Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Medical image registration based on gray distribution correlation

To improve the precision and time consuming of medical image registration, an image registration technique based on the registration measurement is developed and proposed. In this method, a new matching measurement based on gray distribution correlation of the images is proposed, this parameter quantifies aligning degree of two medical images. Comparing with other similarity measurement, such as normal mutual information, the calculation cost spent in this registration method is low. Experiment results show that this method is valid and fast. and enhance robustness of image registration
Student Awareness of Costs and Benefits of Educational Decisions: Effects of an Information Campaign

Many students appear to leave full-time education too soon, despite the possibility of high returns from further investment in their education. One contributory factor may be insufficient information about the potential consequences of their choices. We investigate students’ receptiveness to an information campaign about the costs and benefits of pursuing postcompulsory education. Our results show that students with higher expected net benefits from accessing information are more likely to avail themselves of the opportunity presented by our experiment. Their intention to stay on in post-16 education is strongly affected by the experiment, though not their intention to apply to university. Effects are heterogeneous by family background and gender.
Mechanical Behaviors of Banana Fibres with Different Mechanical Properties

World is as of now concentrating on alternate material sources that are environment agreeable and biodegradable in nature. Because of the expanding natural concerns, bio composite produced out of regular fiber and polymeric resin, is one of the late advancements in the business and constitutes the present extent of experimental work. The use of composite materials field is increasing gradually in engineering. The composite consists of mainly two phases i.e. matrix and fiber. The accessibility of characteristic fiber and simplicity of assembling have enticed scientists worldwide to attempt by regional standards accessible inexpensive fiber and to learning their achievability of fortification determinations and to what degree they fulfill the obliged particulars of great strengthened polymer composite aimed at structural requisition. Fiber reinforced polymer composites has numerous preferences, for example, generally minimal effort of creation, simple to create and better quality contrast than perfect polymer tars due with this reason fiber strengthened polymer composite utilized within an assortment of provision as class of structure material. This work describe the fabrication and the mechanical behavior of banana fiber reinforced polymer composite at varying composition (25\%, 30\%, 35\%) with that of silicon carbide at 4\%, 8\%, 12\% respectively. Also the test such as the tensile test, hardness test and the bending test are carried out and the mechanical properties of the composite material are studied.
A scaling approach to Budyko's framework and the complementary relationship of evapotranspiration in humid environments: case study of the Amazon River basin

Abstract. This paper studies a 3-D state space representation of Budyko's framework designed to capture the mutual interdependence among long-term mean actual evapotranspiration (E), potential evapotranspiration (Ep) and precipitation (P). For this purpose we use three dimensionless and dependent quantities: Ψ = E ⁄ P, Φ = Ep ⁄ P and Ω = E ⁄ Ep. This 3-D space and its 2-D projections provide an interesting setting to test the physical soundness of Budyko's hypothesis. We demonstrate analytically that Budyko-type equations are unable to capture the physical limit of the relation between Ω and Φ in humid environments, owing to the unfeasibility of Ep ⁄ P = 0 when E ⁄ Ep → 1. Using data from 146 sub-catchments in the Amazon River basin we overcome this inconsistency by proposing a physically consistent power law: Ψ = kΦe, with k = 0.66, and e = 0.83 (R2 = 0.93). This power law is compared with two other Budyko-type equations. Taking into account the goodness of fits and the ability to comply with the physical limits of the 3-D space, our results show that the power law is better suited to model the coupled water and energy balances within the Amazon River basin. Moreover, k is found to be related to the partitioning of energy via evapotranspiration in terms of Ω. This suggests that our power law implicitly incorporates the complementary relationship of evapotranspiration into the Budyko curve, which is a consequence of the dependent nature of the studied variables within our 3-D space. This scaling approach is also consistent with the asymmetrical nature of the complementary relationship of evapotranspiration. Looking for a physical explanation for the parameters k and e, the inter-annual variability of individual catchments is studied. Evidence of space–time symmetry in Amazonia emerges, since both between-catchment and between-year variability follow the same Budyko curves. Finally, signs of co-evolution of catchments are explored by linking spatial patterns of the power law parameters with fundamental characteristics of the Amazon River basin. In general, k and e are found to be related to vegetation, topography and water in soils.
Metabolic adaptation to different protein supply in mink (Neovison vison)

