Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Children below 9 years use both verbal cues and lateralized cues to orient their attention in an emotional dichotic listening task

The current study aimed to demonstrate that children below 9 years of age efficiently orient their auditory attention with both verbal cues and lateralized cues to identify emotional stimuli. The use of emotional stimuli is an optimal condition according to the assumption that a multi-component task calling on different resources from the two cerebral hemispheres is easier than a multi-component task requiring resources from the same hemisphere. A sample of 103 right-handed children from 7 to 12 years of age was required to identify emotional speech made up of pseudowords preceded by a binaural verbal cue or by a lateralized tone cue. As expected, we observed better performance for the skilled ear (i.e., the left ear for emotional processing) and an improving effect of verbal cues. According to our success criterion (mean correct report rates significantly different from chance), an efficient control of orienting attention was observed in all groups of children. This means that children from 7 to 8 years of age were able to efficiently orient their attention to identify emotional stimuli. Results are discussed in relation to the hemispheric lateralization of emotions.
Dialog Control in a Natural Language System

In this paper a method for controlling the dialog in a natural language (NL) system is presented. It provides a deep modeling of information processing based on time dependent propositional attitudes of the interacting agents. Knowledge about the state of the dialog is represented in a dedicated language and changes of this state are described by a compact set of rules. An appropriate organization of rule application is introduced including the initiation of an adequate system reaction. Finally the application of the method in an NL consultation system is outlined.
Modeling and Analysis of Fault Detection and Fault Tolerance in Wireless Sensor Networks

Technological advancements in communications and embedded systems have led to the proliferation of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in a wide variety of application domains. These application domains include but are not limited to mission-critical (e.g., security, defense, space, satellite) or safety-related (e.g., health care, active volcano monitoring) systems. One commonality across all WSN application domains is the need to meet application requirements (e.g., lifetime, reliability). Many application domains require that sensor nodes be deployed in harsh environments, such as on the ocean floor or in an active volcano, making these nodes more prone to failures. Sensor node failures can be catastrophic for critical or safety-related systems. This article models and analyzes fault detection and fault tolerance in WSNs. To determine the effectiveness and accuracy of fault detection algorithms, we simulate these algorithms using ns-2. We investigate the synergy between fault detection and fault tolerance and use the fault detection algorithms’ accuracies in our modeling of Fault-Tolerant (FT) WSNs. We develop Markov models for characterizing WSN reliability and Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) to facilitate WSN application-specific design. Results obtained from our FT modeling reveal that an FT WSN composed of duplex sensor nodes can result in as high as a 100% MTTF increase and approximately a 350% improvement in reliability over a Non-Fault-Tolerant (NFT) WSN. The article also highlights future research directions for the design and deployment of reliable and trustworthy WSNs.
Application of the Critical-Path Method to Evaluate Insider Risks

Governments and institutions of many kinds have faced the danger of hostile acts by insiders from time immemorial. In the case of the US government, such hostile acts have included betrayals by employees who supplied secrets to hostile powers, committed sabotage, and fatally attacked fellow employees. Relatively recent examples of such activity include the espionage activities of Aldrich Ames, Larry Chin, and Robert Hanssen; the Wikileaks revelations of Bradley Manning; the disclosures of Edward Snowden; and the violent assaults against fellow Americans by Nidal Hassan and Aaron Alexis.a,1
Polymer : drug ratio : Propranolol hydrochloride loaded nanospheres

Nanotechnology is widely used for delivery of various drugs to the body for increasing the bioavailability, reducing toxicity and controlled release. Nanospheres are the solid particles which are spherical in shape, having the particle size range between 1-1000 nm and having better bioavailability. In nanospheres, the drug is physically and uniformly dispersed in the matrix system of the polymer. Nanospheres of Propranolol Hydrochloride were prepared by using solvent evaporation technique with different concentration of Eudragit RS100 and Eudragit RL100 polymers. The different formulation factors like drug: polymer ratio, concentration of solvent, stirring speed, stirring time on particle size, drug encapsulation, drug efficiency, surface morphology, and process yield and drug release behavior was studied. The in-vitro performance of nanospheres were evaluated by recovery efficiency, particle size analysis, surface topography (using scanning electron microscopy), drug-polymer compatibility (using differential scanning calorimetry) and drug release studies. The single emulsion solvent evaporation method used for nanospheres preparation was suitable in the particle size range between 265.67±3.98 nm, the encapsulation efficiency was 74.67±2.56% (w/w) and the process yield was 83.23±1.23% (w/w). Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) showed that nanospheres were having spherical in shape. FTIR showed no potential chemical interaction between the drug and polymer used. In vitro release studies revealed that drug release from nanospheres followed Higuchi kinetics. INTRODUCTION: Propranolol hydrochloride is a sympatholytic non-selective beta blocker. Scottish scientist James W. Black successfully developed propranolol in the 1960. In 1988, he was awarded with the Nobel Prize in medicine for this discovery. QUICK RESPONSE CODE DOI: 10.13040/IJPSR.0975-8232.4(7). 2639-47 Article can be accessed online on: www.ijpsr. com Propranolol was derived from the early β-adrenergic antagonists dichloroisoprenaline and pronethalol. It is used in the treatment of essential hypertension, myocardial infarction and arrhythmia. Propranolol hydrochloride is completely absorbed from the G.I. Tract following oral Administration. It undergoes extensive hepatic first pass metabolism. Propranolol hydrochloride is about 90% bound to plasma protein; bioavailability is 26% and biological half-life (t1/2): 4-5 hr.
Consensus of Non-rigid Reconstructions

