Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Preferential Trade Agreements in Asia: Alternative Scenarios of "Hub and Spoke"

The proliferation of preferential trade agreements in Asia may result in a number of hub and spoke configures with Japan, China and ASEAN competing as regional hub of bilateral FTAs. Using a newly developed global CGE model with imperfect competition, increasing return to scale and heterogeneous firm, we explore the potential economic effects of alternative hub and spoke configurations in Asia. The simulations results suggest that the regionalism approach to integration in the Asian context can hardly act as building block of global trade liberalization, if it is confined to shallow integration only. However, the regional trade agreements involving deep integration measures provide promising path towards global free trade.
Colonoscopy for Colorectal Cancer Screening

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States. Many, if not most, cases arise from premalignant lesions (adenomas) which may be identified and removed prior to becoming frankly malignant. For over a decade, colonoscopy has been the preferred modality for both CRC screening and prevention in the US. Early reports suggested that colonoscopic screening imparted a 90% risk reduction for colorectal cancer. Subsequent studies showed that estimate to be overly optimistic. While still an outstanding CRC screening and detection tool, colonoscopy has several important limitations. Some of these limitations relate to the mechanics of the procedure such as the risk of colonic perforation, bleeding, adverse consequences of sedation, and the inability to detect all colonic polyps. Other limitations reflect issues with patient perception regarding colonoscopy which, at least in part, drive patient non-adherence to recommended testing. This review examines the literature to address several important issues. First, we analyze the effect of colonoscopy on CRC incidence and mortality. Second, we consider the patient-based, periprocedural, and intraprocedural factors which may limit colonoscopy as a screening modality. Third, we explore new techniques and technologies which may enhance the efficacy of colonoscopy for adenoma detection. Finally, we discuss the short and long-term future of colonoscopy for CRC screening and the factors which may affect this future.
Samband mellan högre språkliga förmågor och fonologiskt arbetsminne hos vuxna

This study investigated relationships between high level language functions and phonological working memory in adults by correlating results of tests in a test battery used for investigating subtle language disorders and digit span task results. Results of two digit span tasks were analyzed in relation to demographic factors. 103 subjects without neurological disease, 20 – 79 years old, participated. Significant correlations were found between the digit span tasks and most of the tests. No significant correlations or difference were found between digit span and demographic factors. Some language tests showed stronger correlations to the digit span tasks, which imply that these tests put a greater strain on phonological working memory. Thus, phonological working memory seems to be involved in a number of complex language functions. This study can contribute to the understanding of high level language functions and how to assess them.
Bronchiectasis-Associated Hospitalizations in Germany, 2005–2011: A Population-Based Study of Disease Burden and Trends

Background Representative population-based data on the epidemiology of bronchiectasis in Europe are limited. The aim of the present study was to investigate the current burden and the trends of bronchiectasis-associated hospitalizations and associated conditions in Germany in order to inform focused patient care and to facilitate the allocation of healthcare resources. Methods The nationwide diagnosis-related groups hospital statistics for the years 2005–2011 were used in order to identify hospitalizations with bronchiectasis as any hospital discharge diagnosis according to the International Classification of Diseases, 10th revision, code J47, (acquired) bronchiectasis. Poisson log-linear regression analysis was used to assess the significance of trends. In addition, the overall length of hospital stay (LOS) and the in-hospital mortality in comparison to the nationwide overall mortality due to bronchiectasis as the primary diagnosis was assessed. Results Overall, 61,838 records with bronchiectasis were extracted from more than 125 million hospitalizations. The average annual age-adjusted rate for bronchiectasis as any diagnosis was 9.4 hospitalizations per 100,000 population. Hospitalization rates increased significantly during the study period, with the highest rate of 39.4 hospitalizations per 100,000 population among men aged 75–84 years and the most pronounced average annual increases among females. Besides numerous bronchiectasis-associated conditions, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) was most frequently found in up to 39.2% of hospitalizations with bronchiectasis as the primary diagnosis. The mean LOS was comparable to that for COPD. Overall, only 40% of bronchiectasis-associated deaths occurred inside the hospital. Conclusions The present study provides evidence of a changing epidemiology and a steadily increasing prevalence of bronchiectasis-associated hospitalizations. Moreover, it confirms the diversity of bronchiectasis-associated conditions and the possible association between bronchiectasis and COPD. As the major burden of disease may be managed out-of-hospital, prospective patient registries are needed to establish the exact prevalence of bronchiectasis according to the specific underlying condition.
Significance of hornblende in calc-alkaline andesites and basalts

