Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Satisfaction with Hearing Aids among Aged Patients with Different Degrees of Hearing Loss and Length of Daily Use

Background and Objectives The evaluation of subjective benefits and positive effects of hearing aids in daily is important for measuring the treatment outcome. The aim of this project was to investigate the degree of satisfaction of aged users with their hearing aids using the Satisfaction with Amplification in Daily Life (SADL) scale, which emphasizes non-auditory factors contributing to satisfaction as well as benefit. Subjects and Methods The Persian version of SADL scale was completed by 40 patients who received monaural hearing aid fitting at south of the Iran from December 2013 and March 2014. SADL subscales of the SADL were evaluated according to the type and degree of hearing loss, the pure tone audiogram pattern and shape and type of the hearing aid. Results The results associated with the SADL subscales revealed a greater satisfaction associated with the Positive Effect and Service and Costs subscales. Subjects with different degree of hearing loss were very satisfied in terms of positive effect subscale. Conclusions Participants reported a considerable level of satisfaction with their hearing aids. Appropriate guidance for using hearing aids and spending more time for counseling can improve the satisfaction level of this age group.
Content Provider Conflict on the Modern Web

Today many web pages include externally sourced content. Advertisements, video, blog “trackbacks,” search—these and other features of the modern web are provided by thirdparty servers. Such external content is so popular that content is often incorporated from more than one source. In this paper we argue that such multiple inclusions are a significant security risk because of the potential for conflict between included elements. In particular, the use of JavaScript to provide external content means that providers can observe and interfere with each other. Financial incentives and competitive advantage provide motivation for such conflicts, both for criminals and for legitimate enterprises. To prevent users and web content providers from becoming collateral damage, we must develop and deploy practical techniques for isolating externally provided web content. This paper outlines the security threat posed by combining content from different providers and describes requirements for a solution.
Multistep regulation of telomerase during differentiation of HL60 cells

Using three different differentiation agents (1α, 25 dihydroxyvitamin D3, all‐trans‐retinoic acid, and Am80), down‐regulation of telomerase activity was found to be a common response during the monocytic or granulocytic differentiation of human acute myeloblastic leukemia cell line 60 (HL60) cells. Rapid down‐regulation of telomerase transcription occurred during early differentiation of HL60 cells prior to G1 arrest. Akt kinase activity was suppressed after 6 h of differentiation along with inhibition of telomerase activity, and the extent of the suppression that occurred while maintaining telomerase protein expression suggested the post‐translational regulation of telomerase activity. Recombinant Akt dose‐dependently increased telomerase activity, and telomerase was inhibited at the transcriptional and post‐translational levels by LY294002, suggesting that PI‐3K/Akt is one of the key signaling proteins involved in telomerase regulation. Each of the three differentiation agents caused a significant increase of signaling proteins (including Akt) at 3 days after the initiation of differentiation. Changes of acetyl‐histone H4, which regulates transcription of the telomerase gene, were observed before the activation of Akt. This finding suggests that epigenetic control of telomerase transcription occurs before activation of Akt during the late stage of differentiation. These results indicate that telomerase activity is regulated by at least two mechanisms during granulocytic and monocytic differentiation, with one mechanism being transcriptional and the other being post‐translational.
A Framework for Measuring Similarity between Requirements Documents

Reusability of software components can save effort, time, and cost. The ability to take a decision for which software components will be reused is not an easy task. Before starting a new project or while working on a project similarity checks between the project requirements and requirements of already developed projects can be done to consider reusable components. In this paper we propose a framework to measure similarity between requirements documents targeting improving reusability.
Pac-Learning a Restricted Class of Recursive Logic Programs

A crucial problem in "inductive logic programming" is learning recursive logic programs from examples alone; current systems such as GOLEM and FOIL often achieve success only for carefully selected sets of examples. We describe a program called FORCE2 that uses the new technique of "forced simulation" to learn twoclause "closed" linear recursive ij-determinate programs; although this class of programs is fairly restricted, it does include most of the standard benchmark problems. Experimentally, FORCE2 requires fewer examples than FOIL, and is more accurate when learning from randomly chosen datasets. Formally, FORCE2 is also shown to be a pac-learning algorithm in a variant of Valiant's [1984] model, in which we assume the ability to make two types of queries: one which gives an upper bound on the depth of the proof for an example, and one which determines if an example can be proved in unit depth.
Status of SUSY Searches

Searches for supersymmetric particles at LEP are first reviewed, with some emphasis on the mass limit for the lightest neutralino. The framework is the MSSM with R-parity conservation, with brief excursions towards mSUGRA and GMSB. Next, recent results obtained in the Run II of the Tevatron are presented.
Emotion Extraction using Rule based and SVM-KNN Algorithm

