimum mean square error adaptation of the equalizer coefficients allows for nearly perfect reconstruction already for a much smaller amount of redundancy than indicated by the perfect reconstruction condition. The new equalization scheme has at least the same potential compared with traditional DMT while offering new degrees of freedom for designing short-latency DMT systems.
End-to-end reliability for best-effort content-based publish/subscribe networks

When it comes to reliability in distributed publish/subscribe systems, there are two main categories of systems: reliable systems and best-effort systems. The former category gives the highest priority to guaranteed and ordered delivery while the latter aims for high throughput and low end-to-end delay. In this paper, we propose a method to improve the delivery guarantees of the basic unreliable service offered by best-effort publish/subscribe systems. The method we propose does not require any modification to the protocol design or broker software, and thus operates using the publish/subscribe API they provide. This method is similar to previous work on reliable multicast, and in particular it is based on a technique that enables subscribers to cooperatively recover lost messages. Through experimental evaluation we demonstrate the effectiveness and performance of our recovery scheme in presence of frequent message losses and show that it enables subscribers to recover more than 70% of lost messages with minimum negative effects on the overall network performance.
Asymmetric taxation in a competition between nonprofit and for-profit firms

This paper considers a Cournot competi- tion between a nonproflt flrm and a for-proflt flrm in a homogeneous goods market, with uncertain demand. Given an asymmetric tax schedule, we compute ex- plicitly the Bayesian-Nash equilibrium. Furthermore, we analize the efiects of the tax rate and the degree of altruistic preference on market equilibrium outcomes.
Experiential education against environmental denial in environmental ethics education: a case study

Recent research shows that ‘environmental denial’ (the denial of anthropogenic impact on the natural world) plays an important role in environmental education. The difÞ culty in changing our detrimental habits stems from the fact that identities in our societies are bound up with consumerist practices. Because we cannot simply give up practices that shape our identity, environmental education has to Þ nd ways of substituting unhealthy habits with environmentally acceptable ones. One method of achieving this is through experiential education based on experiences with the natural world and their importance for identity formation. The paper presents a case study involving experiential education in environmental ethics, implemented at the university level. Findings show that the implementation of experiential education technique (Þ eld trip) yielded positive results in connection with students’ overcoming of environmental denial and consequential change of their environmental outlook.
The Macroeconomic Effects of War Finance in the United States

During World War II, government expenditures were financed primarily by issuing debt. During the Korean War, expenditures were financed almost exclusively by higher taxes, reflecting President Truman's preference for balanced budgets. This paper evaluates quantitatively the economic effects of the different policies used to finance these two wars. Counterfactual experiments are used to explore the implications of financing World War II like the Korean War, and financing the Korean War like World War II. The author finds that using a Korean War policy during World War II would have resulted in much lower output and welfare relative to the actual policy. Copyright 1997 by American Economic Association.
Women, microfinance, and savings: Lessons and proposals

Microfinance--both credit and savings--has potential to improve the well-being of poor women in developing countries. This paper explores practical ways to achieve that potential. Based on lessons from informal savings mechanisms that women already use, the paper proposes two savings services designed to address the development issues that confront women. The proposals call for safe-deposit boxes and for matched-savings accounts for healthcare or education.
Applying feedback to stock trading: Exploring a new field of research

Nowadays, feedback control is everywhere and, affects everything. Recently, a novel idea of applying, feedback control to stock trading is proposed. Some, interesting results are published in recent IEEE/IFAC, control conferences. Different from current statistical or, artificial neural network based approaches, this opens a new, research field in analytical strategies for stock trading. In, this paper we follow the scheme of “Simultaneous Long-, Short feedback control” and carry out a new study. In our, study, instead of one feedback gain for both long and short, trading, different trading gains are applied. Based on recent, stock prices over one year (from 2014/3/27 to 2015/3/26), we show our selected simulation results for two stocks. One, is the Apple Incorporated stock. The trend of its price over, the year is increasing. The other is the NASDAQ-100 index, and the trend of its price is decreasing. A number of new, research topics are also proposed in this paper.
DOAS 2006 PROJECT: REINFORCEMENT LEARNING OF TRAFFIC LIGHT CONTROLLERS ADAPTING TO ACCIDENTS

