Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
GROUPING BASED ON PHENOMENAL PROXIMITY.

The question was raised whether the Gestalt law of grouping by proximity is based on proximity of stimuli on the retina or perceived proximity in phenomenal space. To tease apart these 2 possibilities an earlier experiment of Corbin was repeated in which the stimulus array is tilted back into the 3rd dimension. By including a measure of constancy for the perceived distance between points it was possible to show in 2 experiments, that the crucial factor is phenomenal proximity. This finding questions the Gestalt assumption that grouping is based on certain objectively given features within the stimulus. The grouping of stimuli on the basis of proximity is one of the major Gestalt laws of the spontaneous organization of the visual field. Presumably, more proximal stimuli on the retina yield stronger forces of attraction between their corresponding loci of excitation in the brain than less proximal stimuli. However, it has not been demonstrated that it is the anatomical closeness within the proximal stimulus array which governs grouping. The only investigator who ever raised this question was Corbin (1942), who speculated that grouping may be accomplished on the basis of the perceived spatial relations between the points in a stimulus array, and that this phenomenally perceived proximity and retinal proximity, although usually coinciding, can be experimentally separated and thrown into conflict. Corbin's method was to present an array of illuminated points in the dark seen as columns when in the frontal plane. A gradual lateral tilting of the stimulus configuration into the third dimension progressively foreshortened the horizontal distance between the columns as projected to the retina. Corbin reasoned that under monocular
Vision-based obstacle avoidance for a small, low-cost robot

This paper presents a vision-based obstacle avoidance algorithm for a small indoor mobile robot built from low-cost, and off-the-shelf electronics. The obstacle avoidance problem in robotics has been researched extensively and there are many well established algorithms for this problem. However, most of these algorithms are developed for large robots with expensive, specialised sensors, and powerful computing platforms. We have developed an algorithm that can be implemented on very small robots with low-cost electronics and small computing platforms. Our vision-based obstacle detection algorithm is fast and works with very low resolution images. The control mechanism utilises both visual information and sonar sensor’s measurement without having to fuse the data into a model or common representation. The robot platform was tested in an unstructured office environment and demonstrated a reliable obstacle avoidance behaviour.
Effects of feed intake on particle distribution, passage of digesta, and extent of digestion in the gastrointestinal tract of cattle.

Four nonlactating Holstein dairy cows (means +/- SD BW = 692 +/- 49 kg) were used in a 4 x 4 Latin square design experiment to determine changes in distribution of particles within the ruminoreticulum (RR) and total digestive tract in cattle fed a forage-based diet at four intake levels. Relationships between chewing activities and rates of particle breakdown, passage, and digestion were also determined. Percentage of large particles increased linearly in the dorsal rumen (P = .001), ventral rumen (P = .004), reticulum (P = .007), duodenum (P = .007), and feces (P = .006) as DMI increased. Particles of sizes less than or equal to 2,000 microns, eligible to pass from the RR, constituted 60 to 92% of particle DM in the RR. Increased feed intake resulted in a longer (P = .003) eating but a shorter (P = .008) ruminating time per kilogram of DM intake, whereas total chewing time per kilogram of DMI was not affected (P = .12). Passage rate constants of NDF from the RR increased (P = .03) with intake. There was no change (P = .87) in the rate constant for particle breakdown in the dorsal rumen with increased intake. Neither fractional passage rate of NDF nor the rate constant for particle breakdown was related to time spent eating (P + .12; P = .34) or time spent ruminating (P = .11; P = .55). It was concluded that rate of passage of small particles from the RR was a determinant of passage from the RR and that changes in rates of passage and breakdown of particles could only be partially explained by changes in chewing activities.
Analysis and Design of New Initial RAT Selection Strategies Based on Pricing and Path Loss for Heterogeneous Wireless Networks GSM / EDGE / UMTS

This document is the translation to English of my undergraduate research thesis, which was originally written in Catalan. At that point, writing it in Catalan seemed like a good idea but, eventually, I realized it was a very bad idea. This translation has been done automatically using Google Translate, so do not expect Shakespeare’s English. Actually, it is quite terrible, but I am trying to make it decently
Evaluating Laplace Noise Addition to Satisfy Differential Privacy for Numeric Data

Laplace noise addition is often advanced as an approach for satisfying differential privacy. There have been several illustrations of the application of Laplace noise addition for count data, but no evaluation of its performance for numeric data. In this study we evaluate the privacy and utility performance of Laplace noise addition for numeric data. Our results indicate that Laplace noise addition delivers the promised level of privacy only by adding a large quantity of noise for even relatively large subsets. Because of this, even for simple mean queries, the responses for a masking mechanism that uses Laplace noise addition is of little value. We also show that Laplace noise addition may be vulnerable to a tracker attack. In order to avoid this, it may be necessary to increase the variance of the noise added as a function of the number of queries issued. This implies that the utility of the responses would be further reduced. These results raise serious questions regarding the viability of Laplace based noise addition for masking numeric data.
Key Concepts in Sport and Exercise Research Methods