Recently, there have been many progresses for the problem of non-rigid structure reconstruction based on 2D trajectories, but it is still challenging to deal with complex deformations or restricted view ranges. Promising alternatives are the piecewise reconstruction approaches, which divide trajectories into several local parts and stitch their individual reconstructions to produce an entire 3D structure. These methods show the state-of-the-art performance, however, most of them are specialized for relatively smooth surfaces and some are quite complicated. Meanwhile, it has been reported numerously in the field of pattern recognition that obtaining consensus from many weak hypotheses can give a strong, powerful result. Inspired by these reports, in this paper, we push the concept of part-based reconstruction to the limit: Instead of considering the parts as explicitly-divided local patches, we draw a large number of small random trajectory sets. From their individual reconstructions, we pull out a statistic of each 3D point to retrieve a strong reconstruction, of which the procedure can be expressed as a sparse l1-norm minimization problem. In order to resolve the reflection ambiguity between weak (and possibly bad) reconstructions, we propose a novel optimization framework which only involves a single eigenvalue decomposition. The proposed method can be applied to any type of data and outperforms the existing methods for the benchmark sequences, even though it is composed of a few, simple steps. Furthermore, it is easily parallelizable, which is another advantage.
Document page segmentation by integrating distributed soft decisions

A new algorithm for image segmentation is suggested. The suggested algorithm is based on making local soft decisions on small blocks and integrating them to reduce their "ambiguities" and increase their "confidence" as more contextual evidence is obtained from the image data. Integration is performed by vote propagation across windows (within and across scales) using majorities of weighted votes. The algorithm has been tested on some document page decomposition tasks; the results of these tests are presented. This method is based on parallel, distributed and independent computations and has low complexity. It is general and can be applied to different segmentation and classification tasks. <<ETX>>
Subband nonstationary noise reduction based on multichannel spatial prediction under reverberant environments

We propose a novel non-stationary and convolutive noise reduction method under reverberant environments. Unlike many multichannel noise reduction methods, the proposed method does not need pre knowledge of impulse response or direction of arrival (DOA) of the target source. The proposed method is composed of two processes. On the noise reduction process, the noise component is reduced without the impulse response of the target source. The target source component in the output signal is distorted, but the distortion is removed by the distortion-restoration process. Importantly, possibility of complete noise reduction with no distortion based on the proposed framework is assured by MINT theory. Experimental results under the reverberant environment (RT60 ≈ 300 ms) show that the proposed method can reduce more noise than the conventional method and the distortion of the target source is not so big.
Fairness Comparison Based on Queue Schedule between Fast and Reno

In the current TCP congestion control algorithm, TCP Reno and its variants in the high-speed networks, has encountered many constraints. It is difficult to meet the higher requirements of QoS guarantee. The emergence of the Fast TCP may be used as the alternative TCP in congestion control in high-speed network environment. So it is necessary to make a comparison between TCP Reno and FAST TCP on the fairness. This paper puts the focus on considering a number of TCP Reno and FAST TCP sharing a bottleneck link. By comparing the TCP Reno and FAST TCP based on queue management with the two typical scheduling algorithms Drop-Tail and RED, the throughput analysis of the two versions of TCP can show fairness between the TCP Reno and FAST TCP. The numerical analysis and NS2 simulation results can give the guidance for deploying of FAST TCP.
Parallel Programming Abstractions forDynamic Non-Uniform Scienti c Computations

LPARX provides eecient run-time support for dynamic , non-uniform scientiic calculations such as particle methods and adaptive nite diierence methods running on MIMD distributed memory archi-tectures. LPARX's dynamic array facilities extend HPF's static, uniform arrays to provide support for block irregular data structures. LPARX's abstractions represent data decompositions as rst-class objects and express data dependencies in a manner which is logically independent of data decomposition and problem dimension. We have implemented a number of applications in LPARX{including a 3d particle calculation and 2d and 3d adaptive multigrid solvers|which could not have been eeciently implemented in HPF. LPARX applications are portable across a variety of MIMD machines; LPARX is cur
Pressoreceptor-autonomic oscillation; a probable cause of vasomotor waves.