A semiconductor device is provided in which conjunction leakage current from a conductive layer to a semiconductor substrate is restrained and the electric field in the vicinity of a region immediately below a gate electrode is relieved. The device includes n+ and n++ impurity diffusion layers electrically connected with a columnar conductive layer at a contact portion. The distance L4 from contact portion to n+ impurity diffusion layer, the distance L5 from n++ impurity diffusion layer to a source/drain region, and the distance L6 from n+ impurity diffusion layer to the region immediately below the side surface of gate electrode are approximately the same, and columnar conductive layer and gate electrode are formed close to each other to such a degree that their distance L7 is almost the same as the distance L2 from the surface of semiconductor substrate to the top surface of gate electrode.
Determinantes da Acurácia das Previsões dos Analistas do Mercado de Capitais

O objetivo deste artigo e investigar os determinantes da acuracia das previsoes dos analistas de empresas brasileiras. Com base em previsoes extraidas do sistema I/B/E/S, foi desenvolvida uma pesquisa empirica no periodo entre 1997 a 2002. Os resultados demonstraram que a acuracia dos analistas de empresas brasileiras varia em funcao de sua experiencia. Os analistas que trabalham em corretoras maiores sao mais acurados e a acuracia passada do analista explica em parte a acuracia corrente. As evidencias apresentadas sao relevantes, especialmente para aqueles que pretendam incorporar as previsoes elaboradas pelos analistas de mercado em seus modelos de avaliacao de acoes.
An Algorithm Based on Empirical Methods, for Text-to-Tuneful-Speech Synthesis of Sanskrit Verse

Summary The rendering of Sanskrit poetry from text to speech is a problem that has not been solved before. One reason may be the complications in the language itself. We present unique algorithms based on extensive empirical analysis, to synthesize speech from a given text input of Sanskrit verses. Using a pre- recorded audio units database which is itself tremendously reduced in size compared to the colossal size that would otherwise be required, the algorithms work on producing the best possible, tunefully rendered chanting of the given verse. His would enable the visually impaired and those with reading disabilities to easily access the contents of Sanskrit verses otherwise available only in writing.
Selectional preference acquisition through matrix factorization with missing data

Words in an utterance are not placed in their respective slots randomly from a uniform distribution. In English, for example, a verb will rarely, if ever, follow a determiner. This is a syntactic restriction. From another perspective, one would not expect to find a word such as defenestration as the object of eat. This is what is known as the selectional preference of a word for another word in terms of its semantic domain. When this selectional preference is restricted to the arguments that a word may take on, it is called its subcategorization frame [16]. It is closely related to the problem of semantic disambiguation [24, 19, 20] whose central focus is the polysemy of words, but the definition of the problem admits more syntactic cues in that the disambiguation occurs strictly through arguments and their heads. In this paper, we lay out a novel, minimally supervised approach to inducing verb/object subcategorization frames using alternating minimization [27, 10, 4], a matrix factorization method commonly used when data is assumed to be missing. While missing data is generally not assumed in tasks dealing with semantic disambiguation or selectional preference acquisition, the pseudo-disambiguation method used to evaluate the task [18, 22, 5] is based on the assumption that there is. The pseudo-disambiguation task is a convenient but less rigorous alternative to human judgment for un-/minimally supervised approaches to inducing semantics. It is also the only such automated evaluation method for minimally supervised tasks involving semantics. While the approach at its core is based on minimizing a loss function:
Wearable sensor-based system to promote physical activity among elderly people

The European agenda for 2020 sets out the challenge of improving the quality of life of European citizens and thereby increasing life-expectancy by two years. The objective of the study and proposed system presented in this paper is to promote physical activity among older people in a way that ensures the elderly person's welfare and health by designing healthy exercise routines, supported by a biometric parameters monitoring system. The system is based on the acquisition of data by wearable sensors. To acquire the data, a mobile application has been developed to communicate with sensors, and analyze and store the data the sensors collect. The system also has a web telemonitoring platform and has been designed to send real-time tracking data to each person who is performing the activity recorded in the system. If the system detects a movement out of a pre-programmed range, the user is warned to stop / change his/her activity and / or see a doctor if convenient. To verify the correct operation of the system, various trials have been designed and performed which test the system during physical activity at different times of day. With these tests, it was possible to compare the health status of individuals based on age and the physical activity they perform. The users' satisfaction during the test has also been evaluated.
Brazil’s Achievements and Challenges

