Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multiple Sub-Spaces particle filtering for multi-target tracking

A new multiple target tracking method based on Bayesian filtering and Sequential Monte Carlo approximating method is proposed in this paper. The key principle of the proposed method is to decompose the multiple target tracking problem into multiple single target tracking problems by allocating Sub-Spaces which are sub-sets of single-target state space to targets. The computational cost of the proposed method is remarkably reduced by avoiding jointly estimating posterior probability distribution used in many conventional multi-target tracking methods. And compared with Finite Set Statistics based methods, the proposed method is more general, moreover, it could supply high level applications with trajectory of moving targets which is not available in Finite Set Statistics based method. The proposed method is tested by tracking pedestrian in video sequence captured from real-world and the tracking result shows that all targets are well tracked in real-time while the number of targets is unknown and varies with time.
Postural control in the congenital and childhood forms of myotonic dystrophy type 1

Abstract Aims: To increase knowledge regarding postural control in congenital (CDM1) and childhood (ChDM1) forms of myotonic dystrophy type 1 and to analyze whether variations can be explained by age, joint motion, muscle strength and molecular findings. Methodology: In a cross-sectional study, postural control was measured with the Bruininks-Oseretsky test, sub-test balance, range of motion (ROM) in ankle dorsiflexion and muscle strength in ankle dorsiflexors. Simple linear regression analysis was used to investigate the association between postural control, molecular findings, muscle strength, age and ROM. Major findings: Forty-four individuals participated in the study. All individuals with CDM1 and 80% with ChDM1 had reduced postural control. Simple linear regression analysis shows a negative association between z-BOT2 and CTG repeat expansion (R2 = .342, p = .000), a negative association with age (R2 = .148, p = .006), a positive association with muscle strength in ankle dorsiflexors (R2 = .205, p = .001) and a positive association with ROM in ankle dorsiflexion (R2 = .078, p = .037). Principal conclusion: Reduced postural control is common in CDM1 and ChDM1. Size of CTG repeat expansion, muscle strength in ankle dorsiflexors, age and ROM in ankle dorsiflexion all contribute to variations in postural control. These findings provide a better understanding of the disease and contribute to improved health care for the patient group.
The mixing layer at high Reynolds number: large-structure dynamics and entrainment

A turbulent mixing layer in a water channel was observed at Reynolds numbers up to 3 × 106. Flow visualization with dyes revealed (once more) large coherent structures and showed their role in the entrainment process; observation of the reaction of a base and an acid indicator injected on the two sides of the layer, respectively, gave some indication of where molecular mixing occurs. Autocorrelations of streamwise velocity fluctuations, using a laser-Doppler velocimeter (LDV) revealed a fundamental periodicity associated with the large structures. The surprisingly long correlation times suggest time scales much longer than had been supposed; it is argued that the mixing-layer dynamics at any point are coupled to the large structure further downstream, and some possible consequences regarding the effects of initial conditions and of the influence of apparatus geometry are discussed.
Human Cystic Echinococcosis in Lorestan province, Southwest Iran: A retrospective epidemiological study of surgical cases during a 10 years period (2005-2014)

The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of hydatidosis in Lorestan province during a 10 year period (2005-2014). We surveyed medical records of infected patients with hydatid cyst who had been operated in referral hospitals of Lorestan province, Iran. Several parameters were analyzed including age, gender, place of residency, hospitalization time, and the location of cysts. Cystic Echinococcosis (CE) affected more males 114 (52.52%) than females 84 (47.47%). The age of the patients ranged from 3 to 76 years, and the age group 20– 30 years (27%) was the most affected. Cysts were localized in liver and lung in 62.63% and 37.37% of cases respectively and unusual cyst locations in kidneys, brain, pelvic area, spleen and spine was not observed. The average hospitalization time was 7 days. The distribution of residence in patients showed 124 (62.63%) of them to have urban origin and 74 (37.37%) were rural residents. Significant relationships were found between gender and cyst location, and place of residency and cyst location (p<0.05). Single organ involvement was found in 80% of the patients, and was more common in males (51.25%) than in females (48.75%). Farmers had the highest rate of infection (19.19%) followed by students with 18.69%. Because of the growing trend of hydatid cyst operation in Lorestan province, which may be due to many different reasons further studies are needed for evaluation of economic burden and risk factors for CE in this region.
A New Low Voltage Low Power Fully Differential Current Buffer and Its Application as a Voltage Amplifier

