Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Learning Spatial and Temporal Filters for Single-Trial EEG Classification

There is a wide variety of electroencephalography (EEG) analysis methods. Most of them are based on averaging over multiple trials in order to increase signal-to-noise ratio. The method introduced in this article is a single trial method. Our approach is based on the assumption that the ”real brain signal” of each task is smooth, and is contained in several sensor channels. We propose two stage preprocessing. At first, we use spatial filtering, by taking weighted linear combination of sensors. At the second step, we perform time-domain filtering. Both stages are performed blindly, by maximizing the between class discrimination and minimizing the total variation of result average or , alternatively, suppressing the signal at the windows, where it is known to be absent. No other information on signals of interest is assumed to be available.
Obstetric patients in intensive care unit: Perspective from a teaching hospital in Pakistan

Objective Review of obstetric cases admitted to the intensive care unit. Design Ten year retrospective review of individual patients' medical records. Participants Records of obstetric patients admitted from 2005–2014. Setting Aga Khan University Hospital Karachi Main Outcome measures Diagnosis at the time of admission, associated risk factors, and intervention required aspects of management and rate of mortality. Findings A total of 194 obstetric patients were admitted out of which 86.2% of patients had ventilator support. Mortality was not seen to be significantly associated with parity and antenatal/postnatal status. The median age of patients was 34 years, minimum length of stay was 24 hours and maximum stay was 53 days. Sixty one percent of patients were admitted to with organ system failure. The overall mortality rate was 21.64% (42/194). The mortality rate was five times more likely in patients who had gastro-intestinal complication {Odds Ratio=4.87; 95%CI: 1.65-14.36}. The largest group of patients {28.4%} presented with hematological diagnosis. Conclusion When the intensive care unit admission became essential, primary diagnosis included: postpartum hemorrhage, hypertensive disorders, sepsis and infectious diseases. An increased vigilance of high-risk pregnant women and a stabilization of their condition before intervention is administered, improves the outcome of these women.
Multimedia Encryption with Joint Randomized Entropy Coding and Rotation in Partitioned Bitstream

This work investigates the problem of efficient multimedia data encryption. A novel methodology is proposed to achieve encryption by controlling certain operations in the data compression process using a secret key. The new encryption approach consists of two cascaded modules. The first one is called randomized entropy coding (REC) while the second one is called rotation in partitioned bitstream (RPB). By leveraging the structure of the entropy coder, the joint REC/RPB encryption scheme incurs extremely low computational and implementation costs. Security analysis shows that the proposed scheme can withstand the ciphertext-only attack as well as the known/chosen plaintext attack. The efficiency and security of the proposed encryption scheme makes it an ideal choice in secure media applications where a large amount of multimedia data has to be encrypted/decrypted in real time.
The Reality of Phantom Limbsl

This paper ualuates the joint influence of peripheral neurophysiological factors and higher-order cognitive and ffictive processes in trigeing or madulating a variety of phantow limb uperiences, includ.ing pain. Part I outlines one way in whbh the sympathetic nervaw rystem may influence phantom limb painA model involving a sympathetic-efferent somatic-afferent cycle is presented to oeplain fluctuations in the intensity of sewations refer"d to the phantorn limb. In part 2, the model b stended to explain the puzzling futding that only after amputatinn are thaughts and feelings capable of evaking referred sensati.ons to the (phantom) limb. While phantom pains and other sensations frequently are tigered by though* and feelings, there is no evidence that the painful or painl.ess phantom limb is a symptom of a psychological disorder. In part 3, the concept of a pain "memory" is introduced and descibed with examples. The data show that pain expeienced pior to amputation rnay percist in the form of a memory refened to the phantom limb causing continued suffeing and distress. It is argued that two independent and potentially dissocinble memoty components underlie the unified expertence of a pain memory. This conceptualization is evaluated in the context of the suryical arena, raising the possibility that under ceriain conditions postoperative pain may, in part, reflect the persistent central neural memory trace Ieft by the surgical procedure. It is concluded that the experience of a phantom lirnb is determined by a comple,r interection of inputs fram the periphery and widespreael reginns af the brain subserving sensoty, cognitive, and afective processes.
Students’ Value Orientations in Contemporary China: Analysis of Measurement Invariance and Latent Mean Differences in Comparison With Students From Germany and Russia

