Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Design and usability testing of a user interface for three-way document merging

Word processing merge tool interfaces can show users the changes made by each editor and allow a primary editor to accept or reject individual changes to create a finished document. But when there are many changes, possibly from many editors, users may be confused by the wealth of detail and find themselves unable to be select changes thoughtfully. In this paper, we present a new merging interface that enables users to filter changes based on the type of change being made, as well as providing controls that help users choose among conflicting changes in order to produce a correctly merged document. The interface's usability was tested via a usability study conducted with ten graduate students from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The study was designed to test whether the interface would help users better understand the changes made in two revisions and enable them to choose the best revisions. While the study found both positive and negative qualities in the prototype, most participants valued the change classification feature, suggesting that it is worthy of further research.
The Social Function of Intellect

Henry Ford, it is said, commissioned a survey of the car scrap yards of America to find out if there were parts of the Model T Ford which never failed. I lis inspectors came back with reports of almost every kind of breakdown : axles, brakes, pistons all were liable to go wrong. But they drew attention to one notable exception, the kingpins of the scrapped cars invariably had years of life left in them. With ruthless logic Ford concluded that the kingpins on the Model T were too good for their job and ordered that in future they should be made to an inferior specification. Nature is surely at least as careful an economist as Henry Ford. It is not her habit to tolerate needless extravagance in the animals on her production lines: superfluous capacity is trimmed back, new capacity added only as and when it is needed. We do not expect therefore to . find that animals possess abilities which far exceed the calls that natural living makes on them. If someone were to argue as I shall suggest they might argue that some primate species (and mankind in particular) are much cleverer than they need be, we know that they are most likely to be wrong. But it is not clear why they would be wrong. This paper explores a possible answer. It is an answer which has meant for me a re-thinking of the function of intellect. A re-thinking, or merely a first-thinking? I had not previously given much thought to the biological function of intellect, and my impression is that few others have done either. I n the literature on animal intelligence there has been surprisingly little discussion of how intelligence contributes to biological fitness. Comparative psychologists have established that animals of one species perform better, for instance, on the Hebb-Williams maze than those of another, or that they are quicker to pick up learning sets or more successful on an ` insight ' problem; there have been attempts to relate performance on particular kinds of tests to particular underlying cognitive skills; there has (recently) been debate on how the same skill is to be assessed with fairness ' in animals of different species; but there has seldom been consideration given
Comparing physician and hospital manager perceptions of medical knowledge management systems success

The study is to explore the perceptions of physicians and hospital managers on the key success factors (KSF) of a medical knowledge management system (MKMS). A survey approach was conducted in four medical centers in Taiwan. A total of 340 questionnaires, including 15 for hospital managers and 70 for physicians in each hospital, were administered. Two-hundred four questionnaires responses were received, with a 60% effective response rate. Hospital managers and physicians were testified separately as various samples. Partial least square was used to analyze the data. The results found that both groups indicated user factors and policy factors as the direct factors of MKMS performance. Knowledge quality is regarded as an antecedent to user factors, while system quality is the antecedent to both user and policy factors. However, system software and hardware was supported only by managers; and organizational factors were supported only by physicians. The results reveal the high consensus between physicians and hospital managers. Political interventions could have significant effect on adoption and implementation of MKMS. Second, the study provides hospital managers additional insights into physician requirements for organizational support. Third, more physician participation and involvement are necessary when introducing and developing a MKMS.
A binary-categorization approach for classifying multiple-record Web documents using application ontologies and a probabilistic model

The amount of information available on the World Wide Web has been increasing dramatically in recent years. To enhance speedy searching and retrieving Web documents of interest, researchers and practitioners have partially relied on various information retrieval techniques. We propose a probabilistic model to classify Web documents into relevant documents and irrelevant documents with respect to a particular application ontology, which is a conceptual-model snippet of standard ontologies. Our probabilistic model is based on multivariate statistical analysis and is different from the conventional probabilistic information retrieval models. The experiments we have conducted on a set of representative Web documents indicate that the proposed probabilistic model is promising in binary-categorization of multiple-record Web documents.
Is gonococcal disease preventable? The importance of understanding immunity and pathogenesis in vaccine development

Abstract Gonorrhea is a major, global public health problem for which there is no vaccine. The continuing emergence of antibiotic-resistant strains raises concerns that untreatable Neisseria gonorrhoeae may become widespread in the near future. Consequently, there is an urgent need for increased efforts towards the development of new anti-gonococcal therapeutics and vaccines, as well as suitable models for potential pre-clinical vaccine trials. Several current issues regarding gonorrhea are discussed herein, including the global burden of disease, the emergence of antibiotic-resistance, the status of vaccine development and, in particular, a focus on the model systems available to evaluate drug and vaccine candidates. Finally, alternative approaches to evaluate vaccine candidates are presented. Such approaches may provide valuable insights into the protective mechanisms, and correlates of protection, required to prevent gonococcal transmission, local infection and disease sequelae.
Suppression of type I collagen in human scleral fibroblasts treated with extremely low-frequency electromagnetic fields

