Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An approach for close-form solution of multilateration equations

The approach combines both Chan's algorithm and another close-form algorithm to solve the aircraft multilateration surveillance equations. Results developed are applicable for the surveillance system as a final location solution or as an initial one for the iteration algorithm. However, the ambiguous problem occurs if there are only three TOA measurements. So, the approach will also focus on it and provides an advisable comment to avoid the ambiguity in the receiver stations allocation process for the surveillance system in the airport.
Reforms, Incentives and Banking Sector Productivity: A Case of Nepal

We model banks as profit-cum-utility maximizing firms and study, inter alia, bankers’ incentives (optimal effort) and incentive driven productivity following deregulations. Our model puts to test a panel of Nepalese commercial banks which went through deep financial reforms in the recent past. We find that (i) bankers’ efforts and productivity have notably improved in Nepal, (ii) bankers’ efforts significantly explain the banking sector’s productivity, (iii) the proportion of non-performing loans has considerably declined, and (iv) banking services have become costly, although the bank spread has moderately declined. Our approach is different from the widely used data envelopment analysis (DEA) of bank productivity, hence complements the literature. It also informs the current policy debate in Nepal where the Central Bank is seen to be geared towards regulating the financial system and micro-managing the banking institutions.
Golf Product Advertising Value, Attitude toward Advertising and Brand, and Purchase Intention

We examined the structural relationships among the variables of advertising value, attitude toward advertising, attitude toward the brand, and purchase intention in the context of golf products. The sample ( N = 357) comprised members of 6 golf ranges in 2 major provinces in Korea. Structural equation modeling results supported all hypothesized direct associations except that for the advertising value component of irritation. Further, attitude toward advertising and attitude toward the brand played mediating roles in the relationship between advertising value components and purchase intention. We have redefined Ducoffe’s outcome advertising value model in a golf-product advertising context and shed light on how consumers of these products form purchase intentions through tripartite advertising values.
Redistribution of Gene Frequency and Changes of Genetic Variation Following a Bottleneck in Population Size

Although the distribution of frequencies of genes influencing quantitative traits is important to our understanding of their genetic basis and their evolution, direct information from laboratory experiments is very limited. In theory, different models of selection and mutation generate different predictions of frequency distributions. When a large population at mutation-selection balance passes through a rapid bottleneck in size, the frequency distribution of genes is dramatically altered, causing changes in observable quantities such as the mean and variance of quantitative traits. We investigate the gene frequency distribution of a population at mutation-selection balance under a joint-effect model of real stabilizing and pleiotropic selection and its redistribution and thus changes of the genetic properties of metric and fitness traits after the population passes a rapid bottleneck and expands in size. If all genes that affect the trait are neutral with respect to fitness, the additive genetic variance (VA) is always reduced by a bottleneck in population size, regardless of their degree of dominance. For genes that have been under selection, VA increases following a bottleneck if they are (partially) recessive, while the dominance variance increases substantially for any degree of dominance. With typical estimates of mutation parameters, the joint-effect model can explain data from laboratory experiments on the effect of bottlenecking on fitness and morphological traits, providing further support for it as a plausible mechanism for maintenance of quantitative genetic variation.
Performance and Body Composition of Gilts from Differing Genetic Lines as Affected by Nutritional Program

and Implications Gilts restricted fed a high-protein ration were slower growing (P<.05) than gilts ad libitum fed a highand moderate-protein diet. Gilts ad libitum fed a moderateprotein diet with added fat had significantly (P<.05) more fat accretion than gilts ad libitum fed and restricted fed a high-protein diet. A genetic line by diet interaction (P<.05) was observed for average daily gain. Also, gilts with the presence of a terminal breed in their ancestry were leaner and heavier muscled (P<.05) than gilts with no presence of a terminal breed in their ancestry.
A Systems Perspective on the Quality Description of Software Components

In this paper we present our motivations for proposing of a generic model for the description of quality attributes of software artifacts, in particular suited to software components. The conceptual ideas for our quality description model are derived from researching systems science for its value to software engineering. In this work we realized that software engineering is concerned with a number of different systems, e.g., a development project as a concrete, human activity, system, a software product in the form of programming code as a conceptual system, a software system running in its execution environment as a concrete system. Each of these systems exhibits the basic system theoretic principles and in the context of this paper is strongly related to certain types of qualities. Such qualities receive particular attention in the context of large software systems, where systems are typically a combination of in-house and third party products and are increasingly integrated by means of software component technology. Consequently, quality related information (in the form of a quality data sheet) is needed by component users to gain trust in and to evaluate the possible employment of a candidate component. Interestingly, the concept of a software component appears in most of the aforementioned different types of systems. Hence, they can be an excellent means to carry quality related information that belonged to different spheres up to now. The qualities range from those related to the development economics to those related to the execution performance.
Upregulation of microRNA-373 in human colorectal carcinoma by targeting CD 44

