Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cognitive Profiles and Subtypes of Patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment: Data from a Clinical Follow-Up Study *

Background: Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a heterogeneous condition with a variety of clinical outcomes, the presence of which correlates with risk of Alzheimer’s disease as well as pre-clinical stages of other dementia subtypes. The aims of this study were to assess the specific patterns of cognitive profiles and to identify changes from baseline to 24 weeks in patients with MCI using detailed neuropsychological testing. Methods: We consecutively recruited 120 MCI patients at baseline according to the Petersen’s clinical diagnostic criteria, who were admitted to the Dementia and Memory Clinics. We analyzed patients who fulfilled both inclusion and exclusion criteria for MCI and classified them into four subtypes according to deficits in major cognitive domains; amnestic MCI single domain (aMCI-s), amnestic multiple domain MCI (aMCI-m), non-amnestic single domain MCI (naMCI-s) and non-amnestic multiple domain MCI (naMCI-m). Four groups of MCI were evaluated by a detailed neuropsychological battery test. Results: 83 patients with MCI at the 24-week follow-up were classified into four subtypes. The most frequent subtype was amnestic multi-domain MCI, with the frequency of MCI subtypes as follows: aMCI-s (n = 21, 25.3%), aMCI-m (n = 53, 63.9%), naMCI-s (n = 5, 6.0%) and naMCI-m (n = 4, 4.8%). In the major cognitive items of the SNSB-D, there were significant changes between the initial and follow-up tests in the domains of language, memory and the fron-tal/executive function (p < 0.05), except for attention, in all MCI patient subtypes. At 24-weeks follow-up, the conversion rate to Alzheimer’s disease was 2.4% (n = 2) from a subtype of amnestic multi-domain MCI. Conclusions: Our study revealed the most frequent subtype of MCI to be multiple domain amnestic MCI, with this subtype having a higher tendency of conversion to Alzheimer’s disease.
Linearly Homomorphic Encryption from DDH

We design a linearly homomorphic encryption scheme whose security relies on the hardness of the decisional Diﬃe-Hellman problem. Our approach requires some special features of the underlying group. In particular, its order is unknown and it contains a subgroup in which the discrete logarithm problem is tractable. Therefore, our instantiation holds in the class group of a non maximal order of an imaginary quadratic ﬁeld. Its algebraic structure makes it possible to obtain such a linearly homomorphic scheme whose message space is the whole set of integers modulo a prime p and which supports an unbounded number of additions modulo p from the ciphertexts. A notable diﬀerence with previous works is that, for the ﬁrst time, the security does not depend on the hardness of the factorization of integers. As a consequence, under some conditions, the prime p can be scaled to ﬁt the application needs.
Foolishness and identity: Amartya Sen and Adam Smith

Drawing on Amartya Sen the paper aims at a better understanding of the motivational foundation of the economic agent by analysing Adam Smith’s insights into the foolishness of human ambitions. It inquires whether there is another side to the pursuit of self-interest in Adam Smith and particularly accentuates his parable of the poor man’s son as a prototypical example. Complementing the standard views of the self and their recent extensions, the present analysis of the parable advances a description of economic identity based on selfreflexivity and conscious change of preferences.
Identifying Brain Activity Specifically Related to the Maintenance and Perceptual Consequence of Central Sensitization in Humans

Central sensitization (CS) refers to an increase in the excitability of spinal dorsal horn neurons that results from, and far outlasts the initiating nociceptive input. Here, functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to examine whether supraspinal activity might contribute to the maintenance of CS in humans. A crossover parametric design was used to distinguish and control for brain activity that is related to the consequence of increased pain experienced during CS. When the intensity of pain during CS and normal states were matched, only activity within the brainstem, including the mesencephalic pontine reticular formation, and the anterior thalami remained increased during CS. Further analyses revealed that activity in the isolated brainstem area correlated positively with the force of noxious stimulation only during CS, whereas activity in the isolated thalamic area was not modulated parametrically in either CS or normal states. Additionally, the mean activity in the isolated brainstem area was increased only during CS, whereas the mean activity in the isolated thalamic area was increased in both states, albeit less so in the normal state. Together, these findings suggest a specific role of the brainstem for the maintenance of CS in humans. Regarding brain areas related to the consequence of increased pain perception during CS, we found that only cortical activity, mainly in the primary somatosensory area, was significantly correlated with intensity of pain that was attributable to both the force of noxious stimulation used and state in which noxious stimulation was applied.
Using Xpert MTB/RIF