The present study examined Chinese students’ personal value orientations according to the Schwartz value theory in comparison with students from Germany and Russia. The theory postulates 10 value orientations grouped into four higher-order factors: conservation versus openness to change and self-transcendence versus self-enhancement. Schwartz’ value orientations have been extensively investigated in Europe but less in East Asian countries such as China. We hypothesized that Chinese students would score higher on conservation and self-enhancement than German and Russian students, but lower on self-transcendence. Regarding openness to change, a null hypothesis was formulated. Students from China (n = 9,601), Germany (n = 1,118), and Russia (n = 3,890) completed the Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ-21). To ensure methodological preconditions for cross-cultural comparison, measurement invariance of the PVQ-21 was tested. In a first step, confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was conducted separately for each country. Due to the high correlation between the 10 values, the four higher-order dimensions were studied separately. Configural, metric, and scalar invariance models were tested using multigroup CFA. Full metric and partial scalar invariance models held for all higher-order factors. Thereafter, latent means of values were compared across samples. As a result, Chinese students scored highest on the four higher-order dimensions when compared with Russian and German samples, thus the hypotheses were only partly confirmed. Results of this study could reflect the value conflicts emerging from various cultural influences in contemporary China: Young people are confronted with daily negotiation between Confucian tradition and the rapid economic development.
Speaker Recognition

Speech processing has emerged as one of the important application area of digital signal processing. The objective of automatic speaker recognition is to extract, characterize and recognize the information about speaker identity. This paper proposes the comparison of the MFCC and the Vector Quantisation technique for speaker recognition. Feature vectors from speech are extracted by using Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients which carry the speaker's identity characteristics and vector quantization technique is implemented through Linde-Buzo-Gray algorithm. Vector quantization uses a codebook to characterize the short-time spectral coefficients of a speaker. These coefficients are used to identify an unknown speaker from a given set of speakers. The effectiveness of these methods is examined from the viewpoint of robustness against utterance variation such as differences in content, temporal variation, and changes in utterance speed.
Semantic inference: a data-driven solution for NL interaction

A recorder for a cartridge-enclosed disk includes a loading and unloading mechanism which utilizes a cam and cam-follower to enable a cartridge-receiver unit to automatically open the recorder's pivoted door when the receiver unit itself pivots from an operative to a loading/unloading position. The cam and cam-follower also enable the door to pivot the receiver unit to the operative position when the door is manually closed following insertion of the disk cartridge. A manually-releasable latch holds the receiver unit in its operative position against the action of a pivot-inducing bias spring. Until activated to allow the receiver unit to force open the door, the same latch also holds the door in its closed condition.
An active learning scenario for interactive machine translation

This paper provides the first experimental study of an active learning (AL) scenario for interactive machine translation (IMT). Unlike other IMT implementations where user feedback is used only to improve the predictions of the system, our IMT implementation takes advantage of user feedback to update the statistical models involved in the translation process. We introduce a sentence sampling strategy to select the sentences that are worth to be interactively translated, and a retraining method to update the statistical models with the user-validated translations. Both, the sampling strategy and the retraining process are designed to work in real-time to meet the severe time constraints inherent to the IMT framework. Experiments in a simulated setting showed that the use of AL dramatically reduces user effort required to obtain translations of a given quality.
ESTADOS DE HUMOR E TEMPO DE REAÇÃO DE POLICIAIS CIVIS DE UNIDADES DE OPERAÇÕES ESPECIAIS

Evidencias mostram a influencia de fatores psicologicos no desempenho de policiais. Alteracoes nos estados de humor podem influenciar na tomada de decisao e performance em habilidades motoras, prejudicando o desempenho cognitivo. O objetivo do estudo foi investigar a relacao entre os estados de humor e o tempo de reacao em policiais civis de unidades de operacoes especiais. Participaram do estudo vinte e dois homens adultos – policiais civis do estado de Santa Catarina e integrantes da Coordenadoria de Operacoes Policiais Especiais (COPE), com media de idade de 34,5 anos. O TR foi medido pelo software Vienna Test System. Os estados de humor foram investigados pela Escala de Humor de Brunel. Os dados foram tratados com estatistica descritiva e inferencial. Os policiais apresentaram alto vigor e baixos niveis dos fatores negativos tensao, depressao, raiva, fadiga e confusao mental. O vigor apresentou relacao negativa (r=-0,55; p<0,01) com o desempenho no tempo de reacao. Na relacao entre as dimensoes do humor, o vigor esteve relacionado negativamente com a fadiga (r=-0,45; p<0,05) e depressao (r=-0,44; p<0,01). A raiva esteve positivamente relacionada a tensao (r=0,61; p<0,01) e depressao (r=0,69; p<0,01). Conclui-se que os policias apresentaram estado de humor positivo. O vigor esta relacionado com o tempo de reacao de policiais civis. Ressalta-se a importância de um estado de humor positivo nos policias especializados, pois essa pre-disposicao psicologica em melhores condicoes possibilita o policial responder melhor as exigencias do trabalho e reduz riscos a sua saude.
Information-Theoretic Syndrome Evaluation, Statistical Root-Cause Analysis, and Correlation-Based Feature Selection for Guiding Board-Level Fault Diagnosis

