Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Combining Methods For Mass Detection In Mammograms

This paper presents a combined system for detecting masses in mammographic images. The proposed approach analyses the mammograms in three major steps. First a global segmentation method is applied to find the regions of interest. This step uses texture features, decision trees and a multiresolution Markov Random Field model. The second stage works on the output of the previous algorithm. Here a combination of three different local segmentation methods is used, and then some relevant features are extracted. Some of them refer to the shape of the object; others are simple texture parameters. Based on these features the final decision is made.
Pulsed and Continous Radiofrequency Current Adjacent to the Cervical Dorsal Root Ganglion of the Rat Induces Late Cellular Activity in the Dorsal Horn

Background: Pulsed radiofrequency treatment has recently been described as a non-neurodestructive or minimally neurodestructive alternative to radiofrequency heat lesions. In clinical practice long-lasting results of pulsed radiofrequency treatment adjacent to the cervical dorsal root ganglion for the management of chronic radicular spinal pain have been reported without neurologic complications. However, the mode of action is unclear. An early (3 h) effect of pulsed radiofrequency as measured by an increase of c-Fos in the pain-processing neurons of the dorsal horn of rats has been described in the literature. This effect was not mediated by tissue heating. The authors investigated a possible late or long-term effect of three different radiofrequency modalities. Methods: Cervical laminectomy was performed in 19 male Wistar rats. The cervical dorsal root ganglion was randomly exposed to one of the four interventions: sham, continuous radiofrequency current at 67 centigrades, or pulsed radiofrequency current for 120 s or 8 min. The animals were sacrificed and the spinal cord was prepared for c-Fos labeling 7 days after the intervention. Results: The number of c-Fos immunoreactive cells in the dorsal horn was significantly increased in the three different radiofrequency modalities as compared with sham. No significant difference was demonstrated between the three active intervention groups. Conclusions: The authors demonstrated a late neuronal activity in the dorsal horn after exposure of the cervical dorsal root ganglion to different radiofrequency modalities, which was not temperature dependent.
Contract Enforceability and Economic Institutions in Early Trade: the Maghribi Traders' Coalition

This paper presents an economic institution which enabled eleventh-century traders to benefit from employing overseas agents despite the commitment problem inherent in these relations. Agency relations were governed by a coalition--an economic institution in which expectations, implicit contractual relations, and a specific information-transmission mechanism supported the operation of a reputation mechanism. Historical records and a simple game-theoretical model are used to examine this institution. The study highlights the interaction between social and economic institutions, the determinants of business practices, the nature of the merchants' law, and the interrelations between market and nonmarket institutions. Copyright 1993 by American Economic Association.
The research of cloud manufacturing resource discovery mechanism

In view of the current research hot of cloud manufacturing in the modern manufacturing mode, combined with the discovery principle and method of networked manufacturing resource, put forward a discovery mechanism and realization methods of cloud manufacturing resource. Firstly analysis the basic connotation of the cloud manufacturing, gives a general four system structure, giving manufacturing resources classification and characteristics in cloud manufacture environment, combining semantic Web services with OWL-S techniques, put forward manufacturing resource discovery framework based on the semantic Web and gives a matching strategy and similarity algorithm. On the basis of experiment, comparing the discovery mechanism and other, the result shows that this method recall ratio and precision is higher.
Minimal realization problem for Hidden Markov Models

In this paper, we study the problem of finding a minimal order (quasi-) Hidden Markov Model for a random process, which is the output process of an unknown stationary HMM of finite order. In the main theorem, we show that excluding a measure zero set in the parameter space of transition and observation probability matrices, both the minimal quasi-HMM realization and the minimal HMM realization can be efficiently constructed based on the joint probabilities of length N output strings, for N > max(4 logd(k) + 1,3), where d is the size of the output alphabet size, and k is the minimal order of the realization. We also aim to connect the two lines of literature: realization theory of HMMs/automatas, and the recent development in learning latent variable models with tensor techniques.
Accelerated HMAX model based on improved SIFT feature points

Object recognition technology is an important research field of image understanding and computer vision, with its wide range of application, it attracts more and more attention. HMAX was proposed as a simple and biologically feasible model for object recognition, based on how the visual cortex processes information. However, computational cost is the biggest obstacle of this model. This paper aims to improve HMAX, and the work of this paper is as follow: 1. By studying the directional characteristics of Gabor filters, a convolution layer sparsing method is proposed to reduce the time-consuming of convolution layer. 2. By studying the extracting techniques of feature point, a new SIFT feature extraction algorithm is proposed to resolve the redundancy of patches in sampling layer. At the end of this paper, we apply the improved HMAX models to Caltech101 database. By comparing with the original model, the experimental results show that improved HMAX has a better performance.
A Two-Mean Reverting-Factor Model of the Term Structure of Interest Rates