The reduced or increased level of specific microRNA has been found in colon and other cancers, supporting their role in carcinogenesis. Despite the upregulation of microRNA-373 (miR-373) has been reported in a various cancers, its role in colon cancer is totally unknown. Hence, the present study was aimed to investigate the expression and function of miR-373 in colon cancer tissues and cell lines. Quantitative RT-PCR analysis showed that miR-373 expression was significantly increased in colon tumor tissues and colon cancer cell lines as compared with corresponding adjacent normal tissues and cells lines. Furthermore, the expression level of CD44 was negatively correlated with miR-373 levels in colon tumor tissues and cell lines, suggesting that functions of miR-373 are mediated by the suppression of CD44 expression. Loss-of-function and gain-of-function showed that miR-373 reduced cell death and growth suppression of colon cancer HCT-15 cells. Taken together, our results demonstrated that miR373 expression is upregulated in colon tumor tissues and is a potential oncogenic miRNA, suggesting that miR-373 might be a potential clinical marker and therapeutic target for the prevention of colon cancer.
Folate intake and the risk of neural tube defects: an estimation of dose-response.

BACKGROUND Studies have shown that folic acid supplementation in early pregnancy markedly reduces the risk of neural tube defects (NTDs). Investigation of the relation between relative dose of supplemental folic acid or total folate intake and NTD risk is limited. METHODS We used data from 23,228 women, predominantly from the northeastern United States, enrolled between October 1984 and June 1987 in a prospective study of early prenatal exposures and pregnancy outcomes. Diet and vitamin intake data were gathered in the early second trimester. NTDs were ascertained through prenatal testing and by report of the delivering physician. Data analyses included multiple logistic regression and restricted spline regression modeling. RESULTS For each additional 500 dietary folate equivalents consumed per day, the prevalence of NTDs decreased by 0.78 cases (95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.47-1.09) per 1,000 pregnancies. Compared with women having the lowest total folate intakes (0-149 folate equivalents per day), the prevalence of NTDs declined by 34%, 30%, 56% and 77% among the offspring of those women consuming 150-399, 400-799, 800-1199 and > or = 1200 folate equivalents per day, respectively (P-value for linear trend = 0.016). CONCLUSIONS Our results suggest that NTD risk declines markedly with modest increases of total folate in early pregnancy. Total folate dose, rather than supplemental folate alone, should be considered in formulating public health guidelines for NTD prevention.
Elastic properties of magnetosome chains

Magnetotactic bacteria swim and orient in the direction of a magnetic field thanks to the magnetosome chain, a cellular ‘compass needle’ that consists of a string of vesicle-enclosed magnetic nanoparticles aligned on a cytoskeletal filament. Here we investigate the mechanical properties of such a chain, in particular the bending stiffness. We determine the contribution of magnetic interactions to the bending stiffness and the persistence length of the chain. This contribution is comparable to, but typically smaller than the contribution of the semiflexible filament. For a chain of magnetic nanoparticles without a semiflexible filament, the linear configuration is typically metastable and the lowest energy structures are closed chains (flux closure rings) without a net magnetic moment that are thus not functional as a cellular compass. Our calculations show that the presence of the cytoskeletal filament stabilizes the chain against ring closure, either thermodynamically or kinetically, depending on the stiffness of the filament, confirming that such stabilization is one of the roles of this structure in these bacterial cells.
“The first million is hardest to get”: Building a Large Tagged Corpus as Automatically as Possible

The paper describes a recently started project in Sweden. The goal of the project is to produce a corpus of (at least) one million words of running text from different genres, where all words are classified for word class and for a set of morpho-syntactic properties. A set of methods and tools for automating the process are being developed and will be presented, and problems and some solutions in connection with e.g. homography disambiguation will be discussed.
Device-detected atrial fibrillation and risk for stroke: an analysis of >10 000 patients from the SOS AF project (Stroke preventiOn Strategies based on Atrial Fibrillation information from implanted devices)

