Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Projective Point Matching Using Modified Particle Swarm Optimization

A projective point matching algorithm based on modified particle swarm optimization is presented. In the paper, the point matching problem turns into an optimization with two series of parameters, projective transform parameters and correspondent mapping parameters. Firstly, a modified particle swarm optimization (PSO) is introduced and a new rule searching for correspondences, closer point matching rule, is also proposed. We use PSO find the optimal solution. It updates the best geometric transform parameters constantly till find the global best, and in each iteration the closer point matching rule is applied to get the correspondent mapping parameters under the temporary fixed transform parameters. Experiments on both synthetic points and real images demonstrate the algorithm is reliable and validate.
The Independence of Phonological and Orthographic Lexical Forms: Evidence from Aphasia

WMA suffers from damage to the semantic component of the lexical semantic system and from damage to sublexical phonology-orthography and orthography-phonology conversion procedures. His performance on picture naming tasks that require two consecutive responses was used to explore issues concerning the relations between the phonological and orthographic components of the lexical system. Responses to tasks requiring responses in different modalities (one oral and one written) often resulted in lexically "inconsistent" responses. For example, to a picture representing pliers, WMA said "pincers," but wrote saw; and, to a picture representing peppers, he wrote tomato but said "artichoke. " By contrast, inconsistent responses never occurred in tasks that required two consecutive responses in the same modality (oral or written). In these tasks, WMA always produced the same (correct or incorrect) word twice. These results rule out the hypothesis thatphonological mediation is necessary for writing, and suggest inst.
Finite time consensus for leader following multiagent system with distributed observer design

This paper is concerned with a finite time consensus for a multi-agent system designed by distributed observer and pinning control technique without assuming that the interaction graph is connected. Distributed observers are designed for the second-order follower-agents, under the common assumption that the velocity of the active leader cannot be measured in real time. Some dynamic neighbor-based rules and protocols, consisting of distributed controllers and observers for the autonomous agents, are developed to keep updating the information of the leader. Also it is proved that each agent can follow the active leader using common Lyapunov function (CLF). Finally, a numerical example is given for illustration.
Active Pixel Sensor Arrays in 90 / 65 nm CMOS-Technologies with vertically stacked photodiodes

S.Henker, C. Mayr, J.-U. Schlüßler, R. Schüffny, A. Heittmann, U. Ramacher 1 Univ. of Technology Dresden, Institute of Circuits and Systems (IEE), Helmholtzstr. 10, 01062 Dresden, Germany, {henker,mayr,schlue,schueffn}@iee.et. tu-dresden.de, Tel. : ++49 351 463 33602, Fax: ++49 351 463 37794 2 Qimonda AG, Munich, Germany, Arne.Heittmann@qimonda.com, Tel. : ++49 89 234 52067 3 Infineon AG, Munich, Germany, Ulrich.Ramacher@infineon.com, Tel. : ++49 89 234 41296
Neural Correlates of Coherence-Break Detection During Reading of Narratives

ABSTRACT This functional magnetic resonance imaging study examined the neural correlates of coherence-break detection during reading in the context of a contradiction paradigm. Young adults (N = 31, ages 19–27) read short narratives (half contained a break in coherence) that were presented sentence by sentence in a self-paced, slow event-related design. Reading times were longer for incoherent compared to coherent target sentences, and coherence-break detection was associated with activation in a large network of brain regions that were more active in response to incoherent than to coherent information. Some regions seemed exclusively associated with processing of incoherent information. In addition, activation in the precuneus was negatively correlated with working-memory capacity. Together, these findings shed light on the functional contributions of these brain regions to coherence-monitoring processes during reading and help bridge cognitive and neurobiological accounts of the cognitive processes involved in the construction of coherent mental representations of narrative texts.
Explanatory Dualism in Empirical Aesthetics: A New Reading

The last decade has seen a significant increase in empirical research into the nature of art and aesthetic experience in the Anglo- American scientific community. Much of the impetus for this came from the publication of three special issues of the present journal on the theme of 'Art and the Brain' (Vol. 6, no. 6-7, 1999; Vol. 7, no. 8-9, 2000; Vol.11, no. 3-4, 2004). A decade or so later, it seems timely to consider the extent to which these new approaches have filtered through into wider philosophical understanding. Many philosophers express scepticism towards empirical aesthetics. This paper seeks to re-examine the grounds for any such scepticism and proposes a new reading of the explanatory power of scientific approaches. It begins by separating the data provided by such theories into three categories. Having identified a particular conceptual problem, it argues that many empirical accounts fail to distinguish sufficiently between the aesthetic and the artistic, and that this is a source of considerable philosophical concern. It then suggests that empirical aesthetics should be divided into two branches, namely empirical aesthetics and empirical art theory. Although such a division may seem to restrict the explanatory reach of scientific accounts somewhat in philosophy, it highlights the numerous ways in which empirical investigations can nonetheless strengthen and benefit philosophical analyses.
An efficient power multiple valued look up table for adder circuit using quaternary FPGA

