Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Overcoming Difficulties of Tracking in Changing Lighting Conditions ( for Augmented Reality )

Augmented Reality (AR) is the means of using a combination of hardware and software to enhance a person's vision of the world with useful information about his/her surroundings. In recent years, there have been many different implementations of Augmented Reality. The vast majority of these implementations have assumed that lighting conditions are static, usually in an indoor or outdoor environment. Unfortunately, many of these implementations have problems adapting to new lighting conditions, especially when the conditions change abruptly. This paper is meant to address this issue directly by implementing a more robust system that is able to tolerate such changes in lighting conditions. Thus, this paper will show how to construct a vision component of an Augmented Reality system that will help adjust the system automatically to both indoor and outdoor environments. Augmented Reality has been rapidly becoming a popular trend in the academic and scientific world. As a result, there has been much research on this topic in recent years. Many of the research papers concerning Augmented Reality have dealt with issues such as implementation, system design, tracking algorithms, user interface design, user interaction, etc. Generally this research has been done in a computer lab, where tracking and communications are easily controlled ([1], [2], [3], [9], [13], [14]). Even when AR research has been in an outdoor environment, it too has been in very controlled environments ([5], [8], [15]). Unfortunately, there has not been much research handling harsh environments such as rapidly changing lighting conditions. If future AR implementations are to become more robust, it is important that research is done dealing with harsh environments. This paper specifically addresses dealing with changing lighting conditions. Despite many different variations of Augmented Reality, all implementations have the same basic components. These components include: video/frame input into an AR system, an algorithm/technique that gathers information
Lumen Boundary Motion Analysis by Autocorrelation

We describe a method for extracting boundaries, such as the lumen of a vessel, from digitized intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) frames from a S-VHS video, together with other useful parameters for each frame. Autocorrelation of the lumen and other parameters, a timeseries analysis, shows underlying regularity in the variation of lumen area through the heartbeat, and systematic variation of the circularity (or eccentricity) with heartbeat. The heart rate as extracted from video image sequences agrees with direct determination during animal experiments within 1%. The methodology should be useful in extensions to physiological and pathological
Macronutrient balance and lifespan

Dietary restriction (DR) without malnutrition is widely regarded to be a universal mechanism for prolonging lifespan. It is generally believed that the benefits of DR arise from eating fewer calories (termed caloric restriction, CR). Here we argue that, rather than calories, the key determinant of the relationship between diet and longevity is the balance of protein to non-protein energy ingested. This ratio affects not only lifespan, but also total energy intake, metabolism, immunity and the likelihood of developing obesity and associated metabolic disorders. Among various possible mechanisms linking macronutrient balance to lifespan, the nexus between the TOR and AMPK signaling pathways is emerging as a central coordinator.
A Modified Cournot Aggregation Condition for Obtaining Estimates of Cross-Elasticities of Demand

Insomuch as researchers who estimate cross elasticities of demand implicitly use the assumption of weakly separable utility or production, this paper explicitly uses weak separability to derive what it calls the "modified Cournot aggregation condition. " The modified Cournot aggregation condition imposes a restriction on sum of the share weighted value of the cross elasticities. Consequently, the condition can be used to complement statistical testing of parameter values or be used in the estimation process itself. An example is provided of a three-region model of world steel trade where the condition has proved useful in avoiding perverse results.
Have Increases in Federal Reserve Transparency Improved Private Sector Interest Rate Forecasts?

Yes. This paper shows that, since the late 1980s, U.S. financial markets and private sector forecasters have become (1) better able to forecast the federal funds rate at horizons out to several months, (2) less surprised by Federal Reserve announcements, (3) more certain of their interest rate forecasts ex ante, as measured by interest rate options, and (4) less diverse in the cross-sectional variety of their interest rate forecasts. We also present evidence that strongly suggests increases in Federal Reserve transparency played a role: for example, private sector forecasts of GDP and inflation have not experienced similar improvements over the same period, indicating that the improvement in interest rate forecasts has been special.
FTIR spectroscopy shows structural similarities between photosystems II from cyanobacteria and spinach.

