Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Depth Camera Motion Analysis Framework for Tele-rehabilitation: Motion Capture and Person-Centric Kinematics Analysis

With increasing importance given to tele-rehabilitation, there is a growing need for accurate, low-cost, and portable motion capture systems that do not require specialist assessment venues. This paper proposes a novel framework for motion capture using only a single depth camera, which is portable and cost effective compared to most industry-standard optical systems, without compromising on accuracy. Novel signal processing and computer vision algorithms are proposed to determine motion patterns of interest from infrared and depth data. In order to demonstrate the proposed framework's suitability for rehabilitation, we developed a gait analysis application that depends on the underlying motion capture sub-system. Each subject's individual kinematics parameters, which are unique to that subject, are calculated and stored for monitoring individual progress of the clinical therapy. Experiments were conducted on 14 different subjects, 5 healthy, and 9 stroke survivors. The results show very close agreement of the resulting relevant joint angles with a benchmarking 12-camera based VICON system, a mean error of at most 1.75 % in detecting gait events w.r. t. the hand-labeled ground-truth, and significant performance improvements in terms of accuracy and efficiency compared to a previous Kinect-based system.
A pr 2 00 4 Quasicrystalline Order in Binary Dipolar Systems

Motivated by recent experimental findings, we investigate the possible occurrence and characteristics of quasicrystalline order in two-dimensional mixtures of point dipoles with two sorts of dipole moments. Despite the fact that the dipolar interaction potential does not exhibit an intrinsic length scale and cannot be tuned a priori to support the formation of quasicrystalline order, we find that configurations with long–range quasicrystallinity yield minima in the potential energy surface of the many particle system. These configurations emanate from an ideal or perturbed ideal decoration of a binary tiling by steepest descent relaxation. Ground state energy calculations of alternative ordered states and parallel tempering Monte-Carlo simulations reveal that the quasicrystalline configurations do not correspond to a thermodynamically stable state. On the other hand, steepest descent relaxations and conventional Monte-Carlo simulations suggest that they are rather robust against fluctuations. Local quasicrystalline order in the disordered equilibrium states can be strong.
New Schools for a New Century. The Redesign of Urban Education.

In this book, distinguished scholars discuss recent controversial innovations - charter schools, contracting arrangements, and choice - designed to liberate educators from burdensome bureaucratic controls and raise the level of opportunity for all children. The authors focus on the problems in cities, where far too many children have been denied access to quality institutions. Various essays explore the lessons to be learned from Catholic schools, site-based management, and private entrepreneurs, as well as specific developments in three cities - New York, Milwaukee, and Chicago. The contributors, though realistic about the political and institutional obstacles that stand in the way of meaningful change, foresee the demise of the "one size fits all" approach to schooling. They envision a system of schools that is dynamic, diverse, performance-based, and accountable - one that is supportive of professionals, responsive to creativity, intolerant of failure, and committed to high educational standards for all children.
Modelling Agri-Food Policy Impact at Farm-household Level in Developing Countries (FSSIM-Dev): Application to Sierra Leone

This report describes the generic template of a farm-household model for use in the context of developing countries in order to gain knowledge on food security and rural poverty alleviation under different economic conditions and agri-food policy options. This model, called FSSIM-Dev (Farming System Simulator for Developing Countries), is an extension of the FSSIM model developed within the SEAMLESS project. Contrary to most well-known household models which are econometric based, FSSIM-Dev is a non-linear optimization model which relies on both the general household's utility framework and the farm's production technical constraints, in a non-separable regime. It is referred to as a static Positive Mathematical Programming (PMP) which optimise at farm household level, with the opportunities to simulate the exchange of production factors among farm-households. FSSIM-Dev is designed to capture five key features of developing countries or/and rural areas: (i) non-separability of production and consumption decisions due to market imperfection; (ii) interaction among farm-households for market factors; (iii) heterogeneity of farm households with respect to their both consumption baskets (demand side) and resource endowments (supply side); (iv) inter-linkage between transaction costs and market participation decisions; and (v) the seasonality of farming activities and resource use. Model use is illustrated in this report with an analysis of the combined effects of rice support policy, namely fertiliser subsidy policy, and improved rice cropping managements (practices) on the livelihood of representative farm households in Sierra Leone. Results show that, first, the improvement of rice cropping managements is a key factor to boost significantly farm household income in the studied region. Second, the amount of N fertilizer required for, mainly, upland rice appears too high and costly and could not be applied by farm households without policy support (i.e. subsidies). Third, both the simulated rice policy and the improved crop managements would increase farm productivity and boost household income but they are not sufficient to fight poverty since most of the farm household types would continue to live below the extreme poverty line of 1 USD-equivalent per day.
Uncoupling of cell proliferation and differentiation activities of basic fibroblast growth factor