Objective The aim of this study was to assess the association between maximum daily atrial fibrillation (AF) burden and risk of ischaemic stroke. Background Cardiac implanted electronic devices (CIEDs) enhance detection of AF, providing a comprehensive measure of AF burden. Design, setting, and patients A pooled analysis of individual patient data from five prospective studies was performed. Patients without permanent AF, previously implanted with CIEDs, were included if they had at least 3 months of follow-up. A total of 10 016 patients (median age 70 years) met these criteria. The risk of ischaemic stroke associated with pre-specified cut-off points of AF burden (5 min, 1, 6, 12, and 23 h, respectively) was assessed. Results During a median follow-up of 24 months, 43% of 10 016 patients experienced at least 1 day with at least 5 min of AF burden and for them the median time to the maximum AF burden was 6 months (inter-quartile range: 1.3–14). A Cox regression analysis adjusted for the CHADS2 score and anticoagulants at baseline demonstrated that AF burden was an independent predictor of ischaemic stroke. Among the thresholds of AF burden that we evaluated, 1 h was associated with the highest hazard ratio (HR) for ischaemic stroke, i.e. 2.11 (95% CI: 1.22–3.64, P = 0.008). Conclusions Device-detected AF burden is associated with an increased risk of ischaemic stroke in a relatively unselected population of CIEDs patients. This finding may add to the basis for timely and clinically appropriate decision-making on anticoagulation treatment.
School Governance, Teacher Incentives, and Pupil-Teacher Ratios: Experimental Evidence from Kenyan Primary Schools

This brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study, entitled School governance, teacher incentives, and pupil-teacher ratios : experimental evidence from Kenyan primary schools, conducted between 2005 and 2006 in Kenya. The study observed the impact of a program under which Kenyan parent-teacher associations (PTAs) at randomly selected schools were funded to hire an additional teacher on a renewable contract, outside normal ministry of education civil service channels, at one-quarter normal compensation levels on the student, teacher, and school level. Despite a dramatic reduction in class size, the program generated little improvement for students who remained in the standard system. Civil service teachers were 13 points less likely to be found in class teaching if their school received funding to hire a contract teacher. The program increased test scores by 28 percent of a standard deviation for those students assigned to PTA contract teachers. There is strong evidence that locally hired and monitored teachers had better incentives, they were 15 percent more likely to be in class teaching during unannounced spot checks. The school based management program had significant positive impacts on the tendency for civil service teachers to cut effort in response to introduction of a contract teacher. Funding for the study derived from the World Bank, Government of Netherlands.
Cursive character recognition – a character segmentation method using projection profile-based technique

This paper reports the results of a study on a first sight decision tree algorithm for cursive script recognition based on the use of histogram as a projection profile technique. A postal code image data scanned is converted in a 2-dimension matrix representation to be used with a set of algorithms to provide full range segmentation. The results, based on this approach, are quite satisfactory for first stage classifier.
Deep learning for music genre classification

In this paper we will present how to use Restricted Boltzmann machine algorithm to build deep belief neural networks.The goal is to use it to perform a multi-class classification task of labelling music genres and compare it to that of the vanilla neural networks. We expected that deep learning would out-perform however the results we obtained for 2 and 3 class classification turn out to be on par for deep neural networks and the vanilla version with small data set. By generating more dataset from the original limited music tracks, we see a great classification accuracy improvement in the deep belief neural network and its outperformance than neural networks.
Methodological Considerations in Screening for Cumulative Environmental Health Impacts: Lessons Learned from a Pilot Study in California

Polluting facilities and hazardous sites are often concentrated in low-income communities of color already facing additional stressors to their health. The influence of socioeconomic status is not considered in traditional models of risk assessment. We describe a pilot study of a screening method that considers both pollution burden and population characteristics in assessing the potential for cumulative impacts. The goal is to identify communities that warrant further attention and to thereby provide actionable guidance to decision- and policy-makers in achieving environmental justice. The method uses indicators related to five components to develop a relative cumulative impact score for use in comparing communities: exposures, public health effects, environmental effects, sensitive populations and socioeconomic factors. Here, we describe several methodological considerations in combining disparate data sources and report on the results of sensitivity analyses meant to guide future improvements in cumulative impact assessments. We discuss criteria for the selection of appropriate indicators, correlations between them, and consider data quality and the influence of choices regarding model structure. We conclude that the results of this model are largely robust to changes in model structure.
A Survey on Different Methods for Design of Sparse FIR Filter

Sparsity has been a great issue in the design of FIR filter. The objective of a Sparse FIR filter design is to reduce the implementation complexity as the number of nonzero-coefficients is reduced. By increasing the number of zero-valued coefficients, the implementation of the filter becomes simple as the additions and multiplications corresponding to zero-valued coefficients are omitted. The proposed paper discusses the various techniques used earlier for designing a sparse FIR filter. This paper also presents the comparative study of several filter designing methods used by researchers for this work.
A robust SIFT-based matching algorithm for the occluded area and complex texture