Photosystem II (PSII), an essential component of oxygenic photosynthesis, is a membrane-bound pigment protein complex found in green plants and cyanobacteria. Whereas the molecular structure of cyanobacterial PSII has been resolved with at least medium resolution [Zouni, A. , Witt, H. -T. , Kern, J., Fromme, P., Krauss, N. , Saenger, W. & Orth, P. (2001) Nature (London) 409, 739-743; Kamiya, N. & Shen, J.R. (2003) Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 100, 98-103], the structure of higher plant PSII is only known at low resolution. Therefore Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) difference spectroscopy was used to compare PSII from both Thermosynechococcus elongatus and Synechocystis PCC6803 core complexes with PSII-enriched membranes from spinach (BBY). FTIR difference spectra of T. elongatus core complexes are presented for several different intermediates. As the FTIR difference spectra show close similarities among the three species, the structural arrangement of cofactors in PSII and their interactions with the protein microenvironment during photosynthetic charge separation must be very similar in higher plant PSII and cyanobacterial PSII. A structural model of higher plant PSII can therefore be predicted from the structure of cyanobacterial PSII.
Exploring Delay-Aware Transactions in Heterogeneous Mobile Environments

In the expanding e-society, mobile embedded systems are increasingly used to support transactions such as for banking or database applications. Such systems entail a range of heterogeneous entities - both the devices and the networks connecting them. While these systems are exposed to frequent and varied perturbations, the support of atomic distributed transactions is still a fundamental requirement to achieve consistent decisions. Guaranteeing atomicity and high performance in traditional fixed wired networks is based on the assumption that node and link failures occur rarely. This assumption is often not supported in current and upcoming mobile environments where the heterogeneity and mobility often result in link and node failures as a dominant operational scenario. In order to continue guaranteeing strict atomicity while providing for high efficiency (low resource blocking time of transaction participants and message overhead) and acceptable commit rate, transactional fault-tolerance techniques need to be revisited perhaps at the cost of transaction execution time. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive classification of perturbations for a wide range of mobile environments including infrastructure-based, ad-hoc, and hybrid environments. We also investigate the impact of these perturbations on the design of mobile transactions. In particular we argue for the delay-awareness of mobile transactions to allow for the fault-tolerance mechanisms to ensure resilience to the various and frequent perturbations.
Medical Process Modeling: an Artifact-Centric Approach

In this position paper we argue that just as traditional business process modeling has been adopted to deal with clinical pathways, also the artifact-centric process modeling technique may be successfully used to model various kinds of medical processes: physiological processes, disease behavior and treatment processes. We also discuss how a proposed approach may be used to deal with an interplay of all the processes a patient is subject to and what are the queries that might be imposed over an overall patient model.
O fator da percepção de controle como determinante na intenção de compra de produtos ecológicos

El papel que pueden desempenar las cadenas de alimentacion minorista en el desarrollo de la categoria de productos ecologicos de alimentacion es lo que subyace en este trabajo. Se ha comprobado que la teoria del comportamiento planificado -TPB- (Ajzen, 1988, 1991) es aplicable para la medicion de la intencion de compra hacia productos ecologicos de alimentacion bajo la dualidad Marca de Fabricante (MDF) vs. Marca de Distribuidor (MDD), y para la deteccion y diferenciacion de los factores que mas influyen en la decision sobre ambos tipos de marca. Se aportan evidencias sobre como determinadas acciones de marketing en el punto de venta pueden ser utilizadas como estimulo a la compra de productos ecologicos. Adicionalmente, se ha comprobado que la TPB es aplicable a la evaluacion de las diferencias en la actitud hacia la compra de productos ecologicos bajo MDF y bajo MDD. Los resultados muestran que el factor de percepcion de control es fundamental en la determinacion del comportamiento de compra de estos productos, poniendo de manifiesto, por ejemplo, que una mayor variedad de productos en los lineales, un precio asequible e informacion adicional sobre las utilidades y beneficios en el punto de venta pueden influir positivamente en el comportamiento de compra.
A Bayesian Indicator of Manufacturing Output from Qualitative Business Panel Survey Data

Qualitative business survey data are used widely to provide indicators of economic activity ahead of the publication of official data. Traditional indicators exploit only aggregate survey information, namely the proportions of respondents who report "up" and "down". This paper considers disaggregate or firm-level survey responses. It derives an alternative Bayesian indicator of economic activity relating firms' categorical responses to official data using ordered discrete-choice models. An application to firm-level survey data from the Confederation of British Industry shows that the proposed indicator of manufacturing output growth can provide more accurate early estimates of manufacturing output growth than traditional indicators.
Battery monitoring system by detecting dead battery cells