Purpose To investigate the expression differences of type I collagen (COL1A1) and its underlying mechanisms in human fetal scleral fibroblasts (HFSFs) that were treated with conditioned medium from retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells under extremely low-frequency electromagnetic fields (ELF-EMFs). Methods The ELF-EMFs used in this study were established by slidac and artificial coils. Growth of the treated HFSFs was evaluated by a cell-counting kit-8 assay. The expression of COL1A1 and matrix metalloproteinases-2 (MMP-2) in the treated HFSFs was detected by reverse transcription PCR (RT-PCR) and western blot, and the expression of transforming growth factor-β2 (TGF-β2) and basic fibroblast growth factor-2 (FGF-2) in RPE cells exposed to EMFs was detected by RT-PCR. The expression of COL1A1 and MMP-2 in HFSFs was further confirmed by immunofluorescence staining. Activation of extracellular signal-regulated kinase 1/2 (ERK1/2 also called p44/p42 mitogen-activated protein kinases [MAPK]) and p38 in HFSFs was measured by western blot. Results We found that exposure to ELF-EMFs resulted in a decreased proliferation rate of HFSFs and that addition of RPE supernatant medium could enhance this effect. Compared with that of the control cells, a significant decrease in collagen synthesis was detected in HFSFs under ELF-EMFs. However, the expression of MMP-2 was upregulated, which could be further enhanced via an RPE supernatant additive. The activities of ERK1/2 and p38 were significantly increased in HFSFs exposed to ELF-EMFs, and this effect could be enhanced by RPE supernatant medium additive. Conclusions Our results suggested that ELF-EMFs can inhibit the expression of type I collagen in HFSFs and contribute to the remodeling of the sclera.
The Simulation of Pricing Algorithms for ATM Networks

Effective bandwidth and incentive compatible pricing algorithms for ATM networks are considered for simulation using the OPNET ATM Modelling Suite. The paper focuses on the modification of AMS data structures and processes to support charging algorithms. The network models and traffic generators used for the pricing simulations are discussed in terms of the demands on multiservice networks, which support a mix of real time and best effort traffic. Suggestions are made for extending the AMS template data structures and processes to inherently support QoS connection switching, and hence charging simulations. The simulation results of the pricing simulations are presented, from which conclusions are drawn.
Patterns of mast fruiting - a stochastic approach

Mast fruiting represents a synchronous population behaviour which can spread on large landscape areas. This reproductive pattern is generally perceived as a synchronous periodic production of large seed crops and has a significant practical importance to forest natural regeneration in order to synchronize cuttings. The mechanisms of masting are still argued and models of this phenomenon are uncommon, so a stochastic approach can cast significant light on some particular aspects. Trees manage to get synchronized and coordinate their reproductive routines. But is it possible that trees get synchronized by chance, absolutely random? Using a Monte Carlo simulation of seeding years and a theoretical masting pattern, a stochastic analysis is performed in order to assess the chance of random mast fruiting. Two populations of 100 trees, with different fruiting periodicity of 2-3 years and 4-6 years, were set and the fruition dynamic was simulated for 100 years. The results show that periodicity itself cannot induce by chance the masting effect, but periodicity mathematically influences the reproductive pattern.
3D Scene Reconstruction Based on Uncalibrated Image Sequences

3D scene reconstruction is an important technique in the computer vision field. Our system can give the user a platform to reconstruct a 3D model of scene from a set of uncalibrated images which are gained by a commonly used camera. There are many key techniques in 3D reconstruction from uncalibrated image sequences, including feature matching, fundamental matrix estimation, projective reconstruction, camera self-calibration, dense stereo matching and Euclidean reconstruction. The paper is focused on above associated issues and improved some key algorithms. The effectiveness of our algorithms is evaluated in the experiments with many real image sequences.
Review: ‘Gimme five’: future challenges in multiple sclerosis. ECTRIMS Lecture 2009

This article is based on the ECTRIMS lecture given at the 25 th ECTRIMS meeting which was held in Dusseldorf, Germany, from 9 to 12 September 2009. Five challenges have been identified: (1) safeguarding the principles of medical ethics; (2) optimizing the risk/benefit ratio; (3) bridging the gap between multiple sclerosis and experimental autoimmune encephalitis; (4) promoting neuroprotection and repair; and (5) tailoring multiple sclerosis therapy to the individual patient. Each of these challenges will be discussed and placed in the context of current research into the pathogenesis and treatment of multiple sclerosis.
Speech Perception, Production and Linguistic Structure.

