Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gestures for your Workplace : Investigating Body Interaction for Everyday Desk Scenarios

We discuss in this paper gesture-based interaction techniques that are appropriate for everyday office desk scenarios for which the constraints of the workspace and the seated position limit the available range of body motions. We are interested in gestures performed by hands and head and highlight our findings with regards to the acquisition and recognition of such gestures using vision techniques. Possible applications and implementations are discussed with focus on the intuitiveness and easy-of-use of the involved gesture vocabularies.
Safety Climate in Finnish- and Swedish-Speaking Companies

The aim of this study was to compare assessments made by Finnish- and Swedish-speaking workers in Finland about the safety climate in their companies, because an earlier study showed that the accident frequency of Swedish-speaking workers was one third lower than that of Finnish-speaking workers. 148 Finnish-speaking and 138 Swedish-speaking workers from 14 small and medium-sized companies participated in this study. They filled out a Finnish safety climate questionnaire, the reliability of which was above the acceptable level. There were no differences between the language groups in the total variables of safety climate and safety action. Based on the differences in single items, we interpreted that Swedish-speaking workers stressed collective safety more, whereas Finnish-speaking workers put more emphasis on their personal responsibility for safety.
Past, Present, and Future: Development of Theranostic Agents Targeting Carbonic Anhydrase IX

Theranostics is the integration of diagnostic information with pharmaceuticals to increase effectiveness and safety of cancer treatments. Nuclear medicine provides a non-invasive means to visualize drug target expression across primary and metastatic sites, and assess pharmacokinetics and efficacy of companion therapeutic agents. This is significant given the increasing recognition of the importance of clonal heterogeneity in treatment response and resistance. Carbonic anhydrase IX (CA-IX) has been advocated as an attractive diagnostic and therapeutic biomarker for targeting hypoxia in solid malignancies. CA-IX confers cancer cell survival under low oxygen tension, and is associated with increased propensity for metastasis. As such, CA-IX is overexpressed in a broad spectrum of cancers. Different classes of antigen recognition molecules targeting CA-IX including monoclonal antibodies, peptides, small molecule inhibitors, and antibody mimetics have been radiolabeled for imaging and therapeutic applications. cG250, a chimeric monoclonal antibody, has been labeled with an assortment of radionuclides (124I, 111In, 89Zr, 131I, 90Y, and 177Lu) and is the most extensively investigated CA-IX radiopharmaceutical. In recent years, there have been tremendous advancements made by the research community in developing alternatives to cG250. Although still in preclinical settings, several small molecule inhibitors and antibody mimetics hold great promise in improving the management of aggressive and resistant cancers.
Efficient classical simulation of the quantum Fourier transform

A number of elegant approaches have been developed for the identification of quantum circuits which can be efficiently simulated on a classical computer. Recently, these methods have been employed to demonstrate the classical simulability of the quantum Fourier transform (QFT). Here we show that one can demonstrate a number of simulability results for QFT circuits in a straightforward manner using Griffiths and Niu's semi-classical QFT construction (Griffiths and Niu 1996 Phys. Rev. Lett. 76 3228). We use this to analyse the simulability properties of the QFT with a variety of classes of entangled input states. We then discuss the consequences of these results in the context of Shor's factorization algorithm.
Organizational Dynamics of Market Transition: Hybrid Forms, Property Rights, and Mixed Economy in China

Victor Nee Cornell University This paper underscores the importance of hybrid forms in the current market transitions in state socialism through an examination of the emergence of marketized firms and cadre-entrepreneurs in China. The paper develops a new-institutionalist analysis of the organizational dynamics that propel market transition in reforming state socialism. Under conditions of partial reform, marketized firms enjoy a transaction cost advantage over alternative governance structures. Changes in the institutional environment stemming from the spread of markets and the changing structure of property rights, however, increasingly favor private firms. Nonetheless, a mixed economy characterized by a diversity of organizational forms and a plurality of property rights will be a persistent feature of transitions from state socialism. Analysis of the interaction between government, enterprise, and market forces illustrates how the new-institutionalist perspective is applied to a dynamic model of market transition in China. '
Toward programmatic research on virtue assessment: Challenges and prospects

Poor construct definition has characterized research on virtue, beginning with Hartshorne and May’s honesty studies and continuing to the present. Recently, scholars have begun to define virtues in ways that improve the prospects for measuring virtue constructs, but a coordinated, programmatic approach is necessary for success in virtue measurement. A brief overview of the construct of virtue includes six key elements that can structure virtue assessment design. Recent research on the trait/situation problem suggests that situational factors do not obviate traits. Veridicality issues such as social desirability and positive illusions are significant challenges for self-report virtue measurement. In summary self-report measures, these challenges can be met with a number of methods, including directly assessing social desirability and item construction to remove social desirability. These challenges can also be met using other-reports, experience sampling, or experimental procedures. A brief discussion of construct validity in virtue measurement leads to the conclusion that many studies with a variety of methods are necessary to establish valid measures of virtue.
Regulation of proliferation and platelet‐derived growth factor expression in palmar fibromatosis (Dupuytren contracture) by mechanical strain

