Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Relative importance of depth cues on portable autostereoscopic display

Depth of a three-dimensional scene is perceived using several different visual cues. The process of perceiving depth is delicate and vulnerable to artefacts. On autostereoscopic displays the aim is to enhance the sensation of reality of the experience by the added three-dimensionality without the need for aiding glasses. The factors that contribute to achieving a plausible 3D effect on autostereoscopic displays are numerous: for example stereoscopy combined with a supporting set of monocular cues: perspective lines, shadows, and textures. The goal of this study is two-fold. First, to gather knowledge on how different characteristics of a 3D scene impact the correct estimation of depth. Second, how the same characteristics impact on perceived quality. These were studied using subjective tests. The studied characteristics were chosen to be five different depth cues - three monocular and two binocular cues. The chosen monocular cues were shadows, texture and focal depth. For binocular cues, two different stereoscopic disparities were used: one optimal for a portable 3D display, and another designed for a HD resolution and later scaled down for a portable device making the disparity decrease. In addition, combination of all aforementioned cues was examined. All of the cues were also studied with three different compression levels (no compression, JPEG with quality factor of 50, and with quality factor of 90). A quantitative study using a portable autostereoscopic display in controlled laboratory environment was conducted. The results of this study indicate that the stereoscopic depth cues outperform the monocular depth cues in accuracy and speed of estimating depth in a 3D video. Interestingly enough, these results are not consistent with the ratings of perceived quality and acceptance. Furthermore, compressing images seems to have a significant effect on the accuracy and speed of depth estimation, and also on the perceived quality.
Convolutional Neural Networks for mammogram classification in BIRADS standard: development and preliminary tests

The aim of our project is to transpose the European Directive 59/2013/EURATOM which regulates the use of ionizing radiation in medicine and the information provided to patients on radiation dose. Controlling the dose is a really important aspect when we deal with breast cancer screening because breast is made of a radiosensitive tissue and screening programs expose to radiation a lot of healthy women. In order to personalize the dose index, it is necessary to take into account breast density because to have a sufficient sensitivity a higher dose is given to the patient. For this reason we propose to classify mammograms with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) in BIRADS standard. To assess density in screening program, an automatic algorithm is necessary because of the large number of women who partecipates.
Routing the social graphs for the large-scale heterogeneous information accessing

The paper proposes a series of novel routing algorithms to the issue of accessing the large-scale heterogeneous information over the Internet. Different from traditional ones, the perspectives of the routing are updated in terms of the quality of information accessing, the types of resources, the dominant driver and the expected consequences. The human capital is connected to form the social capital to resolve the routing problems. Although the human capital dominates the particular information system, it is difficult to capture it to fulfill requirements of users. For that, the social capital, which is shaped in the three graphs, i.e., the data, the channel and the human, is leveraged to perform the primary tasks since the human capital is difficult to be exploited directly. Those graphs represent the comprehensive perspectives to the environment and they are constructed in accordance with users' information accessing behaviors. In the early phase, the seed graphs are constructed to initialize the system. The routing does not expect to find their exactly required information resources. Instead, it aims to provide users with relevant consequences through exploring the nearby human capital.
Active Stabilization of the Beam Pointing of a High- Power KrF Laser System

An active beam-pointing stabilization system has been developed for a high-power KrF laser system to eliminate the long-term drift of the directional change of the beam in order to have a stable focusing to a high intensity. The control of the beam direction was achieved by a motor-driven mirror activated by an electric signal obtained by monitoring the position of the focus of the output beam. Instead of large sized UV-sensitive position sensitive detectors a simple arrangement with scatter plates and photodiodes are used to measure the directionality of the beam. After the beam stabilization the long-term residual deviation of the laser shots is ~14 µrad, which is comparable to the shot-to-shot variation of the beam (~12 µrad). This deviation is small enough to keep the focal spot size in a micrometer range when tightly focusing the beam using off-axis parabolic mirrors.
Psychology Research and Behavior Management Dovepress Can Theoretical Intervention Improve Hand Hygiene Behavior among Nurses?