The development of battery monitoring system by detecting dead battery cell is proposed in this paper. The experiment of charging and discharging process is tested in different values of the current in order to compare the experimental parameter at different condition. During the process, the parameters of battery, which are current, voltage, and temperature are send to display on the computer and analyzed in order to detect the dead battery cell. The monitoring device also shows the parameter of battery during testing. CAN (Controlled Area Network Communication) is used to transfer all data between the microcontroller and the proposed PLC together with a computer. The outputs showing on the displaying screen are voltage per cell, current of charging or discharging, temperature within battery, power density, and also energy density. The dead battery cells and efficiency of battery can also be indicated by this monitor device.
Techniques and tools for engineering secure web applications

With the rise of the Internet, web applications, such as online banking and web-based email, have become integral to many people's daily lives. Web applications have brought with them new classes of computer security vulnerabilities, such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS), that in recent years have exceeded previously prominent vulnerability classes, such as buffer overflows, in both reports of new vulnerabilities and reports of exploits. SQL injection and XSS are both instances of the broader class of input validation-based vulnerabilities. At their core, both involve one system receiving, transforming, and constructing string values, some of which come from untrusted sources, and presenting those values to another system that interprets them as programs or program fragments. These input validation-based vulnerabilities therefore require fundamentally new techniques to characterize and mitigate them. This dissertation addresses input validation-based vulnerabilities that arise in the context of web applications, or more generally, in the context of metaprogramming This dissertation provides the first principled characterization, based on concepts from programming languages and compilers, for such vulnerabilities, with formal definitions for SQL injection and XSS in particular. Building on this characterization, the dissertation also contributes practical algorithms for runtime protection, static analysis, and testing-based analysis of web applications to identify vulnerabilities in application code and prevent attackers from exploiting them. This dissertation additionally reports on implementations of these algorithms, showing them to be effective for their respective settings. They have low runtime overhead, validate the definitions, scale to large code bases, have low false-positive rates, handle real-world application code, and find previously unreported vulnerabilities.
Image synthesis for sparse representation based multi-pose face recognition

In this paper we consider the problem of the pose variance in face recognition. In practice, the face images we get usually have different poses; however the number of training sample is limited, so the sparse representation based classification (SRC) for face recognition cannot work well. For the purpose of expending the sample size, a 3D face modal based image synthesis method is adopted. Experiments on the CMU-PIE face are conducted to verify the efficiency of the proposed image synthesis based SRC (IS-SRC) method for multi-pose face recognition.
Heritability for Alzheimer's disease: the study of dementia in Swedish twins.

BACKGROUND Alzheimer's disease has been thought to have familial and sporadic forms, and several genetic defects have been identified that chiefly explain early-onset familial cases. In this study, our purpose was to detect all cases of dementia in an established twin registry and to estimate total extent of genetic contribution to liability to Alzheimer's disease. METHODS At the first stage, members of the registry were screened for dementia, using in-person or telephone mental status testing. At the second stage, those who screened positively and their partners were referred for clinical work-ups, including neuropsychological assessment, physician examination, laboratory tests, and neuroimaging. Clinical diagnoses were assigned at a multidisciplinary consensus conference. Probandwise concordance rates were examined by zygosity, and structural modeling was applied to the data to estimate genetic and environmental influences, using both single- and multiple-threshold models. RESULTS Sixty-five pairs were identified in which one or both was demented. The probandwise concordance rate for Alzheimer's disease among monozygotic pairs was 67%; the corresponding figure for dizygotic pairs was 22%. Heritability of liability to Alzheimer's disease was estimated to be . 74; to any dementia, . 43. The other variance is attributable to environmental influences. CONCLUSIONS Findings indicate a substantial genetic effect for these predominantly late-onset Alzheimer's disease cases. At the same time, structural modeling results and large intra-pair differences in age of onset suggest that environmental factors are also important in determining whether and when an individual may develop dementia.
A process variation aware low power synthesis methodology for fixed-point FIR filters

In this paper, we present a novel FIR filter synthesis technique that allows aggressive voltage scaling by exploiting the fact that all filter coefficients are not equally important to obtain a “reasonably accurate” filter response. Our technique implements a Level Constrained Common Subexpression Elimination (LCCSE) algorithm, where we can constrain the number of adder levels required to compute each of the coefficient outputs. By specifying a tighter constraint (in terms of number of adders in the critical path) on the important coefficients, we ensure that the later computational steps compute only the less important coefficient outputs. In case of delay variations due to voltage scaling and/or process variations, only the less important outputs are affected, resulting in graceful degradation of filter quality. The proposed architecture, therefore, lends itself to aggressive voltage scaling for low-power dissipation even under process parameter variations. Under extreme process variation and supply voltage scaling (0.8V), filters implemented in BPTM 70 nm technology show an average power savings of 25-30% with minor degradation in filter response.
Hospital staffing, organization, and quality of care: cross-national findings.