Academic Journals Analytic Epidemiology Applied versus Pure Research Archival Research Causality Critical Theory Descriptive Statistics Discourse Analysis Distributions Epistemology Ethnography Evaluation Research Evidence-Based Research and Practice Experiments Grounded Theory Hypotheses Inferential Statistics Interdisciplinary Research Interpretivism Interviewing Literature Reviews Media Analysis Meta-Analysis Ontology Populations and Samples Positivism Quantitative versus Qualitative Research Questionnaires Reliability Representation Research Ethics Research Proposals Research Questions Theory Translation Triangulation Unobtrusive Methods Validity Variables Visual Methods
in Multiobjective Optimization with (Partial) Dominance Structure Preservation: Generalized Minimum Objective Subset Problems

Most of the available multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEA) for approximating the Pareto set have been designed for and tested on low dimensional problems ( ≤ 3 objectives). However, it is known that problems with a high number of objectives cause additional difﬁculties in terms of the quality of the Pareto set approximation and running time. Furthermore, the decision making process becomes the harder the more objectives are involved. In this context, the question arises whether all objectives are necessary to preserve the problem characteristics. One may also ask under which conditions such an objective reduction is feasible, and how a minimum set of objectives can be computed. In this paper, we propose a general mathematical framework, suited to answer these three questions and corresponding algorithms, exact and heuristic ones. The heuristic variants are geared towards direct integration into the evolutionary search process. Moreover, extensive experiments for four well-known test problems show that substantial dimensionality reductions are possible on the basis of the proposed methodology.
Communicating with chaos.

The use of chaos to transmit information is described. Chaotic dynamical systems, such as electrical oscillators with very simple structures, naturally produce complex wave forms. We show that the sym- bolic dynamics of a chaotic oscillator can be made to follow a desired symbol sequence by using small perturbations, thus allowing us to encode a message in the wave form. We illustrate this using a simple numerical electrical oscillator model. PACS numbers: 05.45. +b Much of the fundamental understanding of chaotic dy- namics involves concepts from information theory, a field developed primarily in the context of practical communi- cation. Concepts from information theory used in chaos include metric entropy, topological entropy, Markov par- titions, and symbolic dynamics (1). On the other hand, because of their exponential sensitivity, chaotic systems are often said to evolve randomly. This terminology is partially justified if one regards the information obtained by detailed observation of the chaotic orbit as being less significant than the statistical properties of the orbits. The object of this Letter is to show that we can use the close connection between the theory of chaotic systems and information theory in a way that is more than purely formal. In particular, we show that the recent realization that chaos can be controlled with small perturbations (2) can be utilized to cause the symbolic dynamics of a chaotic system to track a prescribed symbol sequence, thus allowing us to encode any desired message in the sig- nal from a chaotic oscillator. The natural complexity of chaos thus provides a vehicle for information transmission in the usual sense. Furthermore, we argue that this method of communication will often have technological advantages. Specifically, assume that there is an electrical oscillator producing a large amplitude chaotic signal that one wishes to use for communication. The so-called double
SMOKING AND TRAFFIC ACCIDENT INVOLVEMENT: A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

Literature which describes and/or attempts to explain the links between smoking and traffic accident (and violation) involvement is critically examined with a view to reaching conclusions as to the causative or associative mechanisms involved. The explanations put forward to account for the over-involvement of smokers in traffic accidents/violations fall under three major categories: physically-based, physiologically-based, and psychologically-based. These categories are employed as broad group headings for the review of the published literature.
Changes of Mind in an Attractor Network of Decision-Making

Attractor networks successfully account for psychophysical and neurophysiological data in various decision-making tasks. Especially their ability to model persistent activity, a property of many neurons involved in decision-making, distinguishes them from other approaches. Stable decision attractors are, however, counterintuitive to changes of mind. Here we demonstrate that a biophysically-realistic attractor network with spiking neurons, in its itinerant transients towards the choice attractors, can replicate changes of mind observed recently during a two-alternative random-dot motion (RDM) task. Based on the assumption that the brain continues to evaluate available evidence after the initiation of a decision, the network predicts neural activity during changes of mind and accurately simulates reaction times, performance and percentage of changes dependent on difficulty. Moreover, the model suggests a low decision threshold and high incoming activity that drives the brain region involved in the decision-making process into a dynamical regime close to a bifurcation, which up to now lacked evidence for physiological relevance. Thereby, we further affirmed the general conformance of attractor networks with higher level neural processes and offer experimental predictions to distinguish nonlinear attractor from linear diffusion models.
Industrial Management & Data Systems Effect of information sharing and process coordination on logistics outsourcing