Language is not only a powerful tool to communicate and convey information but is also a means to express emotion. Emotions are the important factors while interacting socially as emotion can easily connect people and improve health and other aspects of daily life. Emotions manipulate the way human thinks, percept and behave. We propose a hybrid system that consists of a rule-based engine and trained a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. For each possible emotion, a rule-based engine is used to find whether the rule is present or not and if the rule is not present for the emotion, we require the SVM classifier in order to get the proper final decision. A set of syntactic and semantic features are extracted from sentences for building the rules and training the classifier. General Terms Emotion Extraction, English
The Implementation of Statistical Process Control in the Food Industry: A Systematic Review

This study is to illustrate a systematic review application in investigating common issues emerging from Statistical Process Control (SPC) implementation in the food industry. A total of 41 journal articles were rigorously selected from four databases and reviewed. The most common themes emerge in SPC implementation in the food industry is the benefits while the remaining themes are motivation, barriers and critical success factors (CSF). This review found that the evidence of SPC implementation in the food industry is beneficial; however, a lack of both awareness and guidelines relating to SPC implementation in the food industry has resulted in a slow adoption. This paper also provided a critical review of the existing SPC implementation framework. This systematic review concluded that there is a need for further research into the SPC deployment aspect addressing how to deploy SPC in the food industry in a systematic manner. The development of practical and useful guidelines to assist food manufacturers with the implementation of SPC is suggested able to address such issue.
Nonlinear smoothing of skin lesions images driven by derivative filters

Image segmentation is an important step to suitable extraction of features of objects from images. However, the presence of noise interferes in segmentation quality; for example, by generating the detection of false edges (or false borders). To diminish the problems caused by the presence of noise in images, various smoothing techniques have been proposed to pre-process the original images. Those methods reduce the noise presented in input images, but they can also strongly affect the borders of the objects, leading to the loss of important details, such as the original roughness of the contours or the elimination of the borders of small objects. Among the existing smoothing techniques, one of the most promising is based on the use of anisotropic diffusion, which allows a selective smoothing that decreases the undesirable effects caused by noise presented in the input image and preserves the edges of the objects. However, the success of this smoothing method is strongly reliant on the number of iterations performed that depends on the input image. In this work, we propose the use of derivative filters for the definition of the appropriate number of iterations adopted by the smoothing method based on anisotropic diffusion, when it is applied for the removal of noise usually present in images of skin lesions. The experimental results demonstrate that the developed solution is promising, being able to determine the adequate number of iterations for smoothing the input images avoiding the excessive loss of details of the borders of the lesions presented in images.
Evaluation of NPP-VIIRS Nighttime Light Data for Mapping Global Fossil Fuel Combustion CO2 Emissions: A Comparison with DMSP-OLS Nighttime Light Data

Recently, the stable light products and radiance calibrated products from Defense Meteorological Satellite Program’s (DMSP) Operational Linescan System (OLS) have been useful for mapping global fossil fuel carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions at fine spatial resolution. However, few studies on this subject were conducted with the new-generation nighttime light data from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) sensor on the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) Satellite, which has a higher spatial resolution and a wider radiometric detection range than the traditional DMSP-OLS nighttime light data. Therefore, this study performed the first evaluation of the potential of NPP-VIIRS data in estimating the spatial distributions of global CO2 emissions (excluding power plant emissions). Through a disaggregating model, three global emission maps were then derived from population counts and three different types of nighttime lights data (NPP-VIIRS, the stable light data and radiance calibrated data of DMSP-OLS) for a comparative analysis. The results compared with the reference data of land cover in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou show that the emission areas of map from NPP-VIIRS data have higher spatial consistency of the artificial surfaces and exhibit a more reasonable distribution of CO2 emission than those of other two maps from DMSP-OLS data. Besides, in contrast to two maps from DMSP-OLS data, the emission map from NPP-VIIRS data is closer to the Vulcan inventory and exhibits a better agreement with the actual statistical data of CO2 emissions at the level of sub-administrative units of the United States. This study demonstrates that the NPP-VIIRS data can be a powerful tool for studying the spatial distributions of CO2 emissions, as well as the socioeconomic indicators at multiple scales.
Dark Matter: Are Mice the Solution to Missing Heritability?

