Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using a group decision support system environment for knowledge acquisition: a field study

A field study using a GDSS (group decision support systems) environment to acquire knowledge from multiple experts to build an expert system for an information center was conducted. This field study indicated that a GDSS environment facilitates the acquisition of knowledge from a group of experts by documenting knowledge electronically, by supporting knowledge extraction from individual experts in a parallel fashion, by offering possibilities to resolve conflicts during the knowledge extraction phase, and by providing a group interaction atmosphere to enrich the domain of expertise. In addition, it was found that structured analysis techniques were useful in planning for knowledge acquisition and that a designated primary expert was of great help when dealing with multiple experts. <<ETX>>
Can ‘Blended Learning’ Be Redeemed?

Although the term ‘blended learning’ is widely used, this article argues against it. Two arguments are advanced. The first is primarily philosophical, although it has several pragmatic implications. It proposes that ‘blending’ either relies on the idea of dichotomies which are suspect within the context of learning with technology or else becomes ineffective as a discriminating concept and is thus without purpose. The implication of this is that the term ‘blended’ should either be abandoned or, at the least, radically reconceived. The second argument proposes that learning, from the perspective of the learner, is rarely, if ever, the subject of blended learning. What is actually being addressed are forms of instruction, teaching, or at best, pedagogies. The implication of this is that the term ‘learning’ should be abandoned. The second half of the article attempts to redeem the concept of blended learning by arguing that learning gains attributed to blended learning may have their explanation in variation theory. It offers a new way to conceptualise what is being ‘blended’ that is theoretically coherent, philosophically defensible and pragmatically informative. The article concludes by setting an agenda for further work in this area.
A region-based multiresolution image fusion algorithm

We propose a multiresolution fusion algorithm which combines aspects of region and pixel-based fusion. We use multiresolution decompositions to represent the input images at different scales, and introduce a multiresolution/multimodal segmentation to partition the image domain at these scales. The basic idea is to use this segmentation to guide the fusion process. A region-based multiresolution approach allows us to consider low-level as well as intermediate-level structures, and to impose data-dependent consistency constraints based on spatial, inter and intra-scale dependencies.
Considering User's Access Pattern in Multimedia File Systems

Legacy buffer cache management schemes for multimedia server are grounded at the assumption that the application sequentially accesses the multimedia file. However, user access pattern may not be sequential in some circumstances, for example, in distance learning application, where the user may exploit the VCR-like function(rewind and play) of the system and accesses the particular segments of video repeatedly in the middle of sequential playback. Such a looping reference can cause a significant performance degradation of interval-based caching algorithms. And thus an appropriate buffer cache management scheme is required in order to deliver desirable performance even under the workload that exhibits looping reference behavior. We propose Adaptive Buffer cache Management(ABM) scheme which intelligently adapts to the file access characteristics. For each opened file, ABM applies either the LRU replacement or the interval-based caching depending on the Looping Reference Indicator, which indicates that how strong temporally localized access pattern is. According to our experiment, ABM exhibits better buffer cache miss ratio than interval-based caching or LRU, especially when the workload exhibits not only sequential but also looping reference property.
Neurological, Hematological and Dermatological Manifestations of Vitamin B12 Deficiency Secondary to Pernicious Anemia; A Case Report and Literature Review

Background: Vitamin B 12 is a water-soluble essential vitamin. It is essential for the rapid synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) during cell division and thus formation of red blood cells and maintenance of a healthy nervous system as well as the skin. It is found mainly in food of animal origin (e.g. meat, eggs, and dairy products and lacks a reliable plant source. Deficiency occurs due to either poor intake or decreased absorption. Among the most common causes are: pernicious anemia, atrophic gastritis, celiac disease or following gastric surgery. Deficiency of this essential vitamin can lead to potentially irreversible neurological, psychiatric, hematological and/or dermatological symptoms. Case Summary: We report a case of a 46-year-old omnivorous male patient who presented with gradual onset of weakness and spasticity of both lower limbs and upper limbs, parasthesia of all limbs with loss of joint position and vibration sensation. These symptoms were associated with memory changes, weight loss and hyperpigmentation of the skin. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed a long demyelinating lesion in the cervical spinal cord. Extensive laboratory investigations were performed that confirmed vitamin B 12 deficiency and ruled out other common mimics associated with that condition. He had marked improvement of all his neurological and non-neurological symptoms following vitamin B 12 supplementation with complete resolution of the cervical demyelinating lesion within 3 months. Conclusion: Vitamin B 12 deficiency is a common but under-diagnosed clinical condition that needs to be highlighted. It can present with neurological, psychiatric, hematological and/or dermatological manifestations. It is uncommon to see the whole systems affected together early in the course of the disease. Early diagnosis and treatment may reverse potentially permanent symptoms and signs and can prevent the disability that would otherwise ensue if left untreated. Pernicious anemia is one of the most common causes of vitamin B 12 deficiency and should be ruled out in all cases even if autoantibodies against intrinsic factor and parietal cells are negative.
Celiac Disease: More Common yet “Atypical” than Previously Thought