In this paper a novel low voltage low power fully differential current buffer with high CMRR is introduced. The proposed current buffer is designed and simulated with HSPICE in TSMC 0. 18µm CMOS process and supply voltage of ±0.75V. The simulation results show 39. 5Ω and 5. 64KΩ differential mode and common mode input resistances respectively. The differential mode input impedance is 142.7 times smaller than the common mode one which is a unique feature. This result is quite significant when it is considered that in the conventional current buffers differential mode input resistance is equal to common mode one. The proposed current buffer exhibits a CMRR of 72.2dB and consumes only 83. 9µW. PSRR+ and PSRR- are 160dB and 120dB respectively which make the proposed current buffer very suitable for mixed mode designs. Application of the proposed current buffer as a voltage amplifier is also presented which benefits from the outstanding property of independency of gain from related -3dB bandwidth.
Testing tidal-torque theory: I. spin amplitude and direction

We evaluate the success of linear tidal-torque theory (TTT) in predicting galactic-halo spin using a cosmological N-body simulation with thousands of well-resolved haloes. The protohaloes are identified by tracing today's haloes back to the initial conditions. The TTT predictions for the protohaloes match, on average, the spin amplitudes of the virialized haloes of today, if linear growth is assumed until ∼t0/3, or 55–70 per cent of the halo effective turn-around time. This makes it a useful qualitative tool for understanding certain average properties of galaxies, such as total spin and angular momentum distribution within haloes, but with a random scatter of the order of the signal itself. Non-linear changes in spin direction cause a mean error of ∼50° in the TTT prediction at t0, such that the linear spatial correlations of spins on scales ≥1 h−1 Mpc are significantly weakened by non-linear effects. This questions the usefulness of TTT for predicting intrinsic alignments in the context of gravitational lensing. We find that the standard approximations made in TTT, including a second-order expansion of the Zel'dovich potential and a smoothing of the tidal field, provide close-to-optimal results.
Trademark Detection Using SIFT Features Matching

A large amount of investment every year made on sports. The major portion of which placement on billboards position in an around the field. Sponsors need to verify their brand has the level of visibility they accept to justify advertising budget. The current method of manual annotation is extremely tedious. In this work automatic annotation of trademark and logo is proposed. Detection is performed by matching set of feature descriptor for each trademark against the set of feature detected in each frame of video. The Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) algorithm proposed by Lowe [1] is an approach for extracting distinctive invariant features from image an improvement of the original SIFT algorithm providing more reliable feature matching for the purpose of trademark detection. For this image matching algorithm is designed. Further the system provides varies kind of statistics. Trademark duration visibility is calculated. Experimental results are provided along with analysis. Result shows that our proposed technique is efficient and effectively detects trademarks.
The prayer companion: openness and specificity, materiality and spirituality

In this paper we describe the Prayer Companion, a device we developed as a resource for the spiritual activity of a group of cloistered nuns. The device displays a stream of information sourced from RSS news feeds and social networking sites to suggest possible topics for prayers. The nuns have engaged with the device enthusiastically over the first ten months of an ongoing deployment, and, notwithstanding some initial irritation with the balance of content, report that it plays a significant and continuing role in their prayer life. We discuss how we balanced specificity in the design with a degree of openness for interpretation to create a resource that the nuns could both understand and appropriate, describe the importance of materiality to the device's successful adoption, consider its implications as a design for older people, and reflect on the example it provides of how computation may serve spirituality.
Time Dependent Relative Risk Aversion

Risk management and the thorough understanding of the relations between financial markets and the standard theory of macroeconomics have always been among the topics most addressed by researchers, both financial mathematicians and economists. This work aims at explaining investors’ behavior from a macroeconomic aspect (modeled by the investors’ pricing kernel and their relative risk aversion) using stocks and options data. Daily estimates of investors’ pricing kernel and relative risk aversion are obtained and used to construct and analyze a three-year long time-series. The first four moments of these time-series as well as their values at the money are the starting point of a principal component analysis. The relation between changes in a major index level and implied volatility at the money and between the principal components of the changes in relative risk aversion is found to be linear. The relation of the same explanatory variables to the principal components of the changes in pricing kernels is found to be log-linear, although this relation is not significant for all of the examined maturities.
Quantifying uncertainty in pest risk maps and assessments : adopting a risk-averse decision maker’s perspective