Hornblende occurs in some andesitic and basaltic rocks of calc-alkaline affini1y, where it is commonly associated with olivine. The texture, eruption history, and composition are interpreted to indicate that hornblende commonly forms as a product of reaction between olivine and basaltic and andesitic liquids. The natural hornblendes probably formed within the crust at temperatures between 960o and 1080'C from liquids with less than about 6 weight percent HrO. The formation of hornblende from basaltic liquid within the crust has implications for evolution of continental crust, as well as for the origin of andesite and thermal conditions in subduction zones.
Elementary Reactions and Their Role in Gas-Phase Prebiotic Chemistry

The formation of complex organic molecules in a reactor filled with gaseous mixtures possibly reproducing the primitive terrestrial atmosphere and ocean demonstrated more than 50 years ago that inorganic synthesis of prebiotic molecules is possible, provided that some form of energy is provided to the system. After that groundbreaking experiment, gas-phase prebiotic molecules have been observed in a wide variety of extraterrestrial objects (including interstellar clouds, comets and planetary atmospheres) where the physical conditions vary widely. A thorough characterization of the chemical evolution of those objects relies on a multi-disciplinary approach: 1) observations allow us to identify the molecules and their number densities as they are nowadays; 2) the chemistry which lies behind their formation starting from atoms and simple molecules is accounted for by complex reaction networks; 3) for a realistic modeling of such networks, a number of experimental parameters are needed and, therefore, the relevant molecular processes should be fully characterized in laboratory experiments. A survey of the available literature reveals, however, that much information is still lacking if it is true that only a small percentage of the elementary reactions considered in the models have been characterized in laboratory experiments. New experimental approaches to characterize the relevant elementary reactions in laboratory are presented and the implications of the results are discussed.
A Multilevel Approach to Topology-Aware Collective Operations in Computational Grids

The efficient implementation of collective communiction operations has received much attention. Initial efforts produced "optimal" trees based on network communication models that assumed equal point-to-point latencies between any two processes. This assumption is violated in most practical settings, however, particularly in heterogeneous systems such as clusters of SMPs and wide-area "computational Grids," with the result that collective operations perform suboptimally. In response, more recent work has focused on creating topology-aware trees for collective operations that minimize communication across slower channels (e.g., a wide-area network). While these efforts have significant communication benefits, they all limit their view of the network to only two layers. We present a strategy based upon a multilayer view of the network. By creating multilevel topology-aware trees we take advantage of communication cost differences at every level in the network. We used this strategy to implement topology-aware versions of several MPI collective operations in MPICH-G2, the Globus Toolkit[tm]-enabled version of the popular MPICH implementation of the MPI standard. Using information about topology provided by MPICH-G2, we construct these multilevel topology-aware trees automatically during execution. We present results demonstrating the advantages of our multilevel approach by comparing it to the default (topology-unaware) implementation provided by MPICH and a topology-aware two-layer implementation.
Status Epilepticus and Periictal Imaging

Summary: Peri‐ and postictal changes on both anatomic and functional imaging examinations have been recognized for many years. With the wide availability of magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography, a growing range of recognized acute imaging findings have been described. Periictal and postictal findings can be classified as either local or remote, with respect to the site of maximal ictal EEG abnormality. Although many of the findings described are reversible, the factors that determine whether findings will resolve are incompletely understood. This article considers the range of findings that have been described, places them into the context of known or hypothesized pathophysiologic mechanisms, and considers their clinical significance. A framework is proposed for considering the relation between ictal duration and severity, the characteristics of imaging abnormalities, and the mechanism of their underlying pathophysiology.
Salient point region covariance descriptor for target tracking

Features extracted at salient points are used to construct a region covariance descriptor (RCD) for target tracking. In the classical approach, the RCD is computed by using the features at each pixel location, which increases the computational cost in many cases. This approach is redundant because image statistics do not change significantly between neighboring image pixels. Furthermore, this redundancy may decrease tracking accuracy while tracking large targets because statistics of flat regions dominate region covariance matrix. In the proposed approach, salient points are extracted via the Shi and Tomasi's minimum eigenvalue method over a Hessian matrix, and the RCD features extracted only at these salient points are used in target tracking. Experimental results indicate that the salient point RCD scheme provides comparable and even better tracking results compared to a classical RCD-based approach, scale-invariant feature transform, and speeded-up robust features-based trackers while providing a computationally more efficient structure. 1 Introduction In target tracking, it is important to extract features from the target region that have high differentiation property and scale and rotation invariance. Features should be robust to noise, partially invariant to affine transformation, intensity changes, and occlusion. 1,2 Another issue in target tracking is to estimate and predict target location in the subsequent frames based on the observations. 3 A fundamentally important requirement comes from video processing. In order to process video frames while preserving real-time requirements , it is important to extract features in a computationally efficient manner for object tracking purposes. 4 Features may be the color, raw pixel intensities or statistics extracted from these values, edges, displacement vectors in optic flow-based approaches, textures, and their combinations depending on the target model (appearance and motion) and imaging
User reputation based VoIP spam defense architecture