Palmar fibromatosis (Dupuytren contracture) causes fibrosis of specific palmar fascial bands. These bands are subjected to repetitive mechanical strain in situ. Primary cell cultures were derived from (a) palmar fibromatosis from eight patients, (b) uninvolved palmar fascia (Skoog's fibers) from four of these patients and (c) normal palmar fascia from four additional patients. The cells were plated onto collagen‐coated membranes either subjected to cyclic strain (25% maximal strain at 1 Hz) or without strain. Bromodeoxy uridine incorporation showed an increase in proliferation in all cultures subjected to strain. This increase was highest for palmar fibromatosis (10 to 40% nuclear incorporation, p = 0.02). Skoog's fibers and fascia from the normal individuals showed a trend (not significant) toward increase with strain (8 to 25%, p = 0.15 for Skoog's fibers, and 8 to 15%, p = 0.45 for normal fascia). Cyclic strain increased the expression of platelet derived growth factor‐A relative to glyceraldehyde‐3‐phosphate dehydrogenase in palmar fibromatosis (2.2 to 3.5, p = 0.05) and Skoog's fibers (0.8 to 2.0, p = 0.04). The expression of platelet‐derived growth factor‐B relative to glyceraldehyde‐3‐phosphate dehydrogenase was enhanced by cyclic strain only in the fibromatosis tissue (0.7 to 2.1, p = 0.04). The normal fascia did not express platelet‐derived growth factor. Platelet‐derived growth factor neutralizing antibody decreased bromodeoxyuridine incorporation in fibromatosis cultures subjected to cyclic strain to near levels for those grown in the absence of strain (38 to 16%, p = 0.05). Conditioned medium from fibromatosis cells grown under stain showed a trend toward increased proliferation in additional fibromatosis cultures compared with conditioned medium from fibromatosis cells grown without strain (9 to 15% nuclear incorporation, p = 0.20). The observed palmar fibromatosis contracture can be partially explained on the basis of the cell's response to cyclic strain, which may be mediated by plateletderived growth factor.
Vascular injuries during gynecological laparoscopy--the vascular surgeon's advice.

CONTEXT Iatrogenic vascular problems due to laparoscopy are a well recognized problem and lead to significant repercussions. In this context, a ten-year review of cases topic is presented, based on experience gained while heading two important vascular surgery services. CASES Five patients with vascular injuries during elective laparoscopy are described. These patients presented with seven lesions of iliac vessels. All cases were evaluated immediately and required laparotomy, provisional hemostasis and urgent attendance by a vascular surgeon. Direct suturing was performed in three cases. One aortoiliac bypass and one ilioiliac reversed venous graft were made. Venous lesions were sutured. One case of a point-like perforation of the small bowel was found. There were no deaths and no complications during the postoperative period. DISCUSSION Important points on this subject are made, and advice is given. There needs to be immediate recognition of the vascular injury, and expert repair by a vascular surgeon is recommended, in order to significantly reduce the degree of complications.
Rhythmic activity in smooth muscle from small subcutaneous arteries.

JOHANESON, BORJE, AND DAVID F. BOHR. Rhythmic activity in smooth muscle from small subcutaneous arteries. Am. J. Physiol. 210(4): 801-806. I g66. -Isolated strips of small subcutaneous arteries (200-500 p o.d.) from the dog’s paw show two components in their contractile behavior: I) a tonic increase in tension and 2) superimposed phasic contractions which are often grouped to form rhythmic waves. This pattern of activity occurs spontaneously in physiological salt solution and in response to various vasoactive agents (catecholamines, serotonin, angiotensin, dog plasma). The phasic activity signifies cell-to-cell propagation and single-unit organization in this vascular smooth muscle. The frequency of the phasic contractions is augmented with increasing doses of stimulating agents. Passive stretch also increases the frequency of the phasic contractions, a phenomenon that may have some bearing on the theory of autoregulation of blood flow in vivo. Supranormal concentrations of Ca ++ have an inhibitory effect on the rhythmic activity, probably due to the membrane-stabilizing action of this ion. Increased [K+] (10-30 mM) stimulates an inactive strip to contract rhythmically but reduces the frequency of the phasic contractions in an active strip and this leads to partial relaxation. It is suggested that red.uction of pacemaker frequency in vascular smooth muscle with high myogenic activity may be the mechanism responsible for the potassium vasodilatation in vivo. Some implications of single-unit organization of vascular smooth muscle are discussed.
NEURAL CONNECTION BETWEEN BILATERAL BASAL TEMPORAL REGIONS: CORTICO‐CORTICAL EVOKED POTENTIAL ANALYSIS IN PATIENTS WITH TEMPORAL LOBE EPILEPSY