you hereby accept the Terms. Non-commercial uses of the work are permitted without any further permission from Dove Medical Press Limited, provided the work is properly attributed. For permission for commercial use of this work, please see paragraphs 4.2 and 5 of our Terms Background: Hand washing is the best strategy to prevent known nosocomial infections but the nurses' hand hygiene is estimated to be poor in Iran. Objective: This study aimed to determine the effectiveness of BASNEF (Behavior, Attitude, Subjective Norms, and Enabling Factors) model on hand hygiene adherence education. Methods: This controlled quasi-experimental study was conducted on 70 hemodialysis unit nurses (35 case and 35 control) in the health and educational centers of the University of Medical Sciences of Urmia, Iran. To collect the data, a six-part validated and reliable questionnaire was used. The data were analyzed using SPSS version18, using Wilcoxon, Mann–Whitney, chi-square, and Fisher's exact tests. The significance level was considered P,0.05. Results: The mean age was 38.4±8.1 years for the intervention group and 40.2±8.0 years for the control group. There was no significant difference between the two groups for any demographic variables. Also, before the intervention, there was no significant difference between the two groups for any components of the BASNEF model. Post-intervention, the attitude, subjective norms, enabling factors, and intention improved significantly in the intervention group (P,0.001), but hand hygiene behavior did not show any significant change in the intervention group (P=0.16). Conclusion: Despite the improving attitudes and intention, the intervention had no significant effect on hand hygiene behavior among the studied nurses.
Plasma concentrations of zonulin are elevated in obese men with fatty liver disease

Purpose Zonulin is considered as a biomarker of increased intestinal permeability. The relationship between intestinal permeability and obesity is known, and many studies have investigated the relationship between intestinal permeability and liver disease. Thus, we aimed to investigate the potential association between plasma zonulin concentrations and fatty liver in obese men. Patients and methods A total of 140 obese men without inflammatory bowel diseases, autoimmune diseases, and severe liver diseases were included. The subjects were divided into three groups: normal, mild fatty liver, and moderate-to-severe fatty liver, according to abdominal ultrasonography findings. We subdivided the subjects into two subgroups based on the amount of alcohol consumption (appropriate drinking and hazardous drinking), and subgroup analyses were performed. Results The mean plasma zonulin concentrations (ng/mL) in the normal, mild fatty liver, and moderate-to-severe fatty liver groups were 0.618, 2.143, and 5.815, respectively (P<0.001). A multivariate multinomial logistic regression analysis revealed an odds ratio (OR) of 1.77 (P=0.015) in the moderate-to-severe fatty liver group. The median plasma zonulin concentrations (ng/mL) in the appropriate drinking subgroup of the fatty liver groups were 0.002, 0.500, and 6.550, respectively (P-trend<0.001), and in the hazardous drinking subgroup were 0.002, 0.590, and 5.800, respectively (P-trend=0.001). The ORs for moderate-to-severe fatty liver were 1.91 (P=0.039) in the appropriate drinking group and 1.56 (P=0.045) in the hazardous drinking group. Conclusion Plasma zonulin concentrations were elevated among obese men. A significant association was found between zonulin concentrations and severity of fatty liver.
The Effects of Sibling Relationships on Social Adjustment Among Japanese Twins Compared With Singletons

This study examined the link between sibling relationships and children's social adjustment by comparing twin siblings and siblings with different ages (singleton siblings), and clarified the role of reciprocity in sibling relationships on children's social development. Mothers of 58 monozygotic twin pairs, 48 dizygotic twin pairs, and 86 singleton sibling pairs reported their children's sibling relationships and social adjustment. This study showed that the effects of sibling relationships on the prosocial behaviors and conduct problems of each child are stronger for twins than for singleton siblings. Moreover, positivity toward one's sibling increased peer problems only among monozygotic twins. The opposite tendency was present among dizygotic twins and singleton siblings. This study suggests the importance for children's social development of having many interactions with siblings and establishing reciprocity in sibling relationships. Moreover, our results suggest that the quality of sibling relationships among monozygotic twins may be different from those among dizygotic twins and singleton siblings.
Geometric Monitoring of Heterogeneous Streams

Interest in stream monitoring is shifting toward the distributed case. In many applications the data is high volume, dynamic, and distributed, making it infeasible to collect the distinct streams to a central node for processing. Often, the monitoring problem consists of determining whether the value of a global function, defined on the union of all streams, crossed a certain threshold. We wish to reduce communication by transforming the global monitoring to the testing of local constraints, checked independently at the nodes. Geometric monitoring (GM) proved useful for constructing such local constraints for general functions. Alas, in GM the constraints at all nodes share an identical structure and are thus unsuitable for handling heterogeneous streams. Therefore, we propose a general approach for monitoring heterogeneous streams (HGM), which defines constraints tailored to fit the data distributions at the nodes. While we prove that optimally selecting the constraints is NP-hard, we provide a practical solution, which reduces the running time by hierarchically clustering nodes with similar data distributions and then solving simpler optimization problems. We also present a method for efficiently recovering from local violations at the nodes. Experiments yield an improvement of over an order of magnitude in communication relative to GM.
Towards an Executable Model of Auxin Transport Canalisation

We describe our use of a modelling and development process to specify and implement biological simulations that involves the development of several different UML models to capture different perspectives on the system being modelled, in particular the investigation of various emergent properties. We use this process in the case of an auxin canalisation simulation, investigating the processes of auxin transport as guided by PIN proteins, in a developing plant. We discuss our preliminary results of investigating one hypothesis of PIN protein placement that fails to demonstrate canalisation in simulation.
Enhancing Superset  $X$ -Canceling Method With Relaxed Constraints on Fault Observation