Background: Strict carnivores such as the mink are considered to have limited ability to adapt protein metabolism to varied protein provision. However, some metabolic adaptation has previously been observed in lactating minks. This was further investigated in this study. Methods: quantitative metabolism (balance and respiration experiments), kit growth, and plasma amino acids concentrations and liver mass in lactating dams, as well as relative mRNA abundance of some key hepatic enzymes (qPCR) after weaning of the kits, were studied. Lactating mink dams were assigned to one of three diets (high- (HP: 60% of metabolisable energy (ME)), medium- (MP: 45% of ME), or low- (LP: 30% of ME) protein), from parturition until ten weeks post partum. Tissue samples were collected 2, 3, 4 and 10 weeks post partum. Results: Diet did not affect (P > 0.05) heat production. The protein provision was clearly reflected in the protein oxidation, and dams fed the HP diet had a higher N excretion, larger liver mass, and tended to have higher weight loss and lower estimated milk production through the four first lactation weeks. Plasma amino acid profiles and liver weights 10 weeks post partum were generally unaffected by dietary protein provision. Besides, the diets did not affect relative abundance of the studied mRNAs in hepatic tissue. Conclusion: Metabolic adaptation in lactating mink dams seems limited mainly to adjustment of liver mass, but that the relative abundance of mRNA for key gluconeogenic enzymes is unaffected by diet indicates that these animals' capacity to regulate enzyme activity is limited.
Propionibacteria and their role in the biological control of aerobic spoilage in silage

Silage fermentation has been the subject of much research both on factors influencing the efficiency of preservation and biotechnological approaches to manipulate what is essentially an uncontrolled process. However, although the predictability of the fermentation and, consequently, silage quality has been improved, there is increasing evidence that high quality silages are extremely sus- ceptible to spoilage by the activity of aerobic micro-organisrns on opening the silo. The main biological approach to manipulate the fermentation has involved the use of homofermentative strains of lactic acid bacteria as inoculants to direct the fermentation towards lactic acid production and rapid pH decline and there is sorne evidence that this exacerbates the problem of aerobic spoilage. Several microbial groups have been implicated in spoilage including yeasts, moulds, acetic acid bacteria and Bacillus species. The consensus of opinion, however, is that the yeasts are in most cases the primary initiators of spoilage, with bacteria having an involvement depending on conditions. Species of the genus Propionibacteria have been singled out as potential sil age inoculants to combat aerobic spoilage because propionic acid is a very effective antimycotic at the low pH of good silage when a high proportion of this acid is in the undissociated state. Several Propionibacteria species have been iso- lated from silage and a Iimited number of experiments carried out using them as silage inoculants, but the findings are equivocal. This paper reviews the area of silage fermentation, aerobic stability of silage and the potential of propionibacteria as biocontrol agents for sil age. © Inra! EIsevier, Paris.
Software Module Clustering Using Hybrid Socio- Evolutionary Algorithms

Design of the software system plays a crucial role in the effective and efficient maintenance of the software system. In the absence of original design structure it might be required to re-identify the design by using the source code of the concerned software. Software clustering is one of the powerful techniques which could be used to cluster large software systems into smaller manageable subsystems containing modules of similar features. This paper examines the use of novel evolutionary imperialist competitive algorithms, genetic algorithms and their combinations for software clustering. Apparently, recursive application of these algorithms result in the best performance in terms of quality of clusters, number of epochs required for convergence and standard deviation obtained by repeated application of these algorithms. Index Terms—Genetic algorithm, Imperialist competitive algorithm, Module dependency graph, Reverse engineering Software clustering, Software maintenance.
Age Discrimination in Hiring Practices Against Older Adults in Western Australia: the Case of Accounting Assistants

Objectives: To investigate the willingness of employers to hire older adults. Method: Measures of actual age discrimination were obtained through the use of correspondence testing. Unsolicited fictitious resumes were simultaneously mailed to 452 companies across industries in Western Australia. Resumes were similar in all job relevant information except the applicant's age that was either 32 or 57 and gender. Measures of discrimination were obtained through comparisons of the time for receipt, and the number of positive and negative responses across age and gender.
Estimation of Vegetation and Land Use Changes Using Remote Sensing Techniques and Geographical Information System (Case Study: Roodab Plain, Sabzevar City)