Xpert MTB/RIF is an automated real-time polymerase chain reaction test for simultaneous detection of tuberculosis and rifampicin resistance. Xpert MTB/RIF has demonstrated excellent accuracy in clinical evaluation studies, but has reduced sensitivity for detection of smear-negative tuberculosis. Since sample processing and detection are largely automated, Xpert MTB/RIF is potentially suitable for implementation in resource-limited settings. There are, however, a number of practical constraints to the use of Xpert at the point-of-care. Xpert remains a relatively costly test, and clear demonstration of cost-effectiveness will be needed to support efforts to scale up testing in high burden countries.
Building Capacity for Open and Distance Learning (ODL) in West Africa Sub-region: The Pivotal Role of RETRIDAL

The paper posits the Regional Training and Research Institute for Distance and Open Learning (RETRIDAL) as an institution established for the purpose of enhancing Open and Distance Learning in the West African sub-region. The institute has pursued this mandate with an unparalleled vigour since its establishment in 2003 —a partnership of the Commonwealth of Learning and the National Open University of Nigeria. It is the opinion of this paper that enhancing the Open and Distance Learning mode of education in the West African subregion will require building capacity. Consequently, RETRIDAL has championed this cause through workshops and training sessions as well as commissioning research studies in Nigeria and other West African countries. The objective is to produce suitably qualified manpower that is able to utilise ODL to mitigate the exploding demand for access to education in the sub-region. The paper also foresees a future of ODL and RETRIDAL for West Africa, as many universities are keying into the distance education paradigm.
Dynamic web server construction on the intranet using a change management framework

As organizations increasingly emphasize effective collaborative working through networked systems, the World Wide Web (WWW) server and associated intranet technologies are gaining wider acceptance as a new enterprise-wide information systems paradigm. In an intranet collaborative working environment, data used in the web server are usually modified more frequently than are those used in a traditional internet web server. Thus, to support synchronous collaboration without causing any inconsistency among multiple concurrent users, the intranet web server must provide users with synchronized and consistent views of shared data. However, current web technologies have limitations in supporting this, largely because the existing Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is unidirectional and does not allow web servers to send messages to their web browsers without first receiving requests from them. This paper proposes a web-based change management framework that can overcome such limitations and support synchronous collaboration in an intranet computing environment. The web-based change management framework facilitates management of dependency relationships between shared data in the web server and dependent user views in the client web browser and allows the web server to actively propagate changing details of the shared objects to all users referencing them. On the basis of the change management framework, we propose a dynamic web server that can support synchronous collaboration in various intranet-based collaborative systems including concurrent engineering design systems and electronic approval systems. The prototype system of the dynamic web server is developed on a commercial Object-oriented Database Management System (ODBMS) called OBJECTSTORE using the C++ programming language.
- 1-A Method of Computational Correction for Optical Distortion in Head-Mounted Displays

Optical distortion is one of the optical aberrations of optical systems that do not affect image sharpness. Thus, it can be beneficial to correct optical distortion computationally rather than optically. Computational correction versus optical correction will generally yields lighter optical systems. This is of great importance for head-mounted displays where the weight of the viewer needs to be minimized for efficient performance, safety, and optimum duration of usage. We shall describe in this paper, one method of computational correction that consists in warping polygon vertices. It is the case, however, that the algorithms given can be easily rewritten to handle pixels rather than vertices warpings.
SODA: Service Oriented Device Architecture

We now see an increasing need and opportunity to create interfaces between the physical world of sensors and actuators and the software world of enterprise systems. To eliminate much of the complexity and cost associated with integrating devices into highly distributed enterprise systems, we propose leveraging existing and emerging standards from both the embedded-device and IT domains within a service-oriented device architecture (SODA)
Family Rituals and the Potential for Interaction Design

Drawing on a field study with eight families in northern England, we explore the traditions and rituals carried out at Christmas, looking at the artifacts and processes that constitute family life at this time of year. In addition to individual differences, a common pattern emerges: an extended preparation is carried out by the hosting household over a few weeks to set up the celebration and build expectations; preparation gives way to a short but intense celebration shared with the family or intimate friends; then decorations are stored and there is a return to normal life. The celebration is across generations, and everyone takes part. We note examples of new and evolving rituals. Starting from the three identified phases, we discuss the theoretical and technical implications of our findings for the design of more sympathetic technology that holds potential for augmenting family rituals sensitively and possibly creating new ones.
Modeling of Driver Behavior in Real World Scenarios Using Multiple Noninvasive Sensors