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to test how integrative mechanisms, including information sharing and process coordination, influence logistics outsourcing, and how logistics outsourcing influence performance from an extended RBV perspective. Design/methodology/approach – The structural equation modeling (SEM) method is used to examine the proposed model, based on data collected from 361 companies in greater China. Findings – Integrative mechanisms are helpful for logistics outsourcing (basic, customized, and advanced outsourcing). Specially, information sharing contributes to customized and advanced outsourcing, but has no significant effect on basic outsourcing. In contrast, process coordination improves basic and advanced outsourcing, but insignificantly influences customized outsourcing. Besides, each type of logistics outsourcing has differently effects on 3PL users’ performance. This study contributes to 3PL theories and practices. Originality/value – This study empirically examines the antecedents and the outcomes of logistics outsourcing, contributing to 3PL literature and practices.
Going Beyond Word Cooccurrences in Global Lexical Selection for Statistical Machine Translation using a Multilayer Perceptron

Phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBSMT) decoders translate source sentences one phrase at a time using strong independence assumptions over the source phrases. Translation table scores are typically independent of context, language model scores depend on a few words surrounding the target phrase and distortion models do not influence directly the choice of target phrases. In this work, we propose to condition the selection of each target word on the whole source sentence using a multilayer perceptron (MLP). Our interest in MLP lies in their hidden layer which encodes source sentences in a representation that is not directly tied to the notion of word. We evaluated our approach on an English to French translation task. Our MLP model was able to improve BLEU scores over a standard PBSMT system.
QUAD: Overview and Recent Developments

We give an outline of the specification and provable security features of the QUAD stream cipher proposed at Eurocrypt 2006. The cipher relies on the iteration of a multivariate system of quadratic equations over a finite field, typically GF(2) or a small extension. In the binary case, the security of the keystream generation can be related, in the concrete security model, to the conjectured intractability of the MQ problem of solving a random system of m equations in n unknowns. We show that this security reduction can be extended to incorporate the key and IV setup and provide a security argument related to the whole stream cipher.We also briefly address software and hardware performance issues and show that if one is willing to pseudorandomly generate the systems of quadratic polynomials underlying the cipher, this leads to suprisingly inexpensive hardware implementations of QUAD.
Performance evaluation of HOG and Gabor features for vision-based vehicle detection

This paper investigates the performance of image features for vehicle classification. We focused on two important image features which have been widely used for vehicle detection. These features are the Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) and the Gabor features. Although there are several literature proposed these features for vehicle classification, it is very hard to make a fair comparison from their published results since they were tested using different data sets and performance matrices. This paper compares the performance of these two features under the same experimental setups. The efficiency of the features in combination with three popular classifiers, namely Support Vector Machines (SVM), Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network (MLP) and Mahalanobis distance classifiers were systematically investigated. The experiment results show that the combination of HOG feature with SVM classifier produced the best result. The processing time required for HOG feature's extraction and classification is also considerably shorter compared to Gabor feature.
Towards the Implementation of a Parallel Hardware Architecture for Spiking Neural Networks

Artificial Neural Networks are processing models widely explored due to the inherent parallelism. Recently, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have been studied. These models have the advantage of reducing the bandwidth needed for interchanging information among the processing elements, due to the communication scheme based on digital spikes. Many hardware architectures for artificial neural networks have been proposed as an alternative to implementations based on personal computers. In this work, efficient hardware implementation of SNN is addressed. A research overview is presented and some preliminary results as well.
1-Corpora and evaluation tools for multilingual named entity grammar development

We present an effort for the development of multilingual named entity grammars in a unification-based finite-state formalism (SProUT). Following an extended version of the MUC7 standard, we have developed Named Entity Recognition grammars for German, Chinese, Japanese, French, Spanish, English, and Czech. The grammars recognize person names, organizations, geographical locations, currency, time and date expressions. Subgrammars and gazetteers are shared as much as possible for the grammars of the different languages. Multilingual corpora from the business domain are used for grammar development and evaluation. The annotation format (named entity and other linguistic information) is described. We present an evaluation tool which provides detailed statistics and diagnostics, allows for partial matching of annotations, and supports user-defined mappings between different annotation and grammar output formats.
Human immunodeficiency virus‐related lymphoreticular malignancies and peripheral neurologic disease. A report of four cases

The most common human immunodeficiency virus‐related (HIV) malignancies to date include Kaposi's sarcoma and the high‐grade non‐Hodgkin's lymphomas. There also appears to be an association between HIV and an aggressive form of Hodgkin's disease. In addition, there is a spectrum of HIV‐related central and peripheral neurologic syndromes. This article documents four patients with HIV‐associated lymphoma who presented with peripheral neurologic syndromes as part of their neoplastic process. Autopsy results obtained from two of these patients showed direct nerve infiltration by lymphoma. All patients had an elevated serum lactate dehydrogenase (LDH). It is recommended that HIV‐related lymphoma be considered in a high‐risk patient who presents with a peripheral neurologic syndrome especially if there is an elevated serum LDH.
Cancer-specific outcomes among young adults without health insurance.