Celiac disease, an autoimmune enteropathy triggered by the consumption of gluten, can develop in genetically predisposed children (HLA DQ2 and/or DQ8 positive) at any point from 9 months of age through adulthood. Although the incidence of celiac disease in both North America and the bulk of Europe is approximately 1 in 100, patients with a first-degree relative with celiac disease are at a much higher risk of development. For example, up to 25% of children who are homozygous for HLA-DQ2 will develop evidence of celiac autoimmunity by age 6 [1]. Additional risk factors for the development of celiac disease include type 1 diabetes, autoimmune thyroid disease, Trisomy 21, Turner syndrome, William’s syndrome, and selective IgA deficiency [2]. The celiac genes (HLA-DQ2 and DQ8) contribute 40% of the risk of developing celiac. Environmental risk factors for celiac disease include infant feeding patterns, early infections,
Artificial economic agents

Neural networks are able to emulate economic subjects' behavior, without the utilization of a priori economic laws. This work states the possibility of explaining economic regularities about demand curve following connectionist models. Targets for training are generated by the model itself while it learns and acts with a cross-target method, i.e., the artificial neural network produces guesses both of the actions of the economic subject and of their effects. Actual effects are estimated by economic environment rules and results are used to train the effect guess mechanism; the evaluation of actions necessary to match guessed effects are, on the contrary, employed to train the decision mechanism (which guesses actions). Two kinds of learning -- short term and long term learning -- take place. The former only with local capability to react to the changes of the environment and the latter one with full capability to do it. For an observer the behavior produced by this kind of artificial agent (AA) matches the actions of a real agent as stated in economic handbooks, with goals and plans. Obviously, AA has no such symbolic entities, which are inventions of the observer. The assumption is that the observations of economists about real world agents' behavior suffer from the same bias. Economic regularities arising from present versions of the model encourage further developments, in particular toward the interaction of micro-models to build macroeconomic ones.
Ensemble modeling approach for rainfall/groundwater balancing

This paper introduces an application of machine learning, on real data. It deals with Ensemble Modeling, a simple averaging method for obtaining more reliable approximations using symbolic regression. Considerations on the contribution of bias and variance to the total error, and ensemble methods to reduce errors due to variance, have been tackled together with a specific application of ensemble modeling to hydrological forecasts. This work provides empirical evidence that genetic programming can greatly benefit from this approach in forecasting and simulating physical phenomena. Further considerations have been taken into account, such as the influence of Genetic Programming parameter settings on the model's performance.
Exploring Virtual Librarianship: Second Life Library 2.0

ABSTRACT In April 2006, Alliance Library System and Online Programming for All Libraries partnered to start the Second Life Library 2.0 in the online world Second Life and in August 2006 purchased an island on the Teen grid of Teen Second Life. Second Life is a virtual world, a descendant of multiplayer online games. Educational institutions have recently been drawn into Second Life's robust economy and vibrant cultural life. The Second Life Library 2.0 works with librarians from around the world and with other educational partners such as TechSoup, WorldBridges, and the New Media Consortium. Second Life Library 2.0 provides “traditional” library services such as ready reference, book discussions, and search assistance, but, at heart, it explores what it means to be a virtual library in a virtual world.
A Probabilistic Recommendation Method Inspired by Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model

The recent decade has witnessed an increasing popularity of recommendation systems, which help users acquire relevant knowledge, commodities, and services from an overwhelming information ocean on the Internet. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), originally presented as a graphical model for text topic discovery, now has found its application in many other disciplines. In this paper, we propose an LDA-inspired probabilistic recommendation method by taking the user-item collecting behavior as a two-step process: every user first becomes a member of one latent user-group at a certain probability and each user-group will then collect various items with different probabilities. Gibbs sampling is employed to approximate all the probabilities in the two-step process. The experiment results on three real-world data sets MovieLens, Netflix, and Last.fm show that our method exhibits a competitive performance on precision, coverage, and diversity in comparison with the other four typical recommendation methods. Moreover, we present an approximate strategy to reduce the computing complexity of our method with a slight degradation of the performance.
A neural model of image velocity encoding