VLSI technology is used for designing, verifying, fabricating and testing a chip. In look up table (LUT) system, the more interconnections are increasingly the dominant contributor to delay, area, and energy consumption in CMOS digital circuits. In existing system would require four QLUTs to properly implement this function, two QLUTs for each output, that is sum and carry out, working with the two possible values of the carry in. This method will have signal propagation delay and hence its decrease the speed of the circuit and more power is consumed. In order to overcome this problem multiple-valued logic is used, it can decrease the average power required for level transitions and reduces the number of required interconnections and also reducing the impact of interconnections on overall energy consumption. In proposed scheme, a quaternary look up table structure is designed to replace or complement binary LUT in FPGA. The proposed design include full adder is constructed using 16:1 multiplexer which overcome the limitations of existing method. The design will be synthesized using Modelsim 6.0 and Xilinx 14.2.
How video production affects student engagement: an empirical study of MOOC videos

Videos are a widely-used kind of resource for online learning. This paper presents an empirical study of how video production decisions affect student engagement in online educational videos. To our knowledge, ours is the largest-scale study of video engagement to date, using data from 6.9 million video watching sessions across four courses on the edX MOOC platform. We measure engagement by how long students are watching each video, and whether they attempt to answer post-video assessment problems. Our main findings are that shorter videos are much more engaging, that informal talking-head videos are more engaging, that Khan-style tablet drawings are more engaging, that even high-quality pre-recorded classroom lectures might not make for engaging online videos, and that students engage differently with lecture and tutorial videos. Based upon these quantitative findings and qualitative insights from interviews with edX staff, we developed a set of recommendations to help instructors and video producers take better advantage of the online video format. Finally, to enable researchers to reproduce and build upon our findings, we have made our anonymized video watching data set and analysis scripts public. To our knowledge, ours is one of the first public data sets on MOOC resource usage.
How small is a small cloud

The interplay between clouds and aerosols and their contribution to the radiation budget is one of the largest uncertainties of climate change. Most work to date has separated cloudy and cloud-free areas in order to evaluate the individual radiative forcing of aerosols, clouds, and aerosol effects on clouds. Here we examine the size distribution and the optical properties of small, sparse cumulus clouds and the associated optical properties of what is considered a cloud-free atmosphere within the cloud field. We show that any separation between clouds and cloud free atmosphere will incur errors in the calculated radiative forcing. The nature of small cumulus cloud size distributions suggests that at any resolution, a significant fraction of the clouds are missed, and their optical properties are relegated to the apparent cloud-free optical properties. At the same time, the cloudy portion incorporates significant contribution from non-cloudy pixels. We show that the largest contribution to the total cloud reflectance comes from the smallest clouds and that the spatial resolution changes the apparent energy flux of a broken cloudy scene. When changing the resolution from 30 m to 1 km (Landsat to MODIS) the average "cloud-free" reflectance at 1.65 μm increases from 0.0095 to 0.0115 (>20%), the cloud reflectance decreases from 0.13 to 0.066 (~50%), and the cloud coverage doubles, resulting in an important impact on climate forcing estimations. The apparent aerosol forcing is on the order of 0.5 to 1 Wm −2 per cloud field.
A novel all-at-once learning method for multi-class Support Vector Machine

In this paper, first we deal with multi-class problems with Support Vector Machine, and then propose a novel and efficient all-at-once method with Support Vector Machine for solving multi-class problems. We evaluate our method for some benchmark data sets and experiment result shows that classification performance of our approach is comparable with one-against-all decomposition solved by the SMO algorithm, and the method not only saves computation time but also keeps accuracy of classification.
Impact of passive humidification on clinical outcomes of mechanically ventilated patients: A meta‐analysis of randomized controlled trials *

Objective: Previous meta‐analyses reported advantages of passive (i.e., heat and moisture exchangers, or HMEs) compared with active (i.e., heated humidifiers, or HHs) humidifiers in reducing the incidence of ventilator‐associated pneumonia, but they did not examine the effect of these devices on mortality, length of intensive care unit stay, and duration of mechanical ventilation. In addition, relevant data were recently published. Design: Meta‐analysis of randomized controlled trials comparing HMEs with HHs for the management of mechanically ventilated patients to determine the impact of these devices on clinical outcomes of such patients. Methods: We searched PubMed and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials as well as reference lists from publications, with no language restrictions. We estimated pooled odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs), using a random effects model. Results: Thirteen randomized controlled trials, studying 2,580 patients, were included. There was no difference in incidence of ventilator‐associated pneumonia among patients managed with HMEs and HHs (OR 0.85, 95% CI 0.62–1.16). There was no difference between the compared groups regarding mortality (OR 0.98, 95% CI 0.80–1.20), length of intensive care unit stay (weighted mean differences, ‐0.68 days, 95% CI ‐3.65 to 2.30), duration of mechanical ventilation (weighted mean differences, 0.11 days, 95% CI ‐0.90 to 1.12), or episodes of airway occlusion (OR 2.26, 95% CI 0.55–9.28). HMEs were cheaper than HHs in each of the randomized controlled trials. Conclusion: The available evidence does not support the preferential performance of either passive or active humidifiers in mechanical ventilation patients in terms of ventilator‐associated pneumonia incidence, mortality, or morbidity.
Une approche de la stabilisation interne par l ’ analyse algébrique I . Factorisations doublement faiblement copremières