Reasoning-based functional-fault diagnosis has recently been advocated to achieve high diagnosis accuracy, low defect escapes, and reducing manufacturing cost. However, such diagnosis method requires a rich set of test items (syndromes) and a sizable database of faulty boards to learn from. An insufficient number of failed boards, ambiguous root-cause identification, and redundant or irrelevant syndromes can render reasoning-based diagnosis ineffective. Periodic evaluation and analysis can help locate weaknesses in a diagnosis system and thereby provide guidelines for redesigning the tests, which facilitates better diagnosis. We propose an information-theoretic framework for evaluating the effectiveness of and providing guidance to a reasoning-based functional-fault diagnosis system. Syndrome analysis based on feature selection methods provides a representative set of syndromes and suggests irrelevant syndromes in diagnosis. Root-cause analysis measures the discriminative ability of differentiating a given root cause from others. Results are presented for four types of diagnosis systems for three complex boards that are in volume production.
The controlled logical clock--a global time for trace-based software monitoring of parallel applications in workstation clusters

Event tracing and monitoring of parallel applications are difficult if each processor has its own unsynchronized clock. A survey is given on several strategies to generate a global time, and their limits are discussed. The controlled logical clock is a new method based on Lamport’s logical clock and provides a method to modify inexact timestamps of tracefiles. The new timestamps guarantee the clock condition, i.e. that the receive event of a message has a later timestamp than the send event. The cor-rected timestamps can also be used for performance measurements with pairs of events in different processes. The controlled logical clock is motivated and it is ana-lyzed in detail by computer simulations. No additional protocol overhead is needed for the new method while tracing an application. It can be implemented as a filter for trace-files or it can be integrated into monitor tools for parallel applications.
Narratives around concealment and agency for stigma-reduction: a study of women affected by leprosy in Cirebon District, Indonesia.

Purpose: This study analyses the experiences of women affected by leprosy, taking into consideration whether they concealed or disclosed their status, and looks specifically at their ‘agency’. The aim is to provide recommendations for stigma-reduction interventions. Methods: The study population consisted of women affected by leprosy who live in Cirebon District, Indonesia. Study subjects were purposively selected on the basis of characteristics such as age and role in the community. After informed consent was obtained, they were interviewed in their homes. Data was collected through semi-structured in-depth interviews. Analysis was done with six points of focus: who knows, care, social stigma, feelings, self-isolation and agency. Results: In total, 53 women were interviewed. Eight were omitted due to ambiguity over who knew about their leprosy status. Five different categories of ‘disclosure’ were identified, ranging from 1 woman who concealed completely to 19 (42%) who disclosed fully. Disclosure created possibilities for care and support, which 84% mentioned they received. In contrast, disclosure was also found to be linked to negative feelings, isolation and social stigma, which 18 women experienced. The women coped with this through acceptance, comforting themselves, trusting in God, focussing on recovery, friendship or finding inspiration in others. Conclusions: An analysis of these experiences helps to understand how women affected by leprosy are coping, and what they are already doing for and by themselves. This could be a starting point for more appropriate and effective stigma-reduction interventions. It is recommended to consider the following: i) assisting people with their choice, if any, of either concealment or disclosure, ii) the appropriateness of any intervention for people who (want to) conceal their illness, iii) the existing sources of care and support, and iv) the inner strength demonstrated and its three sources (spirituality, relationships and the desire to be cured).
Message-passing and shared-data programming models - wish vs. reality

Typically, only technical arguments like performance, cost or scalability are discussed if programming models and languages on high performance computing facilities are under consideration. In this paper, we investigate the impact of human factors such as personal preferences and perceptions, and personal experience on making technical decisions. We have queried a large HPC community of the Sharcnet project in Ontario in regards to general preferences and in regards to detailed usage of language features and programming style. The main result of our study is that - as often claimed in the past but never proven - shared-memory programming models and architectures appear to be the ideal for the majority of users, even if the main architecture of the project is a distributed-memory cluster. However, experience appears to be able to quickly overcome initial difficulties in using message passing.
THE EXPANDING SCALE OF SPECIES TURNOVER EVENTS ON CORAL REEFS IN BELIZE