A self-organizing neural network is presented which uses, as input, Fourier information about the image of moving objects to represent the magnitude and orientation of their velocity vectors topologically over the neural layer. The input space consists of the outputs of spatio-temporal frequency and orientation tuned filters. The motion that is encoded is that in the plane perpendicular to the line of sight. The neural model of velocity encoding incorporates biologically plausible elements into a computational theory based on Fourier analysis of the image. At the systems level, the model may be represented as a two-stage process. The first stage is composed of input cell filters which extract information in the Fourier domain, and the second stage is the velocity encoding net itself. <<ETX>>
Hotspot detection using image pattern recognition based on higher-order local auto-correlation

Below 40nm design node, systematic variation due to lithography must be taken into consideration during the early stage of design. So far, litho-aware design using lithography simulation models has been widely applied to assure that designs are printed on silicon without any error. However, the lithography simulation approach is very time consuming, and under time-to-market pressure, repetitive redesign by this approach may result in the missing of the market window. This paper proposes a fast hotspot detection support method by flexible and intelligent vision system image pattern recognition based on Higher-Order Local Autocorrelation. Our method learns the geometrical properties of the given design data without any defects as normal patterns, and automatically detects the design patterns with hotspots from the test data as abnormal patterns. The Higher-Order Local Autocorrelation method can extract features from the graphic image of design pattern, and computational cost of the extraction is constant regardless of the number of design pattern polygons. This approach can reduce turnaround time (TAT) dramatically only on 1CPU, compared with the conventional simulation-based approach, and by distributed processing, this has proven to deliver linear scalability with each additional CPU.
ACC/AHA/ESC 2006 guidelines for management of patients with ventricular arrhythmias and the prevention of sudden cardiac death: A report of the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association Task Force and the European Society of Cardiology Committee for Practice Guidelines

It is important that the medical profession plays a significant role in critically evaluating the use of diagnostic procedures and therapies as they are introduced and tested in the detection, management, or prevention of disease states. Rigorous and expert analysis of the available data documenting absolute and relative benefits and risks of those procedures and therapies can produce helpful guidelines that improve the effectiveness of care, optimize patient outcomes, and favorably affect the overall cost of care by focusing resources on the most effective strategies. The American College of Cardiology Foundation (ACCF) and the American Heart Association (AHA) have jointly engaged in the production of such guidelines in the area of cardiovascular disease since 1980. The ACC/AHA Task Force on Practice Guidelines, whose charge is to develop, update, or revise practice guidelines for important cardiovascular diseases and procedures, directs this effort. The Task Force is pleased to have this guideline developed in conjunction with the European Society of Cardiology (ESC). Writing committees are charged with the task of performing an assessment of the evidence and acting as an independent group of authors to develop or update written recommendations for clinical practice. Experts in the subject under consideration have been selected from all 3 organizations to examine subject-specific data and write guidelines. The process includes additional representatives from other medical practitioner and specialty groups when appropriate. Writing committees are specifically charged to perform a formal literature review, weigh the strength of evidence for or against a particular treatment or procedure, and include estimates of expected health outcomes where data exist. Patient-specific modifiers, comorbidities, and issues of patient preference that might influence the choice of particular tests or therapies are considered as well as frequency of follow-up and cost effectiveness. When available, information from studies on cost will be considered; however, review …
Portability of an Expert System Knowledge Base

To ensure the widest possible use of an expert system knowledge base, the knowledge base, in its final form, must be portable to a broad spectrum of user operating environments. Demonstrating that possibility was the objective of the research reported in this paper. Three cognitive issues, knowledge representation, inference mechanisms and problem solving procedures, as they pertain to portability were examined. Structuring the portability question in terms of these cognitive issues, two commercially available expert system shells, EXSYS and TI PC+, were used to ferret out problems and suggest practical solutions. Results determined that it is possible to formulate a consistent model of domain information in a knowledge base which is portable between shells.
Cutoff point of the phase angle in pre-radiotherapy cancer patients