Recently, many researchers are actively studying on the reconstruction of 3-dimensional structures from the 2-dimensional images acquired from a stereo camera. However, the disparity map calculated from the existing methods does not always provide accurate depth information by the false matching and occluded areas. In this paper, by simultaneously applying the feature-based methods [1] and region-based methods[2], we effectively solve the problems caused by the false matching and occluded regions[3]. By experimental results we show that the proposed method can generate more accurate disparity map even in the case of occluded area or complex texture area [4].
Study of Small-signal Model of Simple CMOS Amplifier with Instability Compensation of Positive Feedback Loop

Abstract The paper deals with precise analysis of simple AC variable gain CMOS amplifier. The circuit can be used as a simple voltage follower (6 MOS transistors are required) or amplifier. The main attention of this work is focused on a small-signal model of the proposed block and effects of additional passive network leading to compensation of its instability. The continuous gain adjusting in range from 1.1 to 10 (0.8 – 20 dB and with bandwidth 4.9 - 90 MHz at 5 pF load capacitance) is possible and the proposed amplifier is suitable for implementation in systems, where lower range of gain adjusting and large dynamical range is required. Theoretical analyses are supported by PSpice simulations (TSMC 0.18 um technological models) and experimental measurements with commercially available CMOS transistor fields (ALD1106/7) also confirm the discussed behavior of the amplifier.
Classification and regression-based surrogate model-assisted interactive genetic algorithm with individual's fuzzy fitness

Interactive genetic algorithms with individual's fuzzy fitness well portray the fuzzy uncertainties of a user's cognition. In this paper, we propose an efficient surrogate model-assisted one to alleviate user fatigue by building a classifier and a regressor to approximate the user's cognition. Two reliable training data sets are obtained based on the user's evaluation credibility. Then a support vector classification machine and a support vector regression machine are trained as the surrogate models with these samples. Specifically, the input trained samples are the individuals evaluated by the user, and the output training samples of the classifier and the regressor are widths and centers of these individuals' fuzzy fitness assigned by the user, respectively. These two surrogate models are simultaneously applied to the subsequent evolutions with enlarged population size so as to alleviate user fatigue and enhance the search ability of the algorithm. We constantly update the training data sets and the surrogate models in order to guarantee the approximation precision. Furthermore, we quantitatively analyze the algorithm's performance in alleviating user fatigue and increasing more opportunities to find the optimal solutions. We also apply it to a fashion evolutionary design system to show its efficiency.
Comparative analysis of formants of British, american and australian accents

This paper compares and quantifies the differences between formants of speech across accents. The cross entropy information measure is used to compare the differences between the formants of the vowels of three major English accents namely British, American and Australian. An improved formant estimation method, based on a linear prediction (LP) model feature analysis and a hidden Markov model (HMM) of formants, is employed for estimation of formant trajectories of vowels and diphthongs. Comparative analysis of the formant space of the three accents indicates that these accents are mostly conveyed by the first two formants. The third and fourth formants exhibit some significant differences across accents for only a few phonemes most notably the variants of vowel ‘r’ in the American (rhotic) accent compared to British (non-rhotic accent). The issue of speaker variability versus accent variability is examined by comparing the cross-entropies of speech models trained on different groups of speakers within and across the accents.
In-vivo polyethylene wear and knee prosthesis longevity estimation

This paper describes an in-vivo polyethylene wear and knee prosthesis longevity estimation approach using an implantable ligament imbalance metric system. Four piezoelectric elements are used to measure the axial force components, on the tibial tray surface and their center of pressure is calculated. This can be used, along with a knee simulator, to estimate polyethylene wear, and the state of the implanted knee prosthesis. Surgeons can exploit this to improve the post operative rehabilitation measures, whereas prosthesis manufacturers can use it to improve prosthesis's strength, geometry and life. The proposed self-powered measurement and telemetry system does not require any external power.
Self-adaptive mutation in XCSF

Recent advances in XCS technology have shown that self-adaptive mutation can be highly useful to speed-up the evolutionary progress in XCS. Moreover, recent publications have shown that XCS can also be successfully applied to challenging real-valued domains including datamining, function approximation, and clustering. In this paper, we combine these two advances and investigate self-adaptive mutation in the XCS system for function approximation with hyperellipsoidal condition structures, referred to as XCSF in this paper. It has been shown that XCSF solves function approximation problems with an accuracy, noise robustness, and generalization capability comparable to other statistical machine learning techniques and that XCSF outperforms simple clustering techniques to which linear approximations are added. This paper shows that the right type of self-adaptive mutation can further improve XCSF's performance solving problems more parameter independent and more reliably. We analyze various types of self-adaptive mutation and show that XCSF with self-adaptive mutation ranges,differentiated for the separate classifier condition values, yields most robust performance results. Future work may further investigate the properties of the self-adaptive values and may integrate advanced self-adaptation techniques.