I N A RECENT study of blood pressure response to intermittent flow and outflow of blood from the circulation (I), it was observed that after suddenly ceasing outflow and then beginning immediately the inflow of blood there usually followed in normal animals a series of damped oscillations in the blood pressure. This effect also occurred when the inflow of blood was suddenly stopped and was followed by outflow. However, following progressive stages of pressoreceptor denervation, these oscillations became less pronounced and were not demonstrable after total pressoreceptor denervation. Furthermore, after total spinal anesthesia, the waves were not evident. Therefore, the hypothesis was offered that these waves are due to pressoreceptor-sympathetic oscillation, and it was further supposed, because of similar periodicities of these waves and vasomotor waves found in dogs, that vasomotor waves might have the same origin. The present study adds additional observations in support of this hypothesis which was only briefly mentioned before.
Speaking to the Self: How Motivating Language Links With Self-Leadership

This study investigates the relationships between the external influence of leader motivating language (ML), each of the major dimensions of self-leadership (SL)—behavioral strategies, constructive thoughts strategies, and natural rewards strategies—and their respective links with the outcomes of employee job satisfaction, performance, and intent-to-stay, using a partial least squares structural equation model. In addition, we look at the direct relationships between ML and SL with the same outcomes in separate analyses. Based on a large, diverse sample, results suggest that ML in conjunction with SL has strong, positive relationships with employee job satisfaction, performance, and intent-to-stay. Furthermore, a partially mediated model of ML affecting SL shows positive links with all three aspects of SL and the outcome variables of performance, job satisfaction, and intent-to-stay. For the SL dimensions, behavioral strategies were positively and significantly linked with job satisfaction; natural rewards strategies were positively and significantly related to job satisfaction, intent-to-stay, and job performance; and constructive thoughts strategies were significantly and positively associated with job satisfaction and intent-to-stay. These findings validate previous research and uncover new knowledge about ML and SL in organizational context.
Pulsational MV versus [Fe/H] relation(s) for globular cluster RR Lyrae variables

We use the results from recent computations of updated non-linear convective pulsating models to constrain the distance modulus of Galactic globular clusters through the observed periods of first-overtone (RRc) pulsators. The resulting relation between the mean absolute magnitude of RR Lyrae stars 〈MV(RR)〉 and the heavy element content [Fe/H] appears well in the range of several previous empirical calibrations, but with a non-linear dependence on [Fe/H] so that the slope of the relation increases when moving towards larger metallicities. On this ground, our results suggest that metal-poor ([Fe/H] −1.5) variables follow two different linear 〈MV(RR)〉−[Fe/H] relations. Application to RR Lyrae stars in the metal-poor globular clusters of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) provides an LMC distance modulus of the order of 18.6 mag, thus supporting the ‘long’ distance scale. The comparison with recent predictions based on updated stellar evolution theory is briefly presented and discussed.
Appetite and the regulation of body composition

Stability of body composition requires that energy intake equals energy expenditure when integrated over prolonged periods. As recent human studies have failed to demonstrate active changes in energy expenditure with changes in body composition, it is likely that energy intake is continually adjusted to preserve a constant total adipose tissue mass. If adipose tissue mass is regulated directly, then there must be some input reflecting this quantity to the central nervous system for the purpose of making corrective changes in appetite when total body fat content fluctuates. The nature of this input has been examined in a variety of animal experiments involving induced weight change, lipectomy, plasma transfer from obese or satiated animals to hungry animals, and parabiosis between obese and lean animals. The bulk of evidence suggests that the plasma level of one or more currently unidentified stable circulating molecules increases in proportion to total body fat content and augments the effect of meal‐related satiety signals in the central nervous system. The implications of this adipose tissue‐related satiety factor for the pathogenesis of obesity, and the possible nature of the factor are discussed. —Weigle, D. S. Appetite and the regulation of body composition. FASEB J. 8: 302‐310; 1994.
Proving Inter-Program Properties