OBJECTIVEIn patients with temporal lobe epilepsy, invasive electroencephalographic study has shown that epileptic activities arising from the unilateral temporal lobe often propagate to the contralateral temporal lobe. Which commissural pathways are responsible for this spreading remains controversial. Some previous studies, however, have suggested that interhemispheric connections between bilateral basal temporal regions (BTR) might have a significant role in propagation of epileptic activities. METHODSWe attempted to elucidate the neural connections between bilateral BTRs using the cortico-cortical evoked potential (CCEP) method. Five consecutive patients with temporal lobe epilepsy who underwent intracranial electroencephalographic monitoring were studied. RESULTSCCEP responses were recorded from a total of 24 electrodes after stimulation of the contralateral BTRs (24 CCEPs/720 recordings; 3.33%). There were 3 types of CCEP waveform: type N-P (16 of 24; 66.7%) consisting of an initial negative peak followed by a positive peak; type N (4 of 24; 16.7%) showing a negative peak only, and type P (4 of 24; 16.7%) showing a positive peak only. The latencies ranged from 48.2 to 102.3 ms (mean, 65.5 ms) for negative peaks and 70.2 to 122.0 ms (mean, 95.2 ms) for positive peaks. In all patients, the basal temporal language area was associated with at least 1 CCEP, either as a stimulated region or a recorded region (11 of 24; 45.8%). CONCLUSIONThese data indicate that there is a neural connection between bilateral BTRs. In consideration of the involvement of the basal temporal language area, we speculate that these responses may reflect some physiological connections between bilateral BTRs.
Response of piezoelectric circular microdiaphragm sensors in higher frequency modes

In this study we investigate two phenomena in the vibration of piezoelectric circular microdiaphragm (PCM) sensors, the non-degenerated vibration modes and increase of mass sensitivity with using higher modes. The investigated parameters can enhance the performance of PCM in mass sensing applications. In order to achieve the desired goals, we used reflection digital holography microscope (RDHM) to visualize different frequency modes of the fabricated PCM. It was found that the degeneracy of the modes with at least one nodal diameter is broken, even though it was expected that these orthogonal modes are degenerated in frequency. These non-degenerated modes are correlated to the lack of symmetry of the PCM, mainly imposed by the top electrode configuration. These modes may be applied as an alternative way for temperature and humidity compensation in the mass sensing resonators as a dual mode resonant sensor. Moreover, it was demonstrated that the frequency shift of PCM to mass loading increases in higher frequency modes. This shift is almost 8.5 times higher in mode (0,3) than mode (0,1).
Quality of Service and Performance Evaluation of Congestion Control for Multimedia Networking

The most important components of multimedia networking are video streaming and synchronization. In video networking, the frames are split into smaller packets at the application layer. The packets of a frame are assembled before being processed at the receiver. For realtime video streaming, packet acknowledgments and retransmission are not practical. When congestion occurs, some packets may be dropped. Consequently, the entire frame (and sometimes successive frames in a group) is considered lost (i.e., not displayable). Often a loss of one packet from the frame can lead to a loss of the whole frame. Selective Message Discarding Policies have been proposed to reduce or avoid congestion and achieve a better buffer utilization by discarding all packets that do not belong to good messages. In this paper, these discarding policies are studied and applied for MPEG video data transmission. Our queuing analysis for video data yields explicit (closed form) expressions for the average buffer occupancy and loss probability by using Early Message Discard and Partial Message Discard policies. The quality of service (QoS) has been studied and evaluated based on a frame (or a group of frames) instead of a packet. The results for different arrival rates, service times, and frame sizes are presented. KEYWORDS—Average buffer occupancy, loss probability, EMD and PMD polices, packet model.
Towards The Deep Model: Understanding Visual Recognition Through Computational Models