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) in humans have identified hundreds of single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with complex traits, yet for most traits studied, the sum total of all these identified variants fail to explain a significant portion of the heritable variation. Reasons for this “missing heritability” are thought to include the existence of rare causative variants not captured by current genotyping arrays, structural variants that go undetected by existing technology, insufficient power to identify multi-gene interactions, small sample sizes, and the influence of environmental and epigenetic effects. As genotyping technologies have evolved it has become inexpensive and relatively straightforward to perform GWAS in mice. Mice offer a powerful tool for elucidating the genetic architecture of behavioral and physiological traits, and are complementary to human studies. Unlike F2 crosses of inbred strains, advanced intercross lines, heterogeneous stocks, outbred, and wild-caught mice have more rapid breakdown of linkage disequilibrium which allow for increasingly high resolution mapping. Because some of these populations are created using a small number of founder chromosomes they are not expected to harbor rare alleles. We discuss the differences between these mouse populations and examine their potential to overcome some of the pitfalls that have plagued human GWAS studies.
Enhanced Mutual Authentication System in Mobile Cloud Environments

Security is one of the significant worries of all associations which utilizes online methods for interchanges particularly banks. Of this, customer side is most defenseless against hacking, as the framework can't be totally shut when use over web by a typical customer is to be permitted. Most frameworks utilize a static password– based verification strategy which is anything but difficult to hack. There are different other validation strategies existing like cards, biometric recognizable proof, and so on. These strategies give better security, however are not material to online customer correspondence as these techniques require extraordinary gadgets for their usage. One conceivable technique for applying an upgraded factor of verification for online access to the framework is a dynamic secret word. In this venture we can plan the validation framework in light of key age, confirmation age and OTP based framework. The keys are created progressively utilizing Mobile IMEI number and SIM card number. The OTP age utilizes the components that are novel to the client and is introduced on a PDA in Android stage and furthermore cloud server claimed by PHP server. An OTP is legitimate for a minutes time, after which, is pointless. The framework in this way gives better customer level security – a straightforward minimal effort strategy which shields framework from hacking strategies, for example, speculating assault, answer assault, stolen and verifier assault and adjustment assault.
Mémoire de travail et troubles phonologiques chez le dyslexique

Resume Cet article de synthese revient sur les liens entre les troubles phonologiques et leurs liens eventuels avec le fonctionnement de la memoire de travail (MDT) et de la memoire a court terme (MCT) dans la dyslexie. La theorie phonologique soutient l’idee selon laquelle la dyslexie est sous-tendue par un dysfonctionnement au niveau des representations phonologiques. Cependant, les troubles des dyslexiques semblent etre plus marques dans les tâches phonologiques qui mobilisent d’autres capacites cognitives telles que la MDT et la MCT. Alors que les premieres modelisations de la MCT evoquaient surtout des difficultes au niveau de la boucle phonologique, d’autres travaux s’appuyant sur des modeles theoriques plus recents evoquent des deficits de MDT et de MCT de l’ordre seriel. Ces resultats invitent a s’interroger, tant au niveau theorique que dans une perspective d’application clinique, sur les liens entre les deficits phonologiques, la MDT et la MCT dans la dyslexie.
Informal Insurance Arrangements with Limited Commitment: Theory and Evidence from Village Economies

Recent work on consumption allocations in village economies finds that idiosyncratic variation in consumption is systematically related to idiosyncratic variation in income, thus rejecting the hypothesis of full risk-pooling. We attempt to explain these observations by adding limited commitment as an impediment to risk-pooling. We provide a general dynamic model and completely characterise efficient informal insurance arrangements constrained by limited commitment, and test the model using data from from three Indian villages. We find that the model can fully explain the dynamic response of consumption to income, but that it fails to explain the distribution of consumption across households.
TaPS Widgets: tangible control over private spaces on interactive tabletops

Private areas are important in multi-user tabletop systems, but hard to implement with current technology. Existing approaches usually involve wearable devices such as shutter glasses or head-mounted displays that are cumbersome to wear. We present TaPS, lightweight transparent widgets that only pass light coming from a particular direction to shield the content beneath them from other users, creating Tangible Private Spaces. TaPS widgets use low-cost hardware to provide tangible privacy controls to interactive tabletops. Informal studies indicate that TaPS widgets enable users to successfully move documents between public and private tabletop spaces without compromising privacy.
eIF4E Is an Important Determinant of Adhesion and Pseudohyphal Growth of the Yeast S. cerevisiae

eIF4E, the cytoplasmatic cap-binding protein, is required for efficient cap-dependent translation. We have studied the influence of mutations that alter the activity and/or expression level of eIF4E on haploid and diploid cells in the yeast S. cerevisiae. Temperature-sensitive eIF4E mutants with reduced levels of expression and reduced cap-binding affinity clearly show a loss in haploid adhesion and diploid pseudohyphenation upon starvation for nitrogen. Some of these mutations affect the interaction of the cap-structure of mRNAs with the cap-binding groove of eIF4E. The observed reduction in adhesive and pseudohyphenating properties is less evident for an eIF4E mutant that shows reduced interaction with p20 (an eIF4E-binding protein) or for a p20-knockout mutant. Loss of adhesive and pseudohyphenating properties was not only observed for eIF4E mutants but also for knockout mutants of components of eIF4F such as eIF4B and eIF4G1. We conclude from these experiments that mutations that affect components of the eIF4F-complex loose properties such as adhesion and pseudohyphal differentiation, most likely due to less effective translation of required mRNAs for such processes.
Disappearance of Resonance Tongues