An X-tolerant multiple-input signature register (MISR) compaction methodology that compacts output streams containing unknown (X) values, called X-canceling, is an alternative to masking X values (i.e., X-masking). A number of control bits that is linear in the number of X's to be canceled are required to perform the X-canceling operation for existing X-canceling approaches. This paper proposes a new X-canceling method significantly reducing the number of control bits for X-canceling. We exploit the fact that 1) unknown values tend to be highly correlated in the scan cells (i.e., X's tend to be generated in certain portions of design) and 2) fault effects can typically be observed in a multiplicity of scan cells. Instead of custom generating the control bits to cancel out only the X's in one MISR signature, the proposed approach finds a general superset solution which can cancel out the X's for many MISR signatures without losing fault coverage. This allows the same control bits to be reused many times thereby significantly improving the amount of compression that can be obtained. Architectures for implementing superset X-canceling are described along with experimental results.
Towards consistency in general dependency networks

Dependency networks are a probabilistic graphical model that claim several advantages from other models like Bayesian networks and Markov networks, for instance. One of these advantages in general dependency networks, which are the object of study in this work, is the ease of learning from data. Nonetheless this easiness is also the cause of its main drawback: inconsistency. A dependency network cannot encode the probability distribution underlay in the data but an approximation. This approximation can be enough good for some applications but not in other cases. In this work we make a study of this inconsistency and propose a method to reduce it. From the conclusions we have taken from this analysis we have developed an algorithm that has to be run after the standard learning algorithm yields its solution. Our method is an heuristic approach so we cannot assure that the resulting model is fully consistent, however we have carried out some experiments which make us to think that it produces high quality models and therefore is advisable its use.
Size and physiological effort in the production of signed and spoken utterances

It is shown that the energy required in order to articulate manual and oral gestures at a given rate varies in proportion with the fifth power of linear body size, while the energy supply varies with its second power. This provides for a better understanding of the differences in peripheralness observed in the formant frequencies of vowels in speech articulated more or less forcefully by men, women and children. 1 Introduction It is well known and well understood that all formant frequencies of vowels vary between speakers in rough proportion with the inverse of the length of the vocal tract, so that the relationship can be described, in approximation, by uniform scaling factors (the same for all formants of all vowels). However, the female-male difference observed in the formant frequencies of the same vowels can not be fully accounted for by a uniform scaling factor. The deviation from uniformity was observed to be similar in speakers of various languages: After normalization with a uniform scaling factor, the vowels produced by women tend to stand out as more peripheral than those produced by men. F1 and F2 both show more dispersion (more extreme values) in vowels produced by women. The reason for the non-uniformity can be seen in the fact that the male vocal tract is not a proportionally upscaled version of the female (Fitch & Giedd 1999). While it is somewhat larger in all its dimensions, the major difference resides in its disproportionately elongated pharynx. In a model simulation of the changes that occur in the male during puberty, and which were assumed to account for the major part of the female-male nonuniformity, it was shown that the more peripheral values of F2 may result from this physiological difference (Traunmuller 1984). F3 was also well predicted, but the model failed for F1. However, this simulation was based on anatomical data that described only the growth of the skeleton. The growth of the tongue was assumed to be more uniform, which was crucial for the resulting values of F2. If the changes that boys experience during puberty are responsible for the non-uniformity, vowel contrast should be reduced in the speech of men as compared with that of children and women. However, an analysis of formant frequency data obtained from Japanese children, adolescents and adults suggested, instead, that the vowels of adult women deviate from the general pattern in their increased contrast (Traunmuller 1988). The "general pattern" showed a steady decrease in the dispersion of F1 (expressed in barks) and an increase in that of F2 and F3 as a function of age. A different explanation for the increased peripheralness of women's vowels had been first suggested by Ryalls & Lieberman 1982 and was considered again by Diehl, Lindblom, Hoemeke & Fahey 1996. Their idea was that women use more peripheral and, thus, more contrastive vowels in order to compensate for a loss in distinctness due to their higher F0.
Broad-Band Chiral Reflectors based on Nano-Structured Biological Materials

In this work we study the reflection of circularly polarised light from a nano-structured biological material found in the exocuticle of scarabus beetles. This material is made of a stack of ultra-thin (~5 nm) uniaxial layers arranged in a left-handed helicoidal stack, which resonantly reflects circularly polarized light. A chirp in the layer thickness combined with a finite absorption coefficient produce a broad smooth reflectance spectrum. By comparing model calculations and electron microscopy with measured spectra we can explain our observations and quantify most relevant structural parameters. Keywords—Chiral reflectors, circularly polarised light, helicoidal structures, nano photonics.
Effects of Exposure to Intermittent versus Continuous Red Light on Human Circadian Rhythms, Melatonin Suppression, and Pupillary Constriction