Author(s): Wang, Panqu | Advisor(s): Cottrell, Garrison; Vasconcelos, Nuno | Abstract: Understanding how visual recognition is achieved in the human brain is one of the most fundamental questions in vision research. In this thesis I seek to tackle this problem from a neurocomputational modeling perspective. More specifically, I build machine learning-based models to simulate and explain cognitive phenomena related to human visual recognition, and I improve computational models using brain-inspired principles to excel at computer vision tasks.I first describe how a neurocomputational model (“The Model”, TM, (Cottrell a Hsiao, 2011)) can be applied to explain the modulation of visual experience on the performance of subordinate-level face and object recognition. Next, by introducing a mixture-of-experts structure in the model, I show that TM can be used to simulate the development of hemispheric lateralization of face processing. In addition, I extend TM to “The Deep Model” (TDM) by coupling it with deep learning techniques, and use TDM to explain the peripheral vision advantage in human scene recognition.Furthermore, I show the performance of these computational methods can be improved by introducing realistic constraints based on the human brain. By combining unsupervised feature learning principles with the Gnostic Fields theory of how the brain performs object recognition across the ventral visual pathway, I show a biologically-inspired model can develop realistic features of the early visual cortex, while performing well on object recognition datasets. By designing better encoding and decoding strategies in the deep neural network, I demonstrate that our system achieves the state-of-the-art performance on pixel-level semantic segmentation task on many popular computer vision benchmarks.
Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy: A Handbook for the Mental Health Practitioner

In this updated and revised, third edition of his classic text, Worden incorporates his thinking on bereavement from extensive research, clinical work and the best of contemporary literature. Readers will find some refinements and several new areas of discussion. The model for understanding mourning not only includes the four "Tasks of Mourning" but his seven "Mediators of Mourning" as well. Important new and expanded materials address special types of losses, including children's violent deaths, grief and the elderly and anticipatory grief. A series of vignettes, the best of the first and second editions plus new cases based on Worden's files, offer powerful training tools for the mental health professional.
Variability of UV Irradiance in Europe

The diurnal and annual variability of solar UV radiation in Europe is described for different latitudes, seasons and different biologic weighting functions. For the description of this variability under cloudless skies the widely used one‐dimensional version of the radiative transfer model UVSPEC is used. We reconfirm that the major factor influencing the diurnal and annual variability of UV irradiance is solar elevation. While ozone is a strong absorber of UV radiation its effect is relatively constant when compared with the temporal variability of clouds. We show the significant role that clouds play in modifying the UV climate by analyzing erythemal irradiance measurements from 28 stations in Europe in summer. On average, the daily erythemal dose under cloudless skies varies between 2.2 kJ m−2 at 70°N and 5.2 kJ m−2 at 35°N, whereas these values are reduced to 1.5–4.5 kJ m−2 if clouds are included. Thus clouds significantly reduce the monthly UV irradiation, with the smallest reductions, on average, at lower latitudes, which corresponds to the fact that it is often cloudless in the Mediterranean area in summer.
Stereo Image Sequence Coding Based on Phase Correlation Disparity Estimation

This paper will discuss how to compress the stereo media data in order to avoid getting poor performance when transmitting these data over network. We proposed a novel disparity estimation method for stereo video compression. Based on our method, we overcome some of the defects of phase correlation and improve disparity estimation accuracy on stereo image. From our experiments, the results not only show higher compression performance but also better than H.264 compression standard. In computing accelerated testing experiment, our proposed method have higher disparity estimation efficiency than block matching, especially when the resolution of the video are growing up or the foreground in a single frame occupies the most area of the scene.
Analysis of Genomic Downsizing on the Basis of Region-of-Difference Polymorphism Profiling of Mycobacterium tuberculosis Patient Isolates Reveals Geographic Partitioning

ABSTRACT Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the etiological agent of tuberculosis, has lost many coding and noncoding regions in its genome during the course of evolution. We performed region-of-difference (RD) analysis using PCR-based genotyping of 131 M. tuberculosis clinical isolates obtained from four different countries, namely, India, Peru, Libya, and Angola. Our studies revealed that RD patterns are often distinct for strains circulating in specific geographical regions and can be used to trace the descent and spread of an isolate from its original reservoir. We describe our findings, which show that no single isolate from the four countries (n = 131) had all the 15 RDs either deleted or retained. Tuberculosis-specific deletion 1 (TbD1) was found to be conserved in 23% of the Indian isolates, indicating their possible ancient origin. RD9 was the most conserved region, RD11 was predominantly deleted, and RD6 was the most variable among the isolates in our collection irrespective of their geographic region. In contrast to earlier reports, our results demonstrate that the deletion of RD1 does not correlate with a decrease in the virulence potential of M. tuberculosis, as Indian isolates (n = 30) examined by us were from diseased individuals and yet had lost the RD1 region. Our results further illustrated that the intactness of the RD5 region may be associated with increased virulence of the organism. This study highlights that the RDs in M. tuberculosis genomes are geographically distributed and specific and may possibly be associated with virulence spectrum.
Automated Functional Testing on the TransCanada Alberta Gas Accounting Replacement Project

Automated functional testing with FIT customization was successfully implemented for a large legacy system replacement. The vision for automated functional testing on this project was to produce a comprehensive automated functional regression test that runs quickly and continuously, while producing worthwhile feedback. The tools, techniques and processes presented in this paper evolved over a time period of five years.