We investigate a phenomenon observed in systems of the form dx/dt = a1(t)x +a2(t)y, dy/dt = a3(t)x +a4(t)y, where ai(t )= Pi + eQicos2t ,w herePi,Qi and e are given constants, and where it is assumed that when e=0 this system exhibits a pair of linearly independent solutions of period 2π . S ince the drivercos2t has period π, we have the ingredients for a 2:1 subharmonic resonance which typically results in a tongue of instability involving unbounded solutions when e >0. We present conditions on the coefficients Pi,Qi such that the expected instability does not occur, i.e., the tongue of instability has disappeared.
On the In uence of Threshold Variability in a Model ofthe Visual

Orientation{selective neu-rons in monkeys and cats show contrast saturation and contrast{ invariant orientation tuning (Albrecht and Hamilton, 1982). Recently proposed models for orientation selectiv-ity predict contrast invariant orientation tuning but no contrast saturation at high strength of recurrent intracor-tical coupling, whereas at lower coupling strengths the contrast response saturates but the tuning widths are contrast dependent (Hansel and Som-polinsky, 1997; Bartsch, Stetter and Obermayer, 1997). In the present work we address the question, if and under which conditions the incorporation of a stochastic distribution of activation thresholds of cortical neurons leads to the saturation of the contrast response curve as a network eeect. We nd that contrast saturation occurs naturally if two diierent classes of inhibitory inter-neurons are combined. Low threshold inhibition keeps the gain of the cortical ampliication nite, whereas high threshold inhibition causes contrast saturation.
Head and Feature Tracking for Model-based Video Coding

R. Lopez , A. Colmenarez , T. S. Huang Beckman Institute University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, IL 61801 Email: rlopez@ifp.uiuc. edu , antonio@ifp.uiuc. edu , huang@ifp.uiuc. edu ABSTRACT In the following paper we introduce an algorithm for automatic head tracking using a model-based approach. The input to the system is a 2D video sequence of a head-and-shoulders scene and the output is the trajectories of salient facial features, as well as an estimate of the 3D motion of the head. Issues such as localization accuracy and error accumulation are overcome by using an underlying 3D model to compute optimal templates for each video frame for use in the feature tracking module.
Moving Up the Energy Ladder: The Effect of an Increase in Economic Well-Being on the Fuel Consumption Choices of the Poor in India

Rising household wealth may potentially impact both total fuel consumption and fuel-type composition, resulting in significant health and environmental implications. Using data from a field experiment in India, we explore the effects of a transfer program that provided poor, rural households with greater levels of assets and cash. Total fuel consumption rose as a result of the transfers. Households shifted from using electricity rather than kerosene as their primary form of light, but total kerosene consumption also rose. In contrast, we did not observe a shift to cleaner cooking fuels.
The year’s work in stylistics 2017

The year 2017 was one of deictic exploration for stylistics, whereby through exploring the spatio-temporal contours of our discipline we reach a better understanding of where we are now. My point is demonstrated in this section, where I cover retrospectives and reprints of past work in stylistics (Burke, 2017; Fowler, 1966/2017), as well as a new textbook for the instruction of future stylisticians (Gibbons and Whiteley, 2017) and a volume which sketches out the current ‘landscape’ of stylistics (Douthwaite et al., 2017). In the subsequent sections, I consider this landscape under arbitrary headings for the purposes of toponymy which, as Brian Friel’s play Translations reminds us, can be political, but is nonetheless necessary for finding one’s way around a field. As always, articles published in this journal are not included in the list of references to avoid self-citation predicaments, but readers are signposted to the relevant issue of Language and Literature where they are encouraged to read more. I knew I had my work cut out for me this year when the weighty four-volume Stylistics (Burke, 2017) landed on my desk. A major reference work reprinting key publications spanning almost sixty years in four hardback volumes, it is part of Routledge’s ‘Critical Concepts in Linguistics’ series. As such, it joins the ranks of other sub-disciplines of linguistics featured in the series, including Pragmatics (Kasher, 1998), Critical Discourse Analysis (Toolan, 2002), and Sociolinguistics (Coopland and Jaworski, 2009). Last year I referred to the publication of several handbooks of stylistics in recent years (Burke, 2014; Sotirova, 2015; Stockwell and Whiteley, 2014) as an indication of disciplinary