Introduction: malnutrition is a common complication for cancer patients. The phase angle (PA), direct measurement of bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA), has been considered a predictor of body cell mass and prognostic indicator. Cutoff points for phase angle (PA) associated with nutritional risk in cancer patients have not been determined yet. Objectives: assess the possibility of determining the cutoff point for PA to identify nutritional risk in pre-radiotherapy cancer patients. Methods: sample group: Patients from both genders diagnosed with cancer and sent for ambulatory radiotherapy. Variables studied: body mass index (BMI), percentage of weight loss (% WL), mid-arm circumference (MAC), triceps skinfold thickness (TST), mid-arm muscle circumference (MAMC), mid-arm muscle area (MAMA), score and categorical assessment obtained using the Patient-Generated Subjective Global Assessment (PG-SGA) form, PA and standardized phase angle (SPA). Kappa coefficient was used to test the degree of agreement between the diagnoses of nutritional risk obtained from several different methods of nutritional assessment. Cutoff points for the PA through anthropometric indicators and PG-SGA were determined by using Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves, and patient survival was analyzed with the Cox regression method. Results: the cutoff points with the greatest discriminatory power were those obtained from BMI (5.2) and the categorical assessment of PG-SGA (5.4). The diagnosis obtained using these cutoff points showed a significant association with risk of death for the patients in the sample group. Conclusion: we recommend using the cutoff point 5.2 for the PA as a criterion for identifying nutritional risk in pre-radiotherapy cancer patients.
A Flexible GPS Software Development System and Timing Analyzer for Present and Future Microprocessors

Discussed is a timing emulation and operating system which predicts loading for microprocessors and enables efficient generation of software found in such applications as the Global Positioning System. The timing emulator is applied to two classes of user equipment, a conventional fast-multiplexed design and a fully integrated processor featuring continuous state feedback into the spread-spectrum demodulation and tracking loops. Timing data are developed for five representative microprocessors ranging from 8/8 to 32/32 register/bus widths. The advanced integrated processor requires augmentation of the 32/32 processor with a math coprocessor. The emulator is used to develop speed requirements on the co-processor. Lastly, the software development system is described. This contains a multi-tasking operating system and matrix library written in the language “C” which may be easily adapted to a range of radio-navigation problems.
Voice conversion based on static speaker characteristics

Voice conversion has recently emerged as an interesting branch of speech processing that deals with the modification of a speaker's perceived identity. This technology has applications in speech recognition, the entertainment and security industries. This paper provides a brief introduction to current voice conversion approaches, and discusses the development of the PASS system, a parametric voice conversion algorithm based on static speaker characteristics. The system is easy to implement, requires no phonetic transcription of the speech data, and is shown to be valuable in the case where very little training data is available. Particular mention is made of the pitch extraction subsystem, which uses a novel pitch determination algorithm to ensure the robust estimation of pitch statistics.
Design and implementation aspects of remote procedure calls

This report is Dot intended as a. survey in the fieJd of remote procedure calls. Neither do we claim it to be complete in some way or a.nother. What we do claim is that we present the reader the major principles of remote procedure call design. We start off by investigating those principles that seem to be most generally applicable. These principles are illustrated by a. number of rather different, but equally beautiful examples. One example is the Rajdoot protocol of Shrivistava and Pa.nz. ieri, that is in some respect complete. Another example is the REX protocol of Otway and Oskiewicz, tha.t perhaps is less complete, but certainly not less elegant. Although these two protocols originated from different starting points, they do share some important characteristics. These common characteristics emerged from the common design principles discussed in the introduction.
Adaptive equalization with RLS-MLSE for fast fading mobile radio channels

The authors derive a novel adaptive equalization scheme from the maximum likelihood estimation theory. This scheme estimates the transmitted signal sequence from the received signal sequence which may suffer from multiplicative time-varying fading and additive white Gaussian noise. Time-varying fading is characterized as a simple Markov Gaussian process. The new scheme is a combination of the recursive least squares adaptation algorithm and maximum likelihood sequence estimation (RLS-MLSE) technique. The authors also report on the performance of the proposed RLS-MLSE as evaluated through laboratory experiments. An RLS-MLSE prototype is developed with a single-chip digital signal processor (DSP) to assess the feasibility of RLS-MLSE's application to 42 kb/s 3-channel TDMA (time division multiple access) mobile radio QPSK transmission in the 900 MHz band under frequency-selective fast fading environments. Experimental results show that RLS-MLSE is superior to a recursive least squares decision feedback equalizer. <<ETX>>
Why do Older Adults Delay in Seeking Help for Hearing Loss

Despite the fact that disabling, age related hearing loss or presbycusis affects around 360 million people globally World Health Organisation, there is quite often a lengthy delay between the time an individual first notices that they are having hearing difficulties and when they actually seek help from a hearing professional [1]. So why is it that people take so long to accept that their hearing is impaired and investigate the potential solutions? The purpose of this paper is to discover, by means of a literature review, some of the barriers that an individual may encounter during the journey of ‘ownership’ of their hearing loss, and to determine how, once the decision has been made to address their hearing problems, the interaction between client and professional can facilitate or impede solution finding.