This paper presents a two--factor model of the term structure of interest rates. We assume that default free discount bond prices are determined by the time to maturity and two factors, the long--term interest rate and the spread (difference between the long--term rate and the short--term (instantaneous) riskless rate). Assuming that both factors follow a joint Ornstein--Uhlenbeck process, a general bond pricing equation is derived. We obtain a closed--form expression for bond prices and examine its implications for the term structure of interest rates. We also derive a closed--form solution for interest rate derivatives prices. This expression is applied to price European options on discount bonds and more complex types of options. Finally, empirical evidence of the model's performance is presented.
Some observations on the dynamics of a congestion control algorithm

We use simulation to make some observations about the behavior of the congestion control algorithm currently embedded in the 4.3-Tahoe BSD TCP implementation. We investigate a simple case of a few TCP connections, originating and terminating at the same pair of hosts, using a single bottleneck link. Our simulations reveal two unexpected phenomena. First, packets from the individual connections, rather than being mixed together, completely separate into individual clusters. Second, every connection loses a single packet during each congestion epoch. As a way of exploring the cause of these phenomena, we discuss how the behavior is altered by modifications to the congestion control algorithm and to the switch queue control algorithm.
Long-Run Performance of Chinese Initial Public Offerings: Further Evidence*

This study examines the long-run performance of 936 Chinese initial public offerings (IPOs) over the period 1996 to 2005 (the post-issue return evidence ends in June 2008). Using a number of empirical methods, including event-time and calendar-time approaches based on a size and industry matching firm benchmark, we find a significant long-run overperformance using the equal-weighted buy-and-hold abnormal returns, although not for the value-weighted returns, suggesting that the performance of small-size IPO firms is superior to that of large-size IPO firms. The significant overperformance disappears, however, when using cumulative or calendar-time abnormal returns. The preset study provides out-of-sample evidence in an emerging market context in support of Fama's (1998) argument that reported long-run performance is sensitive to the method of analysis. Finally, based on a rich set of explanatory factors as proxies for both signaling and ex-ante uncertainty characteristics, our results are supportive of the signaling hypothesis, but inconsistent with the divergence of opinion hypothesis.
Logistics Information and Knowledge Management Issues in Humanitarian Aid Organizations

In this paper, we assess the need for logistics information and knowledge management in humanitarian aid organizations. To do so, we combine literature sources with an extensive case study that we conducted at Medecins sans Frontieres–Holland, which is following a trajectory to improve logistics information management within the organization. We observed that logistics information and logistics knowledge management has not yet matured. We indicate how, by making use of knowledge management strategies such as ‘personalization’ and ‘codification’, this can be improved.
Can Scholarships Alone Help Students Succeed?

Low-income adult learners often struggle to finance their college expenses, having to contend with competing responsibilities involving work, family, and school. This report presents findings from a study of performance-based scholarships at two community colleges in New York City — the Borough of Manhattan Community College and Hostos Community College, both part of the City University of New York system. Students who were eligible for the program could receive up to $2,600 total over two semesters, or up to $3,900 total over two semesters plus a summer semester. Payments were contingent upon maintaining a minimum level of enrollment and grades, and were made directly to students. The program in New York City is one of six being studied as part of the Performance-Based Scholarship (PBS) Demonstration. Each program is designed to serve a different target population and to test an alternative incentive structure, and all employ a random assignment research design. The program in New York City is a test of a scholarship-only program, with no services attached to the award. It targets adult students who are in need of developmental education, and aims to learn whether these scholarships are an effective way to help students progress academically. In addition, the program’s design allows researchers to test whether offering students a summer scholarship as well can further improve their academic outcomes. Analysis suggests that the scholarship-only program: • Encouraged more full-time enrollment during the semesters in which the program operated. Full-time enrollment increased 4.1 percentage points in the first semester and 6.0 percentage points in the second semester of the scholarship program. • Did not increase the average number of semesters registered or credits earned over two years. While students who were eligible for the scholarship attempted more credits on average, this impact was small and was not accompanied by impacts on the number of semesters registered or cumulative credits earned. • Increased registration and credit accumulation in the summer semester. However, this increase did not lead to increased registration or credit accumulation over the two-year followup period. • Had impacts on students at one college but not on students at the other college. There is exploratory evidence that the program at one of the colleges had positive impacts on key academic outcomes. The analyses suggest that the impacts varied by college and that the college environments may have influenced these impacts. MDRC will continue to publish findings from each of the six programs in the PBS Demonstration in the coming years. The program in New York makes an important contribution to the overall demonstration and to the study of performance-based scholarships.
Does “sheep” bring the bad luck? The impacts of education resources on education attainment and earnings in China