With the development of new in-vehicle technology, drivers are exposed to more sources of distraction, which can lead to an unintentional accident. Monitoring the driver attention level has become a relevant research problem. This is the precise aim of this study. A database containing 20 drivers was collected in real-driving scenarios. The drivers were asked to perform common secondary tasks such as operating the radio, phone and a navigation system. The collected database comprises of various noninvasive sensors including the controller area network-bus (CAN-Bus), video cameras and microphone arrays. The study analyzes the effects in driver behaviors induced by secondary tasks. The corpus is analyzed to identify multimodal features that can be used to discriminate between normal and task driving conditions. Separate binary classifiers are trained to distinguish between normal and each of the secondary tasks, achieving an average accuracy of 77.2%. When a joint, multi-class classifier is trained, the system achieved accuracies of 40.8%, which is significantly higher than chances (12.5%). We observed that the classifiers' accuracy varies across secondary tasks, suggesting that certain tasks are more distracting than others. Motivated by these results, the study builds statistical models in the form of Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) to quantify the actual deviations in driver behaviors from the expected normal driving patterns. The study includes task independent and task dependent models. Building upon these results, a regression model is proposed to obtain a metric that characterizes the attention level of the driver. This metric can be used to signal alarms, preventing collision and improving the overall driving experience.
Apparent but not real increase in asthma prevalence during the 1990s

The authors investigated changes in asthma prevalence and perception of bronchoconstriction over 6 yrs in adults of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Postal questionnaires were sent to 6,000 subjects aged 20–44 yrs in 1992–1993 and 1998–1999. Random samples of 600 responders had assessments of atopy, airway responsiveness, and their ability to perceive methacholine-induced bronchoconstriction. The prevalences of asthmatic symptoms, physician-diagnosis, and medication use increased by an average of 4.4%, particularly in subjects aged <30 yrs (8.7 versus 2.7). Atopy prevalence increased from 25% to 31% but atopics and nonatopics had similar mean changes in questionnaire data (5.2 versus 3.4). The probability of a positive methacholine test decreased as did the mean methacholine dose/response slope (0.00527 to 0.00379), indicating lower levels of airway responsiveness. This can be largely explained by an increase in use of inhaled corticosteroids (5.0–9.3%). The proportion of subjects perceiving bronchoconstriction during methacholine tests increased from 63 to 77%. The authors conclude that current changes in asthma epidemiology in adults may result from increased awareness of symptoms (and/or an increased willingness to report them), and from an increased willingness of physicians to make the diagnosis and prescribe treatment, not from increased disease prevalence.
A multi-secret sharing scheme based on general linear groups

A threshold secret sharing scheme has many practical applications, such as opening a bank vault, launching a nuclear, or authenticating an electronic funds transfer. The known matrix projection secret sharing scheme needs a security channel which is unpractical. To overcome this problem, a multi-secret sharing scheme based on general linear groups over finite fields is proposed.In this scheme,each participant selects her/his secret shadow by herself/himself and the dealer need not deliver any secret information to each participant. So a secure channel among the dealer and participants is no longer needed and the cost of the system can be lowered.The security of the proposed scheme is based on the difficulty to solve the discrete logarithm problem on general linear groups over finite fields and difficulty to break Shamir's secret sharing scheme.
Issues in Implementation of Coeducation in Turkish Education System: A Historical Research on 1869 Statute on General Education

Though the Imperial Edict of Gulhane, which is regarded as the real beginning of modernization in the Ottoman Empire, does not contain any direct article on education, Tanzimat (Reorganization of the Ottoman Empire) and the process following it directly affected the education system in the country. The boards formed and the regulations issued in that period were of great importance. Maarif-i Umumiye Nizamnamesi (Statute on General Education) prepared by 7-person committee led by the Minister of Education Saffet Pasha under the influence of the French education system and published on the 1 st of September 1869 is a comprehensive text regulating education. This statute, which consists of 198 articles, involves teacher training and placement, determination of school stages, principles about inspection and assessment, educational administration, right to education, training allowances, provincial organization, testing system, and so on. Coeducation was not a problem in the Ottoman Empire because girls were allowed to receive only primary education. With the 15th article of the Statute on General Education, coeducation was prohibited. However, some documents in the state archives prove that some schools and practices disobeyed this ban. That indicates that not every law introduced was enforced across the country. This may have been because decisions were implemented differently in different cities or regions due to the non-equality of conditions.
Automatic extraction of cue phrases for important sentences in lecture speech and automatic lecture speech summarization

We automatically extract the summaries of spoken class lectures. This paper presents a novel method for sentence extraction-based automatic speech summarization. We propose a technique that extracts “cue phrases for important sentences (CPs)” that often appear in important sentences. We formulate CP extraction as a labeling problem of word sequences and use Conditional Random Fields (CRF) [1] for labeling. Automatic summarization using CP extraction results as features yields precisions of 0.603 and 0.556 when using manual transcriptions and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) results, respectively. Combining the features derived from the CPs and traditional features (including repeated words, words repeated in a slide text, and term frequency (tf), which are surface linguistic information, and speech power and duration, which are prosodic features) [2, 3], we obtained better summarization performance with a κ-value of 0.380, a F -measure of 0.539, and a Rouge-4 of 0.709. Index Terms: automatic speech summarization, sentence extraction, speech synthesis
Greek Compounds: A challenging case for the parsing techniques of PC-KIMMO v.2