FGF‐2 exerts its pleiotropic effects on cell growth and differentiation by interacting with specific cell surface receptors. In addition, exogenously added FGF‐2 is translocated from outside the cell to the nucleus during G1‐S transition. In this study, we show that a single point mutation in FGF‐2 (substitution of residue serine 117 by alanine) is sufficient to drastically reduce its mitogenic activity without affecting its differentiation properties. The FGF‐2(S117A) mutant binds to and activates tyrosine kinase receptors and induces MAPK and p70S6K activation as strongly as the wild‐type FGF‐2. We demonstrate that this mutant enters NIH3T3 cells, is translocated to the nucleus, and is phosphorylated similar to the wild‐type growth factor. This suggests that FGF‐2 mitogenic activity may require, in addition to signaling through cell surface receptors and nuclear translocation, activation of nuclear targets. We have previously shown that, in vitro, FGF‐2 directly stimulates the activity of the casein kinase 2 (CK2), a ubiquitous serine/threonine kinase involved in the control of cell proliferation. We report that, in vivo, FGF‐2(WT) transiently interacts with CK2 and stimulates its activity in the nucleus during G1‐S transition in NIH3T3 cells. In contrast, the FGF‐2(S117A) mutant fails to interact with CK2. Thus, our results show that FGF‐2 mitogenic and differentiation activities can be dissociated by a single point mutation and that CK2 may be a new nuclear effector involved in FGF‐2 mitogenic activity. Bailly, K. , Soulet, F. , Leroy, D. , Amalric, F. , Bouche, G. Uncoupling of cell proliferation and differentiation activities of basic fibroblast growth factor (FGF‐2). FASEB J. 14, 333—344 (2000)
KECK HIRES Spectroscopy of APM 08279+5255

With an optical R‐band magnitude of 15.2, the recently discovered z = 3.911 broad absorption line quasar APM 08279+5255 is an exceptionally bright high‐redshift source. Its brightness has allowed us to acquire a high signal‐to‐noise ratio (∼80), high‐resolution (∼6 km s−1) spectrum using the HIRES echelle spectrograph on the 10 m Keck I telescope. Given the quality of the data, these observations provide an unprecedented view of associated and intervening absorption systems. Here we announce the availability of this spectrum to the general astronomical community and present a brief analysis of some of its main features.
Exotic multi-quark states in the deconfined phase from gravity dual models

In the deconfined phase of quark-gluon plasma, it seems that most of the quarks, antiquarks and gluons should be effectively free in the absence of the linear confining potential. However, the remaining Coulomb-type potential between quarks in the plasma could still be sufficiently strong that certain bound states, notably of heavy quarks such as J/ψ are stable even in the deconfined plasma up to a certain temperature. Baryons can also exist in the deconfined phase provided that the density is sufficiently large. We study three kinds of exotic multi-quark bound states in the deconfined phase of quark-gluon plasma from gravity dual models in addition to the normal baryon. They are k-baryon, (N+)-baryon and a bound state of j mesons which we call ``j-mesonance''. Binding energies and screening lengths of these exotic states are studied and are found to have similar properties to those of mesons and baryons at the leading order. Phase diagram for the exotic nuclear phases is subsequently studied in the Sakai-Sugimoto model. Even though the exotics are less stable than normal baryons, in the region of high chemical potential and low temperature, they are more stable thermodynamically than the vacuum and chiral-symmetric quark-gluon plasma phases (χS-QGP).
A Social Media Marketing Typology: Classifying Brand Facebook Page Messages For Strategic Consumer Engagement

Growing attention for Social Media marketing has resulted in a burgeoning field of research and practice; yet, hitherto few studies have provided empirically grounded and comprehensive typologies for assessing, classifying, and in turn, informing the future development of Social Media marketing communications. The lack of such comprehensive and valuable typologies appears to be related to (i) the limited applicability of traditional marketing theories in the context of novel Social Media; (ii) the focus of existing studies on a limited brand category or messaging category; (iii) the plethora of Social Media platforms that complicate the development of contextually relevant messaging strategies. To overcome this void in the literature and these three challenges, this study presents the results of a longitudinal Multi-Grounded Theory study of three Fortune 110 companies—Delta Airlines, WalMart, and McDonald’s—of six weeks of Facebook Page messaging data (n=256 brand posts). The proposed typology encompasses seven overarching message categories—namely Brand Awareness, Corporate Social Responsibility, Costumer Service, Engagement, Product Awareness, Promotional, and Seasonal—with a total of 23 sub-categories. This typology provides a valuable theoretical and empirical starting point for framing Social Media marketing strategies, and for informing the design and development of successful Social Media marketing messages.
The evaluation of local and global approaches in assessment of baroreflex sensitivity using sequence technique