Pest risk maps are important decision support tools when devising strategies to minimize introductions of invasive organisms and mitigate their impacts. When possible management responses to an invader include costly or socially sensitive activities, decision-makers tend to follow a more certain (i.e., risk-averse) course of action. We presented a new mapping technique that assesses pest invasion risk from the perspective of a risk-averse decision maker. We demonstrated the method by evaluating the likelihood that an invasive forest pest will be transported to one of the U.S. states or Canadian provinces in infested firewood by visitors to U.S. federal campgrounds. We tested the impact of the risk aversion assumption using distributions of plausible pest arrival scenarios generated with a geographically explicit model developed from data documenting camper travel across the study area. Next, we prioritized regions of high and low pest arrival risk via application of two stochastic ordering techniques that employed, respectively, first- and second-degree stochastic dominance rules, the latter of which incorporated the notion of risk aversion. We then identified regions in the study area where the pest risk value changed considerably after incorporating risk aversion. While both methods identified similar areas of highest and lowest risk, they differed in how they demarcated moderate-risk areas. In general, the second-order stochastic dominance method assigned lower risk rankings to moderate-risk areas. Overall, this new method offers a better strategy to deal with the uncertainty typically associated with risk assessments and provides a tractable way to incorporate decisionmaking preferences into final risk estimates, and thus helps to better align these estimates with particular decision-making scenarios about a pest organism of concern. Incorporation of risk aversion also helps prioritize the set of locations to target for inspections and outreach activities, which can be costly. Our results are especially important and useful given the huge number of camping trips that occur each year in the United States and Canada.
Tube Thoracostomy: Complications and Its Management

Background. Tube thoracostomy is widely used throughout the medical, surgical, and critical care specialities. It is generally used to drain pleural collections either as elective or emergency. Complications resulting from tube thoracostomy can occasionally be life threatening. Aim. To present an update on the complications and management of complications of tube thoracostomy. Methods. A review of the publications obtained from Medline search, medical libraries, and Google on tube thoracostomy and its complications was done. Results. Tube thoracostomy is a common surgical procedure which can be performed by either the blunt dissection technique or the trocar technique. Complication rates are increased by the trocar technique. These complications have been broadly classified as either technical or infective. Technical causes include tube malposition, blocked drain, chest drain dislodgement, reexpansion pulmonary edema, subcutaneous emphysema, nerve injuries, cardiac and vascular injuries, oesophageal injuries, residual/postextubation pneumothorax, fistulae, tumor recurrence at insertion site, herniation through the site of thoracostomy, chylothorax, and cardiac dysrhythmias. Infective complications include empyema and surgical site infection. Conclusion. Tube thoracostomy, though commonly performed is not without risk. Blunt dissection technique has lower risk of complications and is hence recommended.
Tunneling Assisted Photo-Conductivity For Novel High Efficiency pi-n MQW Solar Cells

We propose a first principles method of calculating the photo-component of tunneling conductivity of a specific superlattice (SL) photovoltaic structure: an InP/InGaAs P-I(SL)-N solar cell. The method we follow is based on the generalized Greenwood-Kubo formulation and on the causal form of the Green’s function. The vertical conductivity (along the growth direction of the device), under illumination, involves a group of parameters directly connected to the geometry of the device (hence it is on one’s disposal) and the quantum size effects in the quantum wells of the superlattice. The latter is incorporated in the intrinsic region of p-i-n solar cells and bring along the advantage of carrier tunneling, which is possible if thin layers of wide-gap material (InP at 25A/layer) are grown successively on narrow bandgap material (lattice-matched In0.53Ga0.47As at 70A/layer) to form a sequence of quantum wells. Appropriate doping of the barrier regions ensures Fermi level pinning inside the quantum wells (a great advantage, since the excitation energy of photo-generated electrons greatly reduces in this case) in the neighborhood of the ground state miniband. We propose a direct calculation of conductivity under illumination: (a) we replace the intrinsic region of the p-i-n solar cell with an InP/InGaAs superlattice (b) we explicitly derive the photoconductivity σ(ω,Τ) as a function of photon frequency and temperature T (c) we explore the variations of photoconductivity for a large number of superlattice periods (d) we examine the variation of photoconductivity for a range of incident photon energies from 1.4eV to 2.6eV (e) we find that conductivity is greatly enhanced and may reach average maximum levels for superlattices with above 12 total periods (f) we predict efficiency gains in excess of 24%, under moderate levels Key-Words: Superlattices, solar cells, conductivity, Green’s functions
The Escherichia coli NadR Regulator Is Endowed with Nicotinamide Mononucleotide Adenylyltransferase Activity

ABSTRACT The first identification and characterization of a catalytic activity associated with NadR protein is reported. A computer-aided search for sequence similarity revealed the presence in NadR of a 29-residue region highly conserved among known nicotinamide mononucleotide adenylyltransferases. The Escherichia coli nadR gene was cloned into a T7-based vector and overexpressed. In addition to functionally specific DNA binding properties, the homogeneous recombinant protein catalyzes NAD synthesis from nicotinamide mononucleotide and ATP.
MicroRNA targeting in mus musculus and Caenorhabditis elegans