We establish that the birth year in China is related to educational attainment because of the superstitious believes that the girls who were born in the “sheep” year will suffer bad luck, and the education system. The crude birth rate declined in the “sheep” year and schools response to the fluctuations by class size in the short run because there were no binding constraints on the class size in China. We estimate the return to education by using birth year as an instrument for schooling.
7th Annual Workshop on Operating Systems Platforms for Embedded Real-time Applications 23rd Euromicro Conference on Real-time Systems

ion in Real-Time Systems 33 Virtual Real-Time Scheduling Malcolm Mollison and James Anderson . 33 Temporal isolation in an HSF-enabled real-time kernel in the presence of shared resources Martijn M. H. P. van den Heuvel, Reinder J. Bril, Johan J. Lukkien . 41 Hard Real-time Support for Hierarchical Scheduling in FreeRTOS Rafia Inam, Jukka Maki-Turja, Mikael Sjodin, Moris Behnam 51 RTOS-Based Embedded Software Development using Domain-Specific
Fast Hardware Upper-Bound Power Estimation for a Novel FPGA-Based HW/SW Partitioning Scheme

In this paper a fast and accurate upper-bound power consumption estimation tool for FPGA-based designs is presented. The tool is developed in the context of a HW/SW partitioning tool. Rather than modeling the hardware implementation as a single alternative, our approach for HW/SW partitioning models the hardware as two extreme alternatives that bound the latency range for different hardware implementations. The presented estimation tool estimates the power consumption for these two hardware alternatives. The computational cost of the presented estimation tool depends linearly on the design complexity as no simulation processes are performed, and hence, it is very useful for fast design space exploration. Testing this estimation tool on several designs showed that this tool is also accurate. Overall power consumption estimations are within plusmn4% of the actual power consumed with an average of 1% error. However, Logic Elements (LEs) and clock power estimates are accurate with an average error of 8.25% and 6.25%, respectively.
Fano resonances in antennas: General control over radiation patterns

The concepts of many optical devices are based on fundamental physical phenomena such as resonances. One of the commonly used devices is an electromagnetic antenna that converts localized energy into freely propagating radiation and vise versa, offering unique capabilities for controlling electromagnetic radiation. Here we propose a concept for controlling the intensity and directionality of electromagnetic wave scattering in radio-frequency and optical antennas based on the physics of Fano resonances. We develop an analytical theory of spatial Fano resonances in antennas that describes switching of the radiation pattern between the forward and backward directions, and we confirm our theory with both numerical calculations and microwave experiments. Our approach bridges the concepts of conventional radio antennas and photonic nanoantennas, and it provides a paradigm for the design of wireless optical devices with various functionalities and architectures.
A Compiler-Blockable Algorithm for QR Decomposition

Because of an imbalance between computation and memory speed in modern processors, programmers are explicitly restructuring codes to perform well on particular memory systems, leading to machine-speciic programs. This paper describes a block algorithm for QR decomposition that is derivable by the compiler and has good performance on small matrices | sizes that are typically run on nodes of a massively parallel system or workstation. The advantage of our algorithm over the one found in LAPACK is that it can be derived by the compiler and needs no hand optimization.
WordNet : a Test Case of Aligning Lexical Databases across Languages

We report on the creation of a medium-scale WordNet for Hebrew. We address this task as an instance of building a lexical resource for a new language (Hebrew) in a setting where similar resources exist for other languages, and multilingual requirements call for an alignment of the new resource with the existing ones. We compare the two main paradigms, MultiWordNet and EuroWordNet, with an eye to other minority languages, who might lack, like Hebrew does, basic resources for carrying out such a task. As we show, the scales are tipped to the MultiWordNet paradigm for this very reason. Cast in this paradigm, the Hebrew WordNet is strictly aligned to the English lexicon. Consequently, the discrepancy between the languages has to be dealt with: on the one hand, the new resource has to be faithful to the linguistic data of the language for which it is created; on the other, it has to be aligned with existing resources for unrelated languages. We distinguish between contingent and systematic cases of non-equivalence. For the former, we offer a corpus-based methodology that can be easily applied for any new language for which such a resource is planned. For the latter, we propose systematic solutions, focusing on the cases of gender, passive verbs, and antonyms. Where L2 is more specific in its semantic distinctions (as in the case of gender), we devise a solution which facilitates a full semantic inheritance. Where L2's distinctions are more general (as in passive verbs), our solution is partial and calls for further research. The case of antonyms is fully solved for most parts of speech, but it raises crucial questions regarding the typological bias of WordNet towards English (and other Indo-European languages), which may touch on both psycholinguistics and the feasibility of WordNet for such tasks as machine translation. NOAM ORDAN, SHULY WINTNER 2
LarkTM: Efﬁcient, Strongly Atomic Software Transactional Memory