This paper evaluates the assessment of baroreflex sensitivity (BRS) using the most common time domain method - sequence technique. The BRS estimation is based on a linear regression between systolic blood pressure (SBP) and pulse intervals (PI) values in baroreflex sequences (BS). Since BS beats represent a very small percentage of total beat number (about 10% in rats), there exist doubts about the accuracy of the estimated slopes, especially since BSs are usually three bits long and there are number of outliers. For these reasons, a global estimator with outlier rejection rule is evaluated, with both baroreflex sequences and baroreflex events (BE). The BRS estimation techniques were done in datasets obtained from radiotelemetred rats treated with: saline, beta1-adrenergic antagonist metoprolol, alpha1-adrenergic antagonist prazosin and muscarinic receptor antagonist atropine. The results show that, even the number of beats in BE increases up to the 50% of the total, their use slightly improves the distinguishing among the experimental groups. The global estimator, both on BSs and on BEs, shows the best performance in terms of variability.
Building a bird recognition app and large scale dataset with citizen scientists: The fine print in fine-grained dataset collection

We introduce tools and methodologies to collect high quality, large scale fine-grained computer vision datasets using citizen scientists - crowd annotators who are passionate and knowledgeable about specific domains such as birds or airplanes. We worked with citizen scientists and domain experts to collect NABirds, a new high quality dataset containing 48,562 images of North American birds with 555 categories, part annotations and bounding boxes. We find that citizen scientists are significantly more accurate than Mechanical Turkers at zero cost. We worked with bird experts to measure the quality of popular datasets like CUB-200-2011 and ImageNet and found class label error rates of at least 4%. Nevertheless, we found that learning algorithms are surprisingly robust to annotation errors and this level of training data corruption can lead to an acceptably small increase in test error if the training set has sufficient size. At the same time, we found that an expert-curated high quality test set like NABirds is necessary to accurately measure the performance of fine-grained computer vision systems. We used NABirds to train a publicly available bird recognition service deployed on the web site of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
Ultra-high energy cosmic rays, spiral galaxies and magnetars

We measure the correlation between the arrival directions of the highest energy cosmic rays detected by the Pierre Auger Observatory with the position of the galaxies in the H i Parkes All-Sky Survey (HIPASS) catalogue, weighted for their H i flux and Auger exposure. The use of this absorption-free catalogue, complete also along the Galactic plane, allows us to use all the Auger events. The correlation is significant, being 86.2 per cent for the entire sample of H i galaxies, and becoming 99 per cent when considering the richest galaxies in H i content or 98 per cent with those lying between 40 and 55 Mpc. We interpret this result as the evidence that spiral galaxies are the hosts of the producers of ultra-high energy cosmic rays and we briefly discuss the classical (i.e. energetic and distant) long gamma-ray burst (GRBs), short GRBs, as well as newly born or late-flaring magnetars as possible sources of the Auger events. With the caveat that these events are still very few, and the theoretical uncertainties are conspicuous, we found that newly born magnetars are the best candidates. If so, they could also be associated with sub-energetic, spectrally soft, nearby, long GRBs. We finally discuss why there is a clustering of Auger events in the direction on the radio galaxy Cen A and an absence of events in the direction of the radio galaxy M87.
Prosodic modification of speech to incorporate happy and sad emotions

Speech has been in use as an effective medium in human machine interactions for a long time. A conventional text-to-speech (TTS) system produces monotonous speech without any appropriate emotion. The inclusion of emotions in such synthesis systems will not only result in expressive speech but also reduce the monotony of the synthetic speech. The time domain parameters of speech signals, like short time energy, duration, and pitch contour are influenced by emotions. Hence to incorporate desired emotion into neutral speech, signal processing methods are used in this work for modifying the prosodic speech parameters in time domain, either in few words or the entire speech utterance. An initial analysis is performed, by comparing neutral speech with happy and sad speech. Based on the observations from the analysis, the parameters of the speech signal are varied using TD-PSOLA technique. The parameters, short time energy, duration, and pitch contour in the neutral speech are modified and further analyzed quantitatively to decide the combination of parameter modification that better synthesizes the emotional speech from neutral speech.
Fall detection using a Gaussian distribution of clustered knowledge, augmented radial basis neural-network, and multilayer perceptron

The rapidly increasing population of elderly people has posed a big challenge to research in fall prevention and detection. Substantial amounts of injuries, disabilities, traumas and deaths among elderly people due to falls have been reported worldwide. There is therefore a need for a reliable, simple, and affordable automatic fall detection system. This paper proposes a reliable fall detection algorithm using minimal information from a single waist worn wireless tri-axial accelerometer. The method proposed is to approach fall detection using digital signal processing and neural networks. This method includes the application of Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), Regrouping Particle Swarm Optimization (RegPSO), a proposed method called Gaussian Distribution of Clustered Knowledge (GCK), and an Ensemble of Classifiers using two different classifiers: Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network (MLP) and Augmented Radial Basis Neural Networks (ARBF). The proposed method has been tested on 8 healthy individuals in a home environment and yields promising result of up to 100% sensitivity on ingroup, 97.65% sensitivity on outgroup, and 99.56% specificity on Activities of Daily Living (ADL) data.
Antibacterial-Coated Suture in Reducing Surgical Site Infection in Breast Surgery: A Prospective Study