OBJECTIVE To examine the effects of nurse staffing and organizational support for nursing care on nurses' dissatisfaction with their jobs, nurse burnout, and nurse reports of quality of patient care in an international sample of hospitals. DESIGN Multisite cross-sectional survey. SETTING Adult acute-care hospitals in the United States (Pennsylvania), Canada (Ontario and British Columbia), England, and Scotland. STUDY PARTICIPANTS 10 319 nurses working on medical and surgical units in 303 hospitals across the five jurisdictions. INTERVENTIONS None. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Nurse job dissatisfaction, burnout, and nurse-rated quality of care. RESULTS Dissatisfaction, burnout, and concerns about quality of care were common among hospital nurses in all five sites. Organizational/managerial support for nursing had a pronounced effect on nurse dissatisfaction and burnout, and both organizational support for nursing and nurse staffing were directly, and independently, related to nurse-assessed quality of care. Multivariate results imply that nurse reports of low quality care were three times as likely in hospitals with low staffing and support for nurses as in hospitals with high staffing and support. CONCLUSION Adequate nurse staffing and organizational/managerial support for nursing are key to improving the quality of patient care, to diminishing nurse job dissatisfaction and burnout and, ultimately, to improving the nurse retention problem in hospital settings.
BRINGING THE MARKET INSIDE THE FIRM

Academics, consultants, and practitioners have long advocated bringing the market inside the firm. For example, in the 1950's and 1960's economists proposed that the transferpricing problem should be solved by charging market prices for internal transactions. Similarly, in the 1980's, financial economists suggested that the capital-allocation problem should be solved by charging the external cost of capital for internal investments. And wave after wave of organizational restructuring has advocated radical decentralization, empowerment, "intrapreneurship," and the like-in short, making employees feel like owners. Proponents of making transactions within firms more market-like often seem to ignore the factors that brought these transactions inside firms in the first place. But Bengt Holmstrom and Paul Milgrom (1991, 1994), Holmstrom and Jean Tirole (1991), and Holmstrom (1999) [hereafter referred to collectively as HMT] remind us that in some cases integration is efficient precisely because it eliminates market incentives. In such cases, bringing the market inside the firm would clearly be undesirable. In this paper we show that bringing the market inside the firm is often not feasible, even if it would be desirable. More precisely, if some aspects of the market transaction are noncontractible (as we define below) then it is impossible to replicate spot-market payoffs inside a firm. This result would be trivial if the firm's only instruments were court-enforceable contracts: it is impossible (by definition) for such contracts to replicate payoffs that were noncontractible in a spot market. Our contribution is to show that this result also applies to relational contracts (i.e., self-enforcing agreements in repeated games). To establish this result, we follow Sanford Grossman and Oliver Hart (1986), Hart and John Moore (1990), and Hart (1995) [hereafter referred to collectively as GHM] in using asset ownership to determine whether a particular transaction is inside a firm, and HMT in adding court-enforceable contracts to asset-ownership models. We also draw on our own work (Baker et al., 2001) to model relational contracts. ' The resulting model is the first we know of that simultaneously analyzes asset ownership, courtenforceable contracts, and relational contracts.
MASSIVE PROTOPLANETARY DISKS IN ORION BEYOND THE TRAPEZIUM CLUSTER

We present Submillimeter Array11 The Submillimeter Array is a joint project between the Submillimeter Astrophysical Observatory and the Academica Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics and is funded by the Smithsonian Institution and the Academica Sinica. observations of the 880 μm continuum emission from three circumstellar disks around young stars in Orion that lie several arcminutes (≳ 1 pc) north of the Trapezium cluster. Two of the three disks are in the binary system 253-1536. Silhouette disks 216-0939 and 253-1536a are found to be more massive than any previously observed Orion disks, with dust masses derived from their submillimeter emission of 0.045 M☉ and 0.066 M☉, respectively. The existence of these massive disks reveals that the disk mass distribution in Orion does extend to high masses, and that the truncation observed in the central Trapezium cluster is a result of photoevaporation due to the proximity of O-stars. 253-1536b has a disk mass of 0.018 M☉, making the 253-1536 system the first optical binary in which each protoplanetary disk is massive enough to potentially form solar systems. The Submillimeter Array is a joint project between the Submillimeter Astrophysical Observatory and the Academica Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics and is funded by the Smithsonian Institution and the Academica Sinica.