Résumé— Ce papier a pour but de donner une vue générale des différents résultats récemment obtenus sur la stabilisation interne des systèmes linéaires de dimension infinie. On s’attachera à faire ressortir les principales idées plus que la technique utilisée. En particulier, nous donnerons des conditions nécessaires et suffissantes à la stabilisation interne et à l’existence de factorisations doublement copremières faibles ou fortes. Nous caractériserons alors les algèbres de systèmes SISO stables A sur lesquelles tout système − défini par une matrice de transfert à coefficients dans le corps de fractions K = Q(A) de A − est stabilisable de manière interne ou admet des factorisations doublement copremières faibles ou fortes.
Region Authority ( RA ) Collaborated Certificate Organization and Management in VANET

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are receiving increasing attention from academics due to the various applications and potential tremendous benefits they offer for future VANET users. Safety information exchange enables lifecritical applications, such as the alerting functionality during medical emergencies, and thus, plays a key role in VANET applications. In a VANET, vehicles rely on the integrity of receiving data for deciding when to present alerts to drivers. The communication between car to car, car to the roadside unit done through wireless communication. That is why security is an important concern area for vehicular network application. For authentication purposes large amount of bandwidth is consumed and the performance becomes low. In VANET some serious network attacks such as man in the middle attack, masquerading is possible. In this paper various previous researches done in this area are analyzed and compared on the basis of drawbacks of those approaches. After that the different issues on VANET are discussed and finally conclude with proposed idea. Keywords-Security, Region authority (RA), on board unit (OBUs), certificate revocation lists (CRLs).
Evaluating the state of the art in coreference resolution for electronic medical records

BACKGROUND The fifth i2b2/VA Workshop on Natural Language Processing Challenges for Clinical Records conducted a systematic review on resolution of noun phrase coreference in medical records. Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2) and the Veterans Affair (VA) Consortium for Healthcare Informatics Research (CHIR) partnered to organize the coreference challenge. They provided the research community with two corpora of medical records for the development and evaluation of the coreference resolution systems. These corpora contained various record types (ie, discharge summaries, pathology reports) from multiple institutions. METHODS The coreference challenge provided the community with two annotated ground truth corpora and evaluated systems on coreference resolution in two ways: first, it evaluated systems for their ability to identify mentions of concepts and to link together those mentions. Second, it evaluated the ability of the systems to link together ground truth mentions that refer to the same entity. Twenty teams representing 29 organizations and nine countries participated in the coreference challenge. RESULTS The teams' system submissions showed that machine-learning and rule-based approaches worked best when augmented with external knowledge sources and coreference clues extracted from document structure. The systems performed better in coreference resolution when provided with ground truth mentions. Overall, the systems struggled in solving coreference resolution for cases that required domain knowledge.
Technical Note : Comparing and ranking soil-moisture indices performance over Europe , through remote-sensing of vegetation

Technical Note: Comparing and ranking soil-moisture indices performance over Europe, through remote-sensing of vegetation E. Peled, E. Dutra, P. Viterbo, and A. Angert The Institute of Earth Sciences, The Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 91904, Israel IDL, CGUL, Univ. of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal Institute of Meteorology, Lisbon, Portugal Received: 24 August 2009 – Accepted: 31 August 2009 – Published: 5 October 2009 Correspondence to: A. Angert (angert@huji.ac.il) Published by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union.
Exposure to sperm competition risk improves survival of virgin males

Sperm competition between the ejaculates of multiple males for the fertilization of a given set of ova is taxonomically widespread. Males have evolved remarkable adaptations to increase their reproductive success under postcopulatory sexual selection, which in many species includes the ability to modify behaviour and ejaculate characteristics plastically to match the perceived level of sperm competition. Males of the model species Drosophila melanogaster increase mating duration and modify seminal fluid composition in response to short-term changes in sperm competition risk. If these responses increase a male's total investment in reproduction, he must either trade-off this cost against other life-history traits or suffer reduced survival. We tested whether mounting a plastic sperm competition response bears an instantaneous survival cost, and instead found that male D. melanogaster exposed to a high risk of sperm competition survive 12 per cent longer than those at low risk, equating to a 49 per cent reduction in the hourly hazard of death. This striking effect was found only among virgins: the high cost of mating in this species eliminates any such benefit among non-virgin males. Our results suggest that the improvement in survival found among virgins may be a product of males’ tactical responses to sperm competition.
Adenovirus-mediated ING 4 / PTEN double tumor suppressor gene co-transfer modified by RGD enhances antitumor activity in human nasopharyngeal carcinoma cells