Background. To reduce the incidence of microbial colonization of suture material, Triclosan- (TC-)coated suture materials have been developed. The aim of this study was to assess the incidence of suture-related complications (SRC) in breast surgery with and without the use of TC-coated sutures. Methods. We performed a study on two consecutive periods: 92 patients underwent breast surgery with conventional sutures (Group 1) and 98 with TC-coated sutures (Group 2). We performed subgroups analyses and developed a model to predict SRC in Group 1 and tested its clinical efficacy in Group 2 using a nomogram-based approach. Results. The SRC rates were 13% in Group 1 and 8% in Group 2. We found that some subgroups may benefit from TC-coated sutures. The discrimination obtained from a logistic regression model developed in Group 1 and based on multifocality, age and axillary lymphadenectomy was 0.88 (95% CI 0.77–0.95) (P < 10−4). There was a significant difference in Group 2 between predicted probabilities and observed percentages (P < 10−5). The predicted and observed proportions of complications in the high-risk group were 38% and 13%, respectively. Conclusion. This study used individual predictions of SRC and showed that using TC-coated suture may prevent SRC. This was particularly significant in high-risk patients.
Optimal non-uniform deployment of sensors for detection in single-hop Wireless Sensor Networks

We study the problem of determining the optimal spatial node density for deployment of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) for distributed detection of a randomly located target in a sensing field. We formulate an optimization problem for the single cluster case and account for factors such as the Medium Access Control(MAC) protocol that is used, the wireless channel's propagation characteristics, a randomized sleep/wake-up scheduling protocol, network coverage constraints, the energy consumed, the time to reach a decision, and the total number of nodes available. We show that the optimal node density that minimizes the average Decision Error Probability (DEP) at the Cluster Head (CH) is a function of the distance from the CH and also examine trade-offs between the DEP and other network parameters as the spatial sensor density is varied across the cluster. Solution of the optimization problem and simulations are used to reveal the significant performance improvement that non-uniform spatial densities provide over uniform densities and the many optimal trade-offs that are possible amongst energy, network lifetime, detection performance and time to reach a decision.
General Topology

Contents Chapter 0. Introduction 5 Chapter 1. Sets and maps 7 1. Sets, functions and relations 7 2. The integers and the real numbers 11 3. Products and coproducts 13 4. Finite and infinite sets 14 5. Countable and uncountable sets 16 6. Well-ordered sets 18 7. Partially ordered sets, The Maximum Principle and Zorn's lemma 19 Chapter 2. Topological spaces and continuous maps 23 1. Topological spaces 23 2. Order topologies 25 3. The product topology 25 4. The subspace topology 26 5. Closed sets and limit points 29 6. Continuous functions 32 7. The quotient topology 36 8. Metric topologies 43 9. Connected spaces 46 10. Compact spaces 52 11. Locally compact spaces and the Alexandroff compactification 58 Chapter 3. Regular and normal spaces 63 1. Countability Axioms 63 2. Separation Axioms 64 3. Normal spaces 66 4. Second countable regular spaces and the Urysohn metrization theorem 68 5. Completely regular spaces and the Stone– ˇ Cech compactification 71 6. Manifolds 73 Chapter 4. Relations between topological spaces 75 Bibliography 77 3 CHAPTER 0
Optical monitoring of activity from many areas of the in vitro and in vivo salamander olfactory bulb: a new method for studying functional organization in the vertebrate central nervous system

We have investigated the use of voltage-sensitive dyes to monitor neuronal activity in the intact salamander olfactory bulb. After a 10- to 20-min staining period, a magnified image of an in vitro or an in vivo preparation was formed on a 124-element photodiode array. The array was used to simultaneously record absorption or fluorescence changes from 124 adjacent areas of the bulb. At the magnifications used, each detector received light from 100 to 1000 neurons. Relatively large absorption and fluorescence signals were found in response to olfactory nerve stimulation; all of the results presented were from single trials. Because of the large signal size, measurements on in vivo preparations using epi-illumination also had good signal-to-noise ratios. There were significant differences in signal time course between adjacent detectors which suggested a spatial resolution on the order of 200 microns. Tentative assignments of the cellular origins of some signals could be made from the results of paired volley experiments. The results suggest that optical monitoring of membrane potential could provide a useful method for studying neuronal organization in the intact vertebrate central nervous system.