This attractive volume is the result of a workshop held at ATR (Advanced Telecommunications Research) Laboratories, Kyoto, in November 1990, immediately preceding the lntetnational Conference on Spoken Language Processing in Kobe. The contributions are arranged into two major sections (Speech Perception; Speech Production and Linguistic Structure), each of which has three subsectbns. Each of these contains a number of articles followed (with one exception) by several shorter commentaries; the exact distribution is: 5+2, 2+2, 5+4; 2, 3+3, 5+2. Thus there are 22 articles and 13 commentaries in all. Nearly all authors are well-established researchers, roughly one third of them Japanese, the majority from the United States, plus a few European representatives. The first subsection deals with the rather specific topic of “Contextual Effects in Vowel Perception”, with papers by Sumi Shigeno, Robert Allen Fox, Caroline B. Huang, and Masato Akagi, followed by comments from Dominic W. Massaro and Sieb G. Nooteboom. Context effects are not only interesting from a general psychophysical perspective but constitute one of the central problems faced by automatic speech recognition. The contributions by Huang and Akagi represent this latter perspective, while Shigeno and Fox are primarily concerned with modelling human perception. Shigeno’s study (a slightly condensed version of Shigeno, 1991) represents a continuation of her earlier careful work on contextual effects in the perception of isolated vowels as a function of category membership, spectral distance, and temporal proximity. The most salient result is that successive vowels show contrastive effects as long as they belong to different categories, but assimilative effects when they belong to the same category. In agreement with dual-process models of categorical perception, Shigeno suggests that assimilation occurs in auditory memory, whereas contrast arises from categorical representations. Fox reports four experiments aimed at demonstrating that phonotactic regularities of the language constrain vowel perception in syllabic contexts. He compares the identification of vowels in open syllables and in the context of a following /I/, which
Exploratory Procedure for Computer Vision

This paper deals with Exploratory Procedures for Computer Vision. The assumptions are that we have a mobile camera system with controllable focus, close/open aperture, and ability of recording its position, orientation and movement. Furthermore we assume an unknown and unstructured environment. For our analysis we consider two types of illumination sources: the point source and the extended sky-like source. The exploratory procedures determine the illumination energy, in some cases the illumination orientation, the albedo and the differentiation between the true 3D scene and its picture. The key idea is the mobile active observer. Comments University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science Technical Report No. MSCIS-88-92. This technical report is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn. edu/cis_reports/772 EXPLORATORY PROCEDURE FOR COMPUTER VISION Ruzena Bajcsy, K. Wohn and S. W. Lee MS-CIS-88-92 GRASP LAB 165 Department of Computer and Information Science School of Engineering and Applied Science University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 191 04 November 1988 Acknowledgements: This research was supported in part by DARPA grants NO001 4-85K-0018, NO001 4-88-K-0632, U.S Postal Service contract 104230-87-H0001 IM-0195, NSF grants MCS-8219196-CER, IR184-10413-A02 and U.S. Army grants DAA29-84-K-0061, DAA29-84-9-0027. Exploratory Procedure for Computer Vision Ruzena Bajcsy K. Wohn S.W. Lee Computer and Informations Science Department University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104
Progression of symptoms and functioning among female cardiac patients with and without diabetes.

OBJECTIVE To determine if older women with both heart disease and diabetes experience worse physical and psychosocial functioning and higher symptom burden over an 18-month period compared with those with heart disease alone. METHODS Data from older women with heart disease (≥60 years, n = 1008, 18% with diabetes) were used to assess the impact of diabetes on physical functioning (Sickness Impact Profile [SIP]-Physical and Six-Minute Walk test [6MWT]), psychosocial functioning (SIP-Psychosocial and depressive symptoms), and physical symptom burden (cardiac and general) at baseline and 4, 12, and 18 months later. Generalized estimating equation models compared trends in outcomes over time between groups with and without diabetes. RESULTS Across all four time points, women with heart disease and diabetes had greater functional impairment, as indicated by higher SIP scores, than those without diabetes (43%-71% higher SIP-Physical scores and 32%-65% higher SIP-Pyschosocial scores; all p ≤ 0.002). 6MWT distance was 17%-30% less in the diabetes group across time points (all p ≤ 0.002). Depressive symptoms were 27%-39% higher in the diabetes group (all p < 0.03) except at month 4. Women with diabetes scored 15%-29% higher on a physical symptom index across time points (all p < 0.05) than those without diabetes; no significant differences were observed in cardiac symptoms until month 18 (diabetes group 29% higher, p = 0.02). Subgroups with and without diabetes in this sample experienced significantly different trends over time in SIP-Physical scores (p = 0.02) and 6MWT distance (p = 0.05), such that the disadvantage of the diabetes group at baseline was greater 18 months later. CONCLUSIONS Women with comorbid diabetes and heart disease are vulnerable to poor health-related quality of life, particularly in terms of physical functioning and symptoms, and require special efforts from clinical care providers to ameliorate a potential downward trend in these outcomes over time.
Watching Closely: A Guide to Ethnographic Observation