Exposure to light is a major determinant of sleep timing and hormonal rhythms. The role of retinal cones in regulating circadian physiology remains unclear, however, as most studies have used light exposures that also activate the photopigment melanopsin. Here, we tested the hypothesis that exposure to alternating red light and darkness can enhance circadian resetting responses in humans by repeatedly activating cone photoreceptors. In a between-subjects study, healthy volunteers (n = 24, 21–28 yr) lived individually in a laboratory for 6 consecutive days. Circadian rhythms of melatonin, cortisol, body temperature, and heart rate were assessed before and after exposure to 6 h of continuous red light (631 nm, 13 log photons cm−2 s−1), intermittent red light (1 min on/off), or bright white light (2,500 lux) near the onset of nocturnal melatonin secretion (n = 8 in each group). Melatonin suppression and pupillary constriction were also assessed during light exposure. We found that circadian resetting responses were similar for exposure to continuous versus intermittent red light (P = 0.69), with an average phase delay shift of almost an hour. Surprisingly, 2 subjects who were exposed to red light exhibited circadian responses similar in magnitude to those who were exposed to bright white light. Red light also elicited prolonged pupillary constriction, but did not suppress melatonin levels. These findings suggest that, for red light stimuli outside the range of sensitivity for melanopsin, cone photoreceptors can mediate circadian phase resetting of physiologic rhythms in some individuals. Our results also show that sensitivity thresholds differ across non-visual light responses, suggesting that cones may contribute differentially to circadian resetting, melatonin suppression, and the pupillary light reflex during exposure to continuous light.
NF-κB Signals Induce the Expression of c-FLIP

ABSTRACT Activation of the transcription factor NF-κB is a major effector of the inducible resistance to death receptor-mediated apoptosis. Previous evidence indicates that the combined transcriptional activation of TRAF-1, TRAF-2, IAP-1, and IAP-2 is required to suppress cell death by tumor necrosis factor (TNF). Here we show that NF-κB activation upregulates the caspase 8 inhibitor FLIP, resulting in increased resistance to Fas ligand (FasL) or TNF. Restoration of either the full-length 55-kDa long form of FLIP or an alternatively spliced short form of FLIP in NF-κB null cells inhibits TNF- and FasL-induced cell death efficiently, whereas the expression of IAP or TRAF family members only partially rescues cells from death. Resistance to either FasL- or TNF-induced apoptosis is overcome when cells are incubated in the presence of the protein synthesis inhibitor cycloheximide. This treatment leads to the rapid downregulation of FLIP but not to that of TRAF2. Our findings suggest that FLIP is an important mediator of NF-κB-controlled antiapoptotic signals.
Novelty Detection Based on Genuine Normal and Artificially Generated Novelty Examples

One-class classification (OCC) is an important problem with applications in several different areas such as outlier detection and machine monitoring. Since in OCC there are no examples of the novelty class, the description generated may be a tight or a bulky description. Both cases are undesirable. In order to create a proper description, the presence of examples of the novelty class is very important. However, such examples may be rare or absent during the modeling phase. In these cases, the artificial generation of novelty samples may overcome this limitation. In this work it is proposed a two steps approach for generating artificial novelty examples in order to guide the parameter optimization process. The results show that the adopted approach has shown to be competitive with the results achieved when using real (genuine) novelty samples.
Fair Energy Saving (FES) algorithm in MANET

As the wireless mobile devices are coming to wide use, MANETs are getting more attention. Each device has to not only maintain some information relating to forwarding the traffic including the traffic unrelated to its own use, but also establish the path using the broadcast packets. The more traffic, the more channel contentions, redundant retransmissions and collisions, which will cause to increase the battery consumption, which is one of critical factors of each small device. Furthermore there is another factor that energy consumption should be evenly distributed among small devices, since some power-used-up nodes will cause traffic delivery delay or block. Here we propose a FES algorithm in MANET-like environment, showing power consumption can be saved and evenly distributed to nodes in MANET. The simulations were performed using the Qualnet 5.1 discrete event network simulator.
How much do your friends know about you?: reconstructing private information from the friendship graph

After the early land rush and fast exponential growth of online social networking platforms, concerns about how data placed in online social networks may be exploited and abused have begun to appear among mainstream users. Social networking sites have responded to these new public sentiments by introducing privacy filters to their site, allowing users to specify which aspects of their profile are visible to whom. In this paper, we demonstrate that such an approach to privacy and informational self-determination is largely futile: as we form social relations and build networks with those alike us, much of who we are and what we do can be reconstructed from unhidden parts of the social graph.