VoIP market is growing fast and will replace a considerable portion of existing PSTN or 2G/3G which is under big trouble with spam calls. In VoIP, spam calls can be occurred more frequently because of its low cost and easy modification. In this paper, we propose user reputation based spam defense architecture which consists of four spam defense techniques. Each spam defense techniques can be adapted to VoIP service provider step by step. Next time, we will implement and evaluate the proposed schemes through VoIP trap system which collects spam information from VoIP commercial environments.
Incorporating terminology evolution for query translation in text retrieval with association rules

Time-stamped documents such as newswire articles, blog posts and other web-pages are often archived online. When these archives cover long spans of time, the terminology within them could undergo significant changes. Hence, when users pose queries pertaining to historical information, over such documents, the queries need to be translated, taking into account these temporal changes, to provide accurate responses to users. For example, a query on Sri Lanka should automatically retrieve documents with its former name Ceylon. We call such concepts SITACs, i.e., Semantically Identical Temporally Altering Concepts. In order to discover SITACs, we propose an approach based on a novel framework constituting an integration of natural language processing, association rule mining, and contextual similarity as a learning technique. The proposed approach has been experimented with real data and has been found to yield good results with respect to efficiency and accuracy.
Instantaneous environment adaptation techniques based on fast PMC and MAP-CMS methods

This paper proposes instantaneous environment adaptation techniques for both additive noise and channel distortion based on the fast PMC (FPMC) and the MAP-CMS methods. The instantaneous adaptation techniques enable a recognizer to improve recognition on a single sentence that is used for the adaptation in real-time. The key innovations enabling the system to achieve the instantaneous adaptation are: (1) a cepstral mean subtraction method based on maximum a posteriori estimation (MAP-CMS), (2) real-time implementation of the fast parallel model combination (PMC) that we proposed previously, (3) utilization of multi-pass search, and (4) a new combination method of MAP-CMS and FPMC to solve the problem of both channel distortion and additive noise. Experiment results showed that the proposed methods enabled the system to perform recognition and adaptation simultaneously nearly in real-time and obtained good improvements in performance.
Moduli of complex curves and noncommutative geometry I: classification of complex and quantum tori

This paper is a brief account of the moduli of complex curves from the perspective of noncommutative geometry. We focus on problems of Riemann surface theory, which can be settled using K-groups of a noncommutative C∗-algebra. On this way, we prove “generic” arithmeticity of the mapping class group and study correspondences between complex and noncommutative tori.
High-Resolution Spectroscopy of the Transiting Planet Host Star TrES-1

We report on a spectroscopic determination of the stellar parameters and chemical abundances for the parent star of the transiting planet TrES-1. Based on a detailed analysis of iron lines in our Keck and Hobby-Eberly Telescope spectra, we derive Teff = 5250 ± 75 K, log g = 4.6 ± 0.2, and [Fe/H] = 0.00 ± 0.09. By measuring the Ca II activity indicator and by putting useful upper limits on the Li abundance, we constrain the age of TrES-1 to be 2.5 ± 1.5 Gyr. By comparing theoretical stellar evolution models with the observational parameters, we obtain M⋆ = 0.89 ± 0.05 M☉ and R⋆ = 0.83 ± 0.05 R☉. Our improved estimates of the stellar parameters are utilized in a new analysis of the transit photometry of TrES-1 to derive a mass Mp = MJ, a radius Rp = 1.04RJ, and an inclination i = 89.5 deg. The improved planetary mass and radius estimates provide the grounds for new crucial tests of theoretical models of evolution and evaporation of irradiated extrasolar giant planets.
Routing and Admission Control of Virtual Circuitsin General Topology