more violent in many places around the world. Nepstad also argues that we know little about movements that protest non-state targets (organized crime, police corruption, structural violence, etc.), and that more work should attend to shifts between nonviolent and violent tactics within the same movements. Although we often need good comprehensive texts by authoritative voices, it can be hard to find books that are engaging, understandable, up to date, and with sufficient coverage to orient students and those new to an area of study. This book is a rare exception. It is likely to jumpstart future scholarship in what Nepstad calls a ‘‘small but vibrant field’’ that has come ‘‘into the scholarly limelight’’ (p. x).
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Cc by Immoral Scene Censoring System

Harmful contents are rising in television day by day and this motivates the essence of more research in fast and reliable obscene and immoral material filtering. Adultery content image recognition is an important component in each filtering system. We use Skin detection process of finding skin colored pixels and regions in each frame of a video. This process is typically used as a preprocessing step to find regions that potentially have human faces and limbs in images. Many computer vision approaches have been developed for skin detection. Immoral imagery or as they put it pornography has been there for a long time and with the advent of web it has only just grown. Adultery is considered as obscene material whose intention is to provoke sexual arousal. So, it should be managed and certainly shouldn't be popping where it is not meant to. So we propose to design a system that takes a frame and detects if it is a pornographic image or not. We intend to be using SVM (Support Vector Machines) to exploit primitive information from different images and use the knowledge to determine whether given image is pornographic or not.
Effect of temperature, irradiation, humidity and wind on ideal/double diode PV system performance

In this paper, MATLAB/Simulink modeling of ideal and double diode photovoltaic (PV) system is presented based on their mathematical modeling. A comparative transient analysis of ideal and double diode PV system has been done by using a resistive load. Furthermore, effect of climatic conditions such as varying solar irradiation, wind speed, humidity and temperature on the designed ideal and double diode PV system is examined. The acquired results show acceptable performance for real-time model of PV system.
Social determinants of tuberculosis in Europe: a prospective ecological study

Tuberculosis (TB) is considered to be a disease of poverty, since its incidence is exacerbated by socioeconomic factors, inconsistent or partial treatment practices, and immigration from endemic countries. A prospective country level study, using a comprehensive dataset of TB incidence and prevalence taken from countries within the World Health Organization (WHO) European region, was conducted. We employed quintile regression to investigate the prospective association between baseline (measured in 2000) and a nation’s wealth, level of egalitarianism, migration rate, health-related lifestyle and social capital with TB incidence and prevalence over a 10-yr period (2000–2009). We found that ∼50% of TB variation is accounted for by a nation's wealth and level of egalitarianism. We observed a negative prospective association between logged gross domestic product and TB rates, and a positive prospective association between income inequality and TB. National income levels per capita and income inequality are important predictors for TB incidence and prevalence in the WHO European region. They account for 50% of country-level variation, indicating the importance of a combined absolute and relative socioeconomic disadvantage in the development of TB. These findings also provide a tool for forecasting potential fluctuations in the level of TB epidemics in the WHO European region, with respect to socioeconomic changes.
An efficient segmentation method for ultrasound images based on a semi-supervised approach and patch-based features

Segmenting ultrasound images is a challenging problem where standard unsupervised segmentation methods such as the well-known Chan-Vese method fail. We propose in this paper an efficient segmentation method for this class of images. Our proposed algorithm is based on a semi-supervised approach (user labels) and the use of image patches as data features. We also consider the Pearson distance between patches, which has been shown to be robust w.r. t speckle noise present in ultrasound images. Our results on phantom and clinical data show a very high similarity agreement with the ground truth provided by a medical expert.
PZT Transduction of High-Overtone Contour- Mode Resonators

—This paper presents the Butterworth-van Dyke model and quantitative comparison that explore the design space of lead zirconate titanate-only (PZT) and PZT on 3-, 5-, and 10-μm single-crystal silicon (SCS) high-overtone width-extensional mode (WEM) resonators with identical lateral dimensions for incorporation into radio frequency microelectro-mechanical systems (RF MEMS) filters and oscillators. A novel fabrication technique was developed to fabricate the resonators with and without a silicon carrier layer using the same mask set on the same wafer. The air-bridge metal routings were implemented to carry electrical signals while avoiding large capacitances from the bond-pads. We theoretically derived and experimentally measured the correlation of motional impedance (R X), quality factor (Q), and resonance frequency (f) with the resonators' silicon layer thickness (t Si) up to frequencies of operation above 1 GHz.