Inhibitor of growth-4 (ING4) is a member of the inhibitor of growth (ING) family and acts as a tumor suppressor protein. PTEN is a phosphatase and shows potent and extensive antitumor activity. In this study, we constructed an RGD-modified bicistronic ING4/PTEN adenovirus (Ad.RGD-ING4-PTEN) and comprehensively investigated its effects following modification of the CNE human nasopharyngeal carcinoma cell line both in vitro and in vivo. We demonstrated that Ad.RGD-ING4-PTEN enhanced growth inhibition and apoptosis. Furthermore, expression of P21, Bax and cleaved caspase-3 was upregulated, while that of Bcl-2 and survivin was downregulated in CNE cells and CNE xenografted tumors. Moreover, Ad.RGD-ING4-PTEN treatment additively downregulated CD34, VEGF and microvessel density in subcutaneously (s.c.) xenografted CNE cell tumors. The enhanced antitumor activity generated by Ad.RGDING4-PTEN was closely associated with activation of the intrinsic and extrinsic apoptotic pathways and additive inhibition of tumor angiogenesis both in vitro and in vivo. On the basis of this evidence, it is believed that cancer gene therapy combining two tumor suppressors such as ING4 and PTEN can be used to establish an effective and novel therapeutic strategy for nasopharyngeal carcinoma and other cancers.
Efficient Provision of Experience Goods: Evidence from Antidepressant Choice

In the market for depression care, physicians face uncertainty about how a newly diagnosed patient will respond to available treatments. I design a framework to analyze how price and drug promotion influence the physician’s recommendation as she sequentially searches for the best match. Unlike earlier work on learning, I allow the physician to update her priors both on the drug tried and on drugs with similar characteristics. I find that insurer policies that prioritize treatments with high predicted patient adherence outperform commonly used tiered pricing, both in reducing spending and improving health. In addition, I develop a new treatment protocol that incorporates information on observed quit rates. This protocol complements existing guidelines built largely from clinical trials.
Hostility, Gender, and Cardiac Autonomic Control

Objective Although considerable evidence implicates hostility in the development of coronary artery disease (CAD), the pathogenic mechanisms remain poorly understood. We have developed a psychophysiological model that holds that altered autonomic nervous system function links psychological traits with CAD outcomes. In laboratory studies, stressors reduce high-frequency (HF) heart period variability, an index of cardiac vagal modulation. With ambulatory electrocardiographic recording, we demonstrated in a predominantly male sample that hostility was inversely associated with HF power, but only during waking hours. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that hostile individuals experience multiple stressful interpersonal transactions each day, resulting in overall lower HF power during the day but not at night. Methods To further evaluate this hypothesis, we screened 96 subjects using the Cook-Medley Hostility Scale and selected 15 men and 15 women representing a wide distribution of hostility. These subjects were studied in a laboratory session assessing reactivity to psychological and orthostatic challenges with continuous electrocardiographic, blood pressure, and respiration monitoring. We predicted that for men and women, hostility would be inversely related to reductions in HF power in response to challenge. Results In response to mental stressors, all measures of heart period variability change were inversely related to hostility as predicted. No such relationships were found for responses to tilt. The data suggested a possible effect of gender on these relationships. Conclusions These data add to the growing body of evidence showing that hostility influences vagal modulation of the cardiovascular system and suggest that altered autonomic control is a pathogenic mechanism linking hostility and CAD.
Design and Analysis of Ultra Low Power True Single Phase Clock CMOS 2/3 Prescaler

In this paper the power consumption and operating frequency of true single phase clock (TSPC) and extended true single phase clock (E-TSPC) frequency prescalers are investigated. Based on this study a new low power and improved speed TSPC 2/3 prescaler is proposed which is silicon verified. Compared with the existing TSPC architectures the proposed 2/3 prescaler is capable of operating up to 5 GHz and ideally, a 67% reduction of power consumption is achieved when compared under the same technology at supply voltage of 1.8 V. This extremely low power consumption is achieved by radically decreasing the sizes of transistors, reducing the number of switching stages and blocking the power supply to one of the D flip-flops (DFF) during Divide-by-2 operation. A divide-by-32/33 dual modulus prescaler implemented with this 2/3 prescaler using a chartered 0.18 ¿m CMOS technology is capable of operating up to 4.5 GHz with a power consumption of 1.4 mW.