Land use may be regarded as one of the most important factors affecting theenvironment with respect to human activities. So far, destroying the rangelands andchanging them into the waste lands and poor rangelands has been proposed as the mostsignificant variations of land use done by human beings. This paper has been conducted toevaluate the variations of vegetation percentage and land uses in Barabad-Darook villagewith the area of 1522.99 km2 in Sabzevar city during 1987-2007. Thus, using satellitebasedimages of TM and ETM+, the most appropriate band composition has been selectedand a mapping of vegetation cover and land use was provided through maximumlikelihood algorithms to correct the errors of geometer and radiometer highlights. At last,the accuracy of extracted maps was to be determined by the means of overall accuracy testand Kappa coefficient in order to achieve the validation of research process. Resultsindicate that waste lands have been increased from 84.75 to 89.49 and third-ratedrangelands have been reduced from 6.85 to 4.14 percent. On the other hand, first-ratedrangelands were reduced from 0.03 to 0.01 percent which covers 5170791.45 m2 of totalarea in the district. Also, the results show that irrigated agricultural lands are to bedecreased from 6.53 to 0.07 percent. In total, due to improper exploitations of regionalwater resources and vegetation cover, land uses have been changed into fallow and wastelands leading to the decrease in the percentage cover of high quality rangelands. Researchfindings demonstrate that considering the accepted accuracy, new remote sensingtechnology can be applied to exactly estimate the area changes of land use and vegetation.
Feature Selection Using Co-occurrence of Terms for Binary Text Classification

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Financial Ratios and Stock Returns on China¡¯s Growth Enterprise Market

China’s capital markets are not yet fully integrated into the world equity markets. Given the market segmentation, I investigate the relationships between financial ratios and short-term stock returns on China’s recently established Growth Enterprise Market (GEM). Based on regression results, among dozens of financial variables tested, the year-to-year revenue growth is found to be the most significant variable predicting a stock’s short-term performance in every sub-sample period. In contrast, neither the conventional measure price-to-book nor the newly proposed measure of gross profitability is significant. In addition, market capitalization does not behave in the familiar way found in developed markets. The evidence indicates that factors beyond the traditional size, value, or quality have strong explanatory power in short-term asset pricing behavior on the GEM.
Gestures at Work in Sense-Making Science Talk

Emerging research suggests that problem solvers employ distinctive gestures as they strive to explain scientific phenomena. Because the learning sciences increasingly assign explanation a central role in science learning (Chi, Bassok, Lewis, Reimann, & Glaser, 1989; Linn & Songer, 1993; Morrison, Newman, Crowder, & Theberge, 1993), distinguishing descriptions from explanations on the basis of associated gestures could prove a useful research and teaching tool. Extending the work of McNeill (1992) and others, this article outlines a way of coding gestures that allows observers to distinguish explanation discourse from other forms of science talk. Sixth-grade science learners gesture differently depending on their discourse mode. When explaining in-the-moment, students gesture in ways that help them to predict, revise, and coordinate elements in a model. In contrast, when they describe a memorized or previously thought-out model, students time their gestures to redundantly emphasize speech. Gesture perspect.
Département des Sciences Économiques de l'Université catholique de Louvain Involuntary Unemployment : the Elusive Quest for a Theory

This paper addresses the issue of why Keynesian economists have had such a hard time in giving the concept of involuntary unemployment a place in economic theory. Is the gradual demise of this concept a manifestation of some inner defect in economic theory or is it due to some intrinsic weakness in the concept itself, which limits its usefulness when it comes to economic theorising? I have recently published a book which attempts to answer this question, and my aim in this paper is to present its main results. I start by characterising Keynes's programme as consisting of the following four elements: 1) demonstrating the existence of involuntary unemployment; 2) demonstrating that wage rigidity can be exonerated as its cause; 3) giving a general equilibrium or interdependency explanation of the phenomenon; 4) demonstrating that demand stimulation is the proper remedy for the problem. Next, I bring out four conceptual ambiguities that have plagued discussions about involuntary unemploy. Document type : Document de travail (Working Paper) Référence bibliographique De Vroey, Michel. Involuntary Unemployment : the Elusive Quest for a Theory. ECON Working Papers ; 2005/04 (2005) Département des Sciences Économiques de l'Université catholique de Louvain Involuntary Unemployment : the Elusive Quest for a Theory
Systematic tests for position-dependent additive shear bias