The computational analysis, which is still at a prototype level, is based on PCKIMMO version 2, a well-known tool for its world-wide applications to the morphology of several languages. The current state of the implementation handles the recognition of nominal and verbal compounds in the nominative singular, or in the first person singular forms respectively. Compounds are parsed into their structural constituents which, according to the Greek language characteristics, are morphemes (i.e., stems and affixes) or words depending on the case. A first approach to stress is also taken into consideration since compounds display peculiar stress properties that differ from other word-stress properties and are related to syllabification techniques. As is shown below, the system is not able to provide a linguistically-sound analysis for phenomena such as stress and syllabification.
Long-term economic impact of countervailing duties on coated free sheet paper imported by the United States from China, the Republic of Korea, and Indonesia

The international effects of United States countervailing duties on imports of coated free sheet paper from China, the Republic of Korea, and Indonesia were predicted with the Global Forest Products Model, up to the year 2020. The results indicate that the production of printing and writing paper in China, Indonesia, and the Republic of Korea would be lower. The trade balance would worsen in Korea and Indonesia. China, currently a net exporter would become a net importer. Concurrently, production and prices of chemical pulp would decrease substantially in China. However, because of lower prices in China, its domestic consumption of printing and writing paper would increase. In the United States, the duty would induce little increase in production or improvement of net trade. The main effect would be on the United States' source of imports. While the United States' imports of printing and writing paper from Korea, Indonesia, and China would decrease, the imports from Canada, Finland, Germany, and other sources would increase. Moreover, although imports of printing and writing paper from China would be reduced for a few years by the duty, they would start increasing again after less than a decade. The Canadian industry would gain the most from the duty. Canada's production of printing and writing paper would be nearly 9 percent higher. The United States would see some increases in producer revenues, consumer expenditures, and value-added, but they would be small compared to the increases in Canada.
The bi-directional exchange of oxygenated VOCs between a loblolly pine ( Pinus taeda ) plantation and the atmosphere

Abstract. Using new in-situ field observations of the most abundant oxygenated VOCs (methanol, acetaldehyde, acetone, C3/C4 carbonyls, MVK+MAC and acetic acid) we were able to constrain emission and deposition patterns above and within a loblolly pine (Pinus taeda) plantation with a sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua) understory. During the day canopy scale measurements showed significant emission of methanol and acetone, while methyl vinyl ketone and methacrolein, acetaldehyde and acetic acid were mainly deposited during the day. All oxygenated compounds exhibited strong losses during the night that could not be explained by conventional dry deposition parameterizations. Accompanying leaf level measurements indicated substantial methanol and acetone emissions from loblolly pine. The exchange of acetaldehyde was more complex. Laboratory measurements made on loblolly pine needles indicated that acetaldehyde may be either emitted or taken up depending on ambient concentrations, with the compensation point increasing exponentially with temperature, and that mature needles tended to emit more acetaldehyde than younger needles. Canopy scale measurements suggested mostly deposition. Short-term (approx. 2 h) ozone fumigation in the laboratory had no detectable impact on post-exposure emissions of methanol and acetone, but decreased the exchange rates of acetaldehyde. The emission of a variety of oxygenated compounds (e.g. carbonyls and alcohols) was triggered or significantly enhanced during laboratory ozone fumigation experiments. These results suggest that higher ambient ozone levels in the future might enhance the biogenic contribution of some oxygenated compounds. Those with sufficiently low vapor pressures may potentially influence secondary organic aerosol growth. Compounds recently hypothesized to be primarily produced in the canopy atmosphere via ozone plus terpenoid-type reactions can also originate from the oxidation reaction of ozone with leaf surfaces and inside the leaf. This needs to be taken into account when scaling up very reactive biogenic compounds.
Efficiency enhancement of long-distance wireless power transmission using time reversal technique

Combine with time reversal (TR) technique, a method for enhancing power collection efficiency of long-distance wireless power transmission (WPT) is proposed. In the condition of non-line of sight (NLOS) and transmission distance of 15m (d=15m), compared with the WPT directly, the received average power of WPT using TR technique is enhanced more than one order without increasing the complexity of transceivers. In order to further explain the impacts of TR technique on WPT, the power collection efficiency ratios at d=15m are also analyzed.