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small, approximately 22 nucleotide RNAs that regulate gene expression post-transcriptionally by base-pairing to complementary sites in the target mRNA. The first miRNA, lin-4, was discovered in 1993 in Caenorhabditis elegans; since then hundreds of miRNAs have been identified in C. elegans, Drosophila melanogaster, plants, mouse, and humans, where they approach a number equivalent to 1-2% of the protein-coding genes. With the exception of plants, miRNAs most commonly regulate targets by imperfectly pairing to 3' untranslated regions (UTRs), leading to translational repression or mRNA destabilization. The microRNA miR-196 is encoded at three paralogous locations in the HoxA, B, and C clusters in mammals and has conserved complementarity to the 3'UTRs of Hoxb8, Hoxc8, and Hoxa7; in particular, miR-1 96 has complete complementarity to Hoxb8 with the exception of a single G:U wobble. In 2004, Yekta et al., were able to detect RNA fragments diagnostic of miR-1 96-directed cleavage of Hoxb8 transcript in mouse embryos, and cell culture experiments showed down-regulation of Hoxb8, Hoxc8, Hoxd8, and Hoxa7. To address the biological significance of miR-196 mediated repression of Hox genes in vivo, we attempted to generate targeted transgenic mice for the Hoxa7, b8 and c8 genes. These mice would allow us to study the resulting phenotypic and molecular consequences and determine the impact this regulation has on establishment of the anterior-posterior axis in the developing embryo as well as its role in defining the expression boundaries of the individual Hox genes in vivo. The lin-4 miRNA plays a role in regulating the heterochronic genes involved in larval development in C. elegans. We used luciferase assays to test the efficacy of the seven proposed lin-4 binding sites in the lin-14 3'UTR and to determine if lin-4 is capable of recognizing and mediating repression through them. The wild-type lin-14 3'UTR was compared with mutant UTRs in which the lin-4 target sites were mutated. We determined that the three canonical 8mer sites are functional, as expected, and that at least one of the four additional sites is also recognized by lin-4 and contributes to the overall repression of the lin-14 3'UTR.
Heuristic evaluation quality score (HEQS): a measure of heuristic evaluation skills

Heuristic Evaluation is a discount usability engineering method involving three or more evaluators who evaluate the compliance of an interface based on a set of heuristics. Because the quality of the evaluation is highly dependent on their skills, it is critical to measure these skills to ensure evaluations are of a certain standard. This study provides a framework to quantify heuristic evaluation skills. Quantification is based on the number of unique issues identified by the evaluators as well as the severity of each issue. Unique issues are categorized into eight user interface parameters and severity is categorized into three. A benchmark computed from the collated evaluations is used to compare skills across applications as well as within applications. The result of this skill measurement divides the evaluators into levels of expertise. Two case studies illustrate the process, as well as its applications. Further studies will help define an expert's profile.
Polar: an efficient finding nearest neighbor algorithm for overlay network

Obviously, network proximity is an essential characteristic for overlay network construction. By selecting the nearest neighbor for the target node, large-scale distributed applications can decrease the communication cost and improve the performance significantly. Nevertheless, existing mechanisms for exploiting network proximity information are either inaccurate or low efficiency. In this paper, we present a novel and practical algorithm to find the nearest neighbor in overlay network, called Polar. Performing direct measurement based on the result of distance prediction using network coordinate, Polar achieves accuracy as while as it has low overhead. Meanwhile, our proposal does not rely on the static landmark so it has strong scalability and high robustness. Polar is a generic architecture that can be used for a variety of overlay network with different requirement.
A Distributed Effects Perspective of Dimensionally Defined Psychiatric Disorders: And Convergent Versus Core Deficit Effects in ADHD

The focus of psychiatric and psychological research has arguably shifted from brain damage and psychosis to more common forms of psychopathology that reflect extremes variants of otherwise normal cognitive and behavioral characteristics. Now, in addition to trying to understand overtly damaged brain-function (flat tire effects), we are also seeking to understand liabilities associated with non-optimized, but otherwise intact, cognitive and behavioral abilities (poor tuning effects). This shift has pushed us to evolve our investigational strategies to more broadly consider whole-brain integrated brain systems, as well as seek to develop more specific quantifiable indicators of impoverished brain function and behavior. This paper discusses such challenges in relation to dimensionally defined psychiatric disorders and presents a novel whole-brain integrated perspective of ADHD brain function pathology.
On the Applicability of the Bunge-Wand-Weber Ontology to Enterprise Systems Requirements.

To address the problem of alignment and the demands on requirements analyses for enterprise systems (ES), we suggest the optimisation of requirements analyses and thus improved alignment by formalising analyses of both organisation’s requirements and enterprise system’s capabilities with the Bunge–Wand–Weber (BWW) ontology. However, issues arise when applying this ontology to ES requirements. These issues necessitate the extension of the BWW ontology in the sense of a methodically rigorous integration of Bunge’s qualitative differentiation of ontologically distinct layers of reality. This extension of the BWW ontology, by facilitating the development of rigorous methods for the ontological analysis of ES requirements, would form the basis for evaluating the alignment of ES packages with the needs of the organisation.