We develop foundations for proving properties relating two programs. Our formalization is based on a suitably adapted notion of program invariant for a single program. First, we give an abstract formulation of the theory of program invariants based on the notion of assertion function: a function that assigns assertions to program poi nts. Then, we develop this abstract notion further so that it can be used to prove properties between two programs. We describe two applications of the theory. One application is in the tra nslation validation for optimizing compilers, and the other application is in the certificat ion of smart-card application in the framework of Common Criteria. The latter application is part of an industrial project conducted at Verimag laboratory.
The Autonomous Practice of Midwives as a Factor for Improving Quality of Prenatal and Postnatal Care in Bulgaria

Midwives in Bulgaria still cannot practice independently despite the normative documents that have been adopted in accordance with the European directives. Aim: This paper aims at studying midwives’ preparedness for autonomous practice. Methodology: The current study represents a part of a bigger project on the quality of care provided by midwives and perspectives for its development in Bulgaria. An originally developed individual self-administered questionnaire was distributed among 26 obstetricians, 60 midwives and 93 undergraduate students in their last year of education. Results: 68% of midwives and 78.4% of undergraduate students expressed their willingness to work in autonomous practice. Several reasons have been distinguished: providing better care for women, the relationship between the woman and the midwife, the desire for self-employment. According to 53.8% of obstetricians midwives are qualified to observe pregnant women but only under the control of a doctor, which in fact precludes the possibility of independent practice. However, a significant proportion of respondents, both obstetricians and midwives, believe that autonomous practice of midwives would improve the quality of pre- and postnatal care for women. Conclusion: Physicians do not seem to fully support autonomous practice of midwives. Midwives by themselves are not fully informed about their right to autonomous practice. Preparedness for autonomous activities that was expressed by the majority of midwives and students is a precondition for successful reform towards autonomous practice of midwives.
Isowarp and Conwarp: Warps that Exactly Comply with Weak-Perspective Projection of Deforming Objects

This paper studies the problem of surface reconstruction from a single image, given a template of the surface. We investigate the variational structure of the reconstruction problem for isometric and conformal deformations and weak-perspective camera projections. We give analytical solutions for the surface shape given that the registration warp between the template and the input image meets specific differential constraints. We explore those constraints, giving an optimization strategy to compute warps that comply with isometric and conformal deformations under weak-perspective projection. We study the performance of the proposed algorithms with synthetic and real datasets. The experiments show that surface reconstruction with weak-perspective is accurate when using cameras with large focal lengths and improves state of the art methods.
Is there a shortfall in public capital investment? An overview

This article summarizes the Bank’s economic conference held in June 1990. The conference aimed to determine the extent to which the United States may be underinvesting in public infrastructure, explain the potential economic consequences, and suggest mechanisms to help alleviate any adverse trends. It focused on public investment in physical capital only to make the topic manageable, and should not be interpreted to mean that investment in human capital is in any way less important. ; Two quite different perspectives on the need for more infrastructure investment emerge from the discussion. On one side are those who see a strong link between public capital investment and economic and social well-being; they view the current stock of public capital as inadequate and believe that additional investment is required. On the other side are those who are primarily concerned with the efficient use of existing infrastructure; they basically oppose increasing investment until the engineering, pricing, and financing of infrastructure are closer to the optimum.
Beyond the producer/consumer divide: Key principles of produsage and opportunities of innovation

Though popular, concepts such as Toffler's 'prosumer' (1970; 1980; 1990) are inherently limited in their ability to accurately describe the makeup and dynamics of current co-creative environments, from fundamentally non-profit initiatives like the Wikipedia to user-industry partnerships that engage in crowdsourcing and the development of collective intelligence. Instead, the success or failure of such projects can be understood best if the traditional producer/consumer divide is dissolved, allowing for the emergence of the produser (Bruns, 2008). A close investigation of leading spaces for produsage makes it possible to extract the key principles which underpin and guide such content co-creation, and to identify how innovative pro-am partnerships between commercial entities and user communities might be structured in order to maximise the benefits that both sides will be able to draw from such collaboration. This chapter will outline these principles, and point to successes and failures in applying them to pro- am initiatives.
Initiation of Proximal-Distal Patterning in the Vertebrate Limb by Signals and Growth

Growth of limb cells in culture conditions with subsequent in vivo transplantation allows the dissection of limb patterning. Two broad classes of models have been proposed to explain the patterning of the proximal-distal axis of the vertebrate limb (from the shoulder to the digit tips). Differentiating between them, we demonstrate that early limb mesenchyme in the chick is initially maintained in a state capable of generating all limb segments through exposure to a combination of proximal and distal signals. As the limb bud grows, the proximal limb is established through continued exposure to flank-derived signal(s), whereas the developmental program determining the medial and distal segments is initiated in domains that grow beyond proximal influence. In addition, the system we have developed, combining in vitro and in vivo culture, opens the door to a new level of analysis of patterning mechanisms in the limb.