Brazil has come a long way over the last 15 years or so. Different administrations have maintained and built on a macroeconomic framework combining inflation targeting, a flexible exchange rate and rules-based fiscal management. This policy setting has served the country well (see Table 1). It has paved the way for a gradual stabilisation of government indebtedness, which has allowed for a countercyclical response to the slowdown in activity brought about by the global crisis of 2008–09 in an environment of reasonably low and stable inflation. Structural reforms during the 1990s, not least to liberalise the country’s trade and investment regimes and to make regulations in product markets and network industries more pro-competition, have yielded important productivity gains and alleviated several structural impediments to faster growth. Good policies have been essential, but external conditions have also been supportive. Brazil benefited from a stable global economy and rising commodity prices during most of the 2000s. Equally importantly, the benefits of strong growth are being shared more equally across social groups, leading to an improvement in Brazil’s notoriously skewed income distribution. Brazil’s growth prospects also appear to be improving. A resumption in investment and robust employment growth have raised the economy’s potential output growth. But the country’s ability to sustain stronger growth over the longer term will depend on further structural reform to remove existing impediments to investment, job creation and productivity gains. The agenda for further reform is vast: it will require consolidating macroeconomic stability to allow the country to reap the benefits of external support in good times and to withstand adverse shock in bad times. It will also call on the new administration that took office on 1 January to address the short-term challenges associated with an overheated economy and to make headways in structural reform areas where progress has so far been difficult.
Human Body Detection and Tracking in Video Sequences Using Chamfer Matching

We describe a chamfer based matching algorithm which efficiently search the best match from high number of human templates using distance transformation. The novel part of the algorithm is that we introduce a template space which offers more information to create an optimal templates hierarchy and it can be used directly to track people more efficient as the coarse-to-fine technique. This matching method is also eligible to give the pose of the detected people. In this paper we also present an efficient pseudo parallel method to compute the distance transformation.
Levodopa in the treatment of Parkinson's disease: A consensus meeting viewpoint

Levodopa (in combination with a peripheral dopadecarboxylase inhibitor) substantially improves the quality of life of patients. However, physicians are not always comfortable prescribing it, and its administration is often delayed to retard the development of motor complications or is restricted to patients with relatively advanced disease, because there is a fear that the decreased response of parkinsonian symptoms may result from a self-limiting effect of the drug. Moreover, long-term treatment with levodopa is claimed by some to induce the degeneration of dopaminergic neurons, thereby accelerating disease progression. Whether long-term administration of levodopa in patients may result in the irreversible appearance of side effects or accelerate the neurodegenerative process is a crucial question, and it is therefore legitimate to ask whether one should delay the introduction or limit its use in patients. To address these questions, a meeting of experts was held in Paris (January 8–9, 1998) to see whether general agreement could be reached concerning the interpretation of studies of levodopa toxicity in tissue culture, in animal models of parkinsonism, and in patients. Most of the experts agreed that the administration of levodopa was not dangerous for patients. Nevertheless, there are still conflicting results and unanswered questions. This is why this consensus on levodopa treatment of patients with Parkinson’s disease (see below) is followed by additional comments made by some of the experts.
Success and Failure of Software Development : Practitioners ’ Perspective

management consists of two components, namely the technical and non-technical components of software development. Non-technical related components of software development process tend to be under managed. Further research on success and failure of software projects developed in-house are sparse. Therefore a study was conducted in India among the industries that are into in-house software development, to investigate the influence of the non-technical components of the software development process, on success and failure of software development from the practitioners' perspective. The study reveals that practitioners' consider the level of customer/user involvement, software process management, and estimation & schedule contribute most to project success and failure.