PURPOSE The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) will likely improve insurance coverage for most young adults, but subsets of young adults in the United States will face significant premium increases in the individual market. We examined the association between insurance status and cancer-specific outcomes among young adults. METHODS We used the SEER program to identify 39,447 patients age 20 to 40 years diagnosed with a malignant neoplasm between 2007 and 2009. The association between insurance status and stage at presentation, employment of definitive therapy, and all-cause mortality was assessed using multivariable logistic or Cox regression, as appropriate. RESULTS Patients who were uninsured were more likely to be younger, male, nonwhite, and unmarried than patients who were insured and were also more likely to be from regions of lower income, education, and population density (P < .001 in all cases). After adjustment for pertinent confounding variables, an association between insurance coverage and decreased likelihood of presentation with metastatic disease (odds ratio [OR], 0.84; 95% CI, 0.75 to 0.94; P = .003), increased receipt of definitive treatment (OR, 1.95; 95% CI, 1.52 to 2.50; P < .001), and decreased death resulting from any cause (hazard ratio, 0.77; 95% CI, 0.65 to 0.91; P = .002) was noted. CONCLUSION The improved coverage fostered by the ACA may translate into better outcomes among most young adults with cancer. Extra consideration will need to be given to ensure that patients who will face premium increases in the individual market can obtain insurance coverage under the ACA.
SELF-CONFIDENCE : INTRAPERSONAL STRATEGIES 1

This paper analyzes the self-identi.cation process and its role in motivation. We build a model of self-con.dence where people have imperfect knowledge about their ability, which in most tasks is a complement to e¤ort in determining performance. Higher self-con.dence thus enhances motivation, and this creates incentives for the manipulation of self-perception. An individual su¤ering from time-inconsistency may thus want to enhance the self-con.dence of his future selves, so as to limit their procrastination. The bene.ts of con.dence-maintenance must, however, be traded o¤ against the risks of overcon.dence (inappropriate tasks being pursued). Moreover, rational inference implies that the individual cannot systematically fool himself. A . rst application of the model is self-handicapping: to avoid a negative inference about their ability, people may deliberately impair their performance, or choose overambitious tasks. Another application is selective memory or awareness management: people are (endogenously) more likely to remember or consciously acknowledge their successes than their failures. This, in turn, helps explain the widely documented prevalence of self–serving beliefs –that is, the fact that most people have overoptimistic assessments of their own abilities and other desirable traits. We analyze the workings of this “psychological immune system” and show that it typically leads to multiple equilibria in cognitive strategies, self con.dence, and behavior. Moreover, while active self-esteem maintenance can improve ex-ante welfare, it can also be self-defeating. Systematically “looking on the bright side”, avoiding “negative” thoughts and people, etc., can thus be bene.cial in certain environments; but in other circumstances one can only lose by playing such games with oneself, and it would be better to always “accept who you are” and “be honest with yourself ”.
Reframing educational research : resisting the 'what works' agenda

Possibilities for the use of research in educational practice are often written off due to the history, politics and interests of the ostensibly separate worlds that researchers and practitioners occupy. However, a more optimistic account highlights the ways these communities share a common need for practice-based theories, which enable them to make sense of a wide range of issues in education, including pedagogy, learning, and educational equity. In applying theory to situated accounts of various educational practices and learning contexts, this book explores mistaken assumptions about the ways that research can ‘inform’ or otherwise impact practice. It problematises a ‘what works’ agenda but also points to potentially more productive research-practice relationships in education. Experienced contributors describe how they have used a variety of context-sensitive theoretical approaches in the socio-cultural and discursive traditions to both understand practice and address a wide range of practical issues in education.
Ultra-miniature high-Q filters and duplexers using FBAR technology

An ultra-miniature PCS duplexer uses thin-film bulk wave acoustic resonator (FBAR) technology. FBAR resonators are made using aluminum nitride for the piezoelectric material and silicon as the substrate. It has better than -52 dB rejection for the receive (Rx) filter in the transmit (Tx) band and pass-band insertion losses are on the order of 2 dB (Tx) and 3 dB (Rx). Performance is comparable to that of much larger ceramic duplexers.