Software transactional memory provides an appealing alternative to locks by improving programmability, reliability, and scalability without relying on custom hardware. Existing STMs are impractical because they add high overhead and/or provide weak semantics. This paper introduces a novel, strongly atomic STM called LarkTM that adds low overhead and scales well on low-contention workloads. LarkTM provides these features efﬁciently by building on a concurrency control mechanism that avoids expensive concurrency control except at conﬂicting memory accesses. To preserve soundness, conﬂicting accesses require a coordination protocol to detect transactional conﬂicts and resolve them. An implementation and evaluation in a Java virtual machine demonstrate LarkTM adds low single-thread overhead and often scales well enough to outperform single-thread execution not using STM. Furthermore, we implement an existing high-performance, strongly atomic STM and ﬁnd that LarkTM compares favorably. Finally, we design and implement a hybrid of LarkTM and the prior STM that provides the best overall performance.
An improved β-order WEDM spectral amplitude estimator for speech enhancement

This paper proposes an improved β-order Weighted Euclidean Distortion Measure (I-β-WEDM) spectral estimator for speech enhancement. The new β-order WEDM gain function is introduced, in which a novel method of computing order β is proposed. In this method, the input noisy signal is divided into several critical bands in the human auditory model. The value of order β is updated adaptively according to the signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) which are computed in different critical bands. The performance of the proposed estimator with different values of β has been evaluated by ITU-T G.160 under the white noise and the non-stationary noise, respectively. The experimental results show that, comparing with the reference algorithms, the proposed algorithm with adaptive β could provide large amount of noise reduction, and has a little impact on the level of speech signal. The quality of enhanced speech is improved at the same time.
A comparison on fuel economy and emissions for conventional hybrid electric vehicles and the UTS plug-in hybrid electric vehicle

This paper covers a comparative study on fuel economy and emissions of a conventional hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) and the UTS plug-in HEV (PHEV). The interaction between the components such as energy storage system, electric machine, power control unit and internal combustion engine of the UTS PHEV are complex in order to optimize the fuel economy and emissions brought by the vehicle. In this work, the model of the UTS PHEV is derived and implemented numerically in the MATLAB/SIMULINK environment to study its operational performance in various drive cycles measured under life conditions. The simulation results in terms of fuel economy and emissions of the series and parallel HEV from the Advanced Vehicle Simulator and UTS PHEV are compared and the pros and cons discussed.
Impact of pine looper defoliation in Scots pine

Widespread defoliation of forests caused by insects or fungi cause economic losses throughout the world. Successful outbreak management involves cost/benefit estimation and requires knowledge of potential yield losses. Currently, such knowledge is scarce. This thesis evaluates the significance of single-year defoliation by the pine looper moth (Bupalus piniaria L.) (Lepidoptera: Geometridae) and secondary attack by the pine shoot beetle (Tomicus piniperda L.) (Coleoptera: Scolytinae) for yield losses in Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.). In a seven-year study, tree mortality and growth losses were quantified after a B. piniaria outbreak with a subsequent T. piniperda infestation at Hokensas in 1996. Secondary attack by T. piniperda was also studied in a Scots pine stand at Fredriksberg, infested by Gremmeniella abietina (Lagerberg) Morelet. in 2001. Tree mortality at Hokensas mainly occurred in areas with an average defoliation intensity of 90-100%. Tree mortality averaged 25%, and the “defoliation threshold” for tree survival was found to be 90% defoliation. Tree mortality peaked two years after the defoliation event, which coincided with high levels of pine shoot beetles. Involvement of T. piniperda in tree mortality increased with time since defoliation, and tree susceptibility to beetle attack increased with increasing defoliation intensity and decreasing dominance status of trees. As foliage of trees recovered, fewer trees were susceptible to beetle attack, and ultimately, beetle attacks ended as breeding substrate was depleted. Tree susceptibility to beetle attack was a function of tree vigour and beetle density. Growth losses at the Hokensas site were a combined effect of pine looper defoliation and shoot pruning by T. piniperda. Radial, height and volume growth losses were proportional to defoliation intensity. Whereas radial growth was little affected by beetle-induced shoot pruning, height growth was severely affected by beetle-induced damage to leading shoots. Growth losses alone, excluding tree mortality, were large enough to economically justify control of the pine looper outbreak had the outbreak been prevented in 1996. At Fredriksberg, T. piniperda colonised trees that would have survived the damage caused by G. abietina. However, trees with 90-100% foliage losses died because of the damage caused by G. abietina alone, and tree survival seemed to require that trees retained at least 20% of full foliage.