Emerging high speed Broadband Integrated Services Digital Networks (B-ISDN) are expected to carry traac for services like video-on-demand and video teleconferencing which will require resource reservation along the path on which the traac is sent. As a result, such networks will need eecient routing and admission control algorithms. The simplest approach is to use xed paths and no admission control. More sophisticated approaches which use state dependent routing and a form of admission control called trunk reservation can be found in the circuit switching literature. However, the circuit switching literature has generally focused on fully connected (complete) networks. This paper suggests a new routing and admission control algorithm for general topology networks. Our algorithm is an adaptation of a recently discovered theoretical algorithm that is asymptotically best possible with respect to the worst case performance. The main idea behind our algorithm was to improve the performance in the expected instead of the worst case. Although the original theoretically optimum algorithm behaves quite badly in practice, we prove that our modiications dramatically improve the performance under several classes of traac loads. The paper considers both a centralized setting, where routing and admission control decisions are made by a centralized processor, and a distributed setting, where decisions are made at the source node, using potentially inaccurate state information. We show that our algorithm can be easily adapted to the distributed setting. We have evaluated the performance of our algorithms using extensive simulations on an existing commercial network topology and the NSFNet T3 backbone topology. The simulations show that our modiied algorithm outperforms several existing algorithms. The increase in performance is most dramatic in the distributed setting, indicating that our algorithm is able to use outdated information more eeectively.
WBAN on NS-3: Novel implementation with high performance of IEEE 802.15.6

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) are becoming increasingly important for health care with the development of health consciousness and health detection requirements. A lot of researches have been devoted to the progress of WBAN, for example, the improvement of protocols designed for WBAN, the optimization of parameters and the system performance evaluation. However, the main premise of all the directions above is to provide an efficient and reliable simulation platform, since the existing platforms cannot respond to accord with the reality with high performance. To work this issue out, we construct the WBAN simulation platform on Network Simulation 3 (NS-3) which specifies in good expandability and resources saving and agrees with real networks in many aspects comparing with the other simulators. In this paper, we propose our implementation of WBAN module based on IEEE 802.15. 6 standard. Our simulation platform consists of Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical (PHY) layer of IEEE 802.15. 6. Then in order to make the simulation more objective, we design a proper simulation scenario according to the practical application and analyze the simulation results. Finally, we compare the throughput saturation threshold on NS-2 and NS-3 with the analysis results respectively to indicate the superiorities of NS-3 and verify the validity and effectiveness of our WBAN module.
Detection of the Coherent Scatterers using Sub-Aperture Polarimetric SAR data : the Preliminary Results

The objective of this paper is to assess the sub-aperture analysis technique for the detection of coherent scatterers (CSs) using polarimetric SAR data. The non normalized coherence is used to greatly improve the contrast between the clutter and the target, since it can preserve the strong intensity information of the target. Furthermore, by applying a way similar to the polarimetric interferometry coherence optimization, the optimal coherence can be achieved by tuning the polarization states using the full polarimetric SAR data. Finally, utilizing the ALOS PALSAR data, the preliminary results and analyses of the detection of CSs are demonstrated.
Generating Functionals for Computational Intelligence: The Fisher Information as an Objective Function for Self-Limiting Hebbian Learning Rules

Generating functionals may guide the evolution of a dynamical system and constitute a possible route for handling the complexity of neural networks as relevant for computational intelligence. We propose and explore a new objective function, which allows to obtain plasticity rules for the afferent synaptic weights. The adaption rules are Hebbian, self-limiting, and result from the minimization of the Fisher information with respect to the synaptic flux. We perform a series of simulations examining the behavior of the new learning rules in various circumstances. The vector of synaptic weights aligns with the principal direction of input activities, whenever one is present. A linear discrimination is performed when there are two or more principal directions; directions having bimodal firing-rate distributions, being characterized by a negative excess kurtosis, are preferred. We find robust performance and full homeostatic adaption of the synaptic weights results as a by-product of the synaptic flux minimization. This self-limiting behavior allows for stable online learning for arbitrary durations. The neuron acquires new information when the statistics of input activities is changed at a certain point of the simulation, showing however, a distinct resilience to unlearn previously acquired knowledge. Learning is fast when starting with randomly drawn synaptic weights and substantially slower when the synaptic weights are already fully adapted.
AUTOMATING THE DESIGN OF A BAND-PASS SPECTRAL FILTER WITH FREQUENCY SELECTIVE SURFACES ON INHOMOGENEOUS SUBSTRATES

This paper focuses on the design of a Thermo-Photovoltaic filter with band-pass characteristics in the form of a Frequency Selective Surfaces with cascaded inhomogeneous dielectric substrates. Desired performance is achieved via the integration of a topology design methodology known as the density method with robust finite element-boundary integral (FE-BI) simulators.
Refinement of Underdetermined Crystal Structures

The normal matrix for full matrix least squares contains a wealth of information about the behavior of the problem. In particular, the eigenvalues and eigenvectors contain all of the information concerning precision of parameter determination and correlation of parameters. This information is valid even if the refinement is underdetermined. Full-matrix analysis is likely to prove valuable for low resolution work as well as for high resolution work.