Beginning in the late 1980s, white-band disease nearly eliminated the stag- horn coral Acropora cervicornis from reefs in the central shelf lagoon of Belize. The lettuce coral Agaricia tenuifolia replaced Acropora cervicornis in the early 1990s, but anomalously high water temperatures in 1998 caused severe bleaching and catastrophic mortality of Agaricia tenuifolia. The short-lived transition in dominance from Acropora cervicornis to Agaricia tenuifolia left an unambiguous signature in the fossil record of these uncemented lagoonal reefs. Analysis of 38 cores, extracted from 22 sampling stations in a 375-km2 area of the central lagoon, showed that Acropora cervicornis dominated continuously for at least 3000 years prior to the recent events. Agaricia tenuifolia occasionally grew in small patches, but no coral-to-coral replacement sequence occurred over the entire area until the late 1980s. Within a decade, the scale of species turnover increased from tens of square meters or less to hundreds of square kilometers or more. This unprecedented increase in the scale of turnover events is rooted in the accelerating pace of ecological change on coral reefs at the regional level.
Packet Scheduling with Switch Configuration Delays ∗

In modern packet switches, technology limitations may introduce switch configuration delays that are non-negligible compared with the time required to transmit a single packet. In this paper, we propose a methodology for scheduling of packets, in the context of these technology limitations. If the total tolerable delay through a packet switch is at least on the order of the switch configuration delay, we show that a near 100% utilization of the communication links is possible, while providing strict quality of service guarantees. The main idea is to increase the quantum with which data is scheduled and switched to beyond that of a single packet. The quality of service guarantees we consider are in terms of a service curve. Specifically, we present a methodology for the provision of service curves while coping with non-neglible switch configuration delays.
Using Smart Sampling to Discover Promising Regions and Increase the Efficiency of Differential Evolution

This paper presents a novel method to discover promising regions in a continuous search space. Using machine learning techniques, the algorithm named Smart Sampling was tested in hard known benchmark functions, and was able to find promising regions with solutions very close to the global optimum, significantly decreasing the number of evaluations needed by a metaheuristic to finally find this global optimum, when heuristically started inside a promising region. Results show favorable agreement with theories which state the importance of an adequate starting population. The results also present significant improvement in the efficiency of the tested metaheuristic, without adding any parameter, operator or strategy. Being a technique which can be used by any populational metaheuristic, the work presented here has profound implications for future studies of global optimization and may help solve considerably difficult optimization problems.
Transitions in the process industries: opportunities and prospective solutions

With the increasing emphasis on agile operations, the process industries have begun to focus on effectively managing process transitions. Problems during the operation and control of transitions originate from alarm floods, out-of-spec products, and abnormal situations. Recent research has sought to address these issues albeit in a piece-meal fashion. We review these methods and critically evaluate their strengths and shortcomings. We show that none of the methods can adequately tackle the numerous facets of this complex problem; hence an integrated solution and collaboration among heterogeneous methods is essential. We propose a software agent-based framework as a way to realize this in practice.
Ecological correlates of ex situ seed longevity: a comparative study on 195 species.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Extended seed longevity in the dry state is the basis for the ex situ conservation of 'orthodox' seeds. However, even under identical storage conditions there is wide variation in seed life-span between species. Here, the effects of seed traits and environmental conditions at the site of collection on seed longevity is explored for195 wild species from 71 families from environments ranging from cold deserts to tropical forests. METHODS Seeds were rapidly aged at elevated temperature and relative humidity (either 45 degrees C and 60% RH or 60 degrees C and 60% RH) and regularly sampled for germination. The time taken in storage for viability to fall to 50% (p(50)) was determined using Probit analysis and used as a measure of relative seed longevity between species. KEY RESULTS Across species, p(50) at 45 degrees C and 60% RH varied from 0.1 d to 771 d. Endospermic seeds were, in general, shorter lived than non-endospermic seeds and seeds from hot, dry environments were longer lived than those from cool, wet conditions. These relationships remained significant when controlling for the effects of phylogenetic relatedness using phylogenetically independent contrasts. Seed mass and oil content were not correlated with p(50). CONCLUSIONS The data suggest that the endospermic seeds of early angiosperms which evolved in forest understorey habitats are short-lived. Extended longevity presumably evolved as a response to climatic change or the invasion of drier areas. The apparent short-lived nature of endospermic seeds from cool wet environments may have implications for re-collection and re-testing strategies in ex situ conservation.
Reliability of Representative Reviewers on the Web

There are opinion leaders in a society who represent the opinion of general public. The general public accepts information not only by mass media but also by opinion leaders. Since the late 20th century, the number of Internet users has increased fast. Many users interact with each other in an online social network. This makes the Web community similar to the real society. Thus it is a natural task to find influential users in an online society. For example, many online articles posted by influential bloggers are used as marketing tools for companies or political advertisements for parties since these articles have huge influence to other users. We first revisit the previous researches on finding influential users in online society. Then we compose test sets from the GroupLens movie database and identify representative reviewers. Next, we show the validity of the chosen representative reviewers and test the reliability using the 10-fold cross- validation. Finally, we explain applicability of the proposed approach to improve current recommendation systems.