We present new tests to identify stationary position-dependent additive shear biases in weak gravitational lensing data sets. These tests are important diagnostics for currently ongoing and planned cosmic shear surveys, as such biases induce coherent shear patterns that can mimic and potentially bias the cosmic shear signal. The central idea of these tests is to determine the average ellipticity of all galaxies with shape measurements in a grid in the pixel plane. The distribution of the absolute values of these averaged ellipticities can be compared to randomized catalogues; a difference points to systematics in the data. In addition, we introduce a method to quantify the spatial correlation of the additive bias, which suppresses the contribution from cosmic shear and therefore eases the identification of a position-dependent additive shear bias in the data. We apply these tests to the publicly available shear catalogues from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS) and the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS) and find evidence for a small but non-negligible residual additive bias at small scales. As this residual bias is smaller than the error on the shear correlation signal at those scales, it is highly unlikely that it causes a significant bias in the published cosmic shear results of CFHTLenS. In CFHTLenS, the amplitude of this systematic signal is consistent with zero in fields where the number of stars used to model the PSF is higher than average, suggesting that the position-dependent additive shear bias originates from undersampled PSF variations across the image.
Factores de riesgo para la salud familiar: acontecimientos significativos Risk factors for family health: significative events

This work deals with the study of those events that can generate family crises. The concept of significative event of the family life is defined, and it is established a difference between Humanidades Médicas 2012;12(2): 184-191 185 Centro de Desarrollo de las Ciencias Sociales y Humanísticas en Salud them and the family crises. The different stages through which the family life passes by and the significative events that constitute risk peaks within this cycle are analyzed.
Household-level Credit Constraints in Urban Ethiopia

Empirical evidence on determinants of credit constraints and the amount borrowed by urban household in Sub-Saharan Africa is almost non-existent. Using an extended direct approach by virtue of the unique data set we have (the Fourth Round Ethiopian Urban Household Survey), we analysed the determinants of credit constraints and the amount borrowed by urban households. We find a high percentage of credit-constrained households, the majority of which constitute discouraged borrowers. Discrete choice models that control for potential endogeneity and selectivity bias have been fitted to our data. Our analysis shows current household resources, number of dependants, and location as significant correlates.
Investigating the universality of primary metaphors: a perspective from buddhism

Nesse trabalho, examino a “Roda da Vida”, uma representacao diagramatica de conceitos filosoficos budistas significativos, a partir da perspectiva da metafora conceitual (LAKOFF; JOHNSON, 1980, 1999). Conceitos abstratos que definem nossas realidades diarias (e.g. estados, causalidade, temporalidade) sao definidos por alguns pesquisadores como metaforicamente construidos, e, portanto, reduziveis a um conjunto universal de metaforas primarias (GRADY, 1997; LAKOFF; JOHNSON, 1999), enquanto outros os veem como conhecimentos estruturados nao metaforicos e culturalmente compartilhados (D’ANDRADE, 1990, QUINN, 1991). Reconhecendo a necessidade de uma testagem rigorosa da assercao universalista, preferencialmente atraves do uso de dados o mais distante possiveis da tradicao filosofica ‘ocidental’, decidi analisar os conceitos budistas de estados de coisa, perpetuacao do renascimento, e estrutura de eventos, devido a sua reducibilidade a metaforas primarias. Demonstro que, enquanto alguns conceitos budistas sao redutiveis as mesmas metaforas primarias que seus correspondentes ‘ocidentais’, por outro lado, outros conceitos, particularmente a nocao de causalidade, talvez sejam constituidos por conhecimentos culturalmente especificos. Concluo questionando o proprio conceito de metafora primaria, examinando ate que ponto metaforas primarias supostamente universais ja carregam em si preconceitos culturalmente determinados, e argumento que o onus da defesa esta com a escola Lakoffiana, que precisa justificar a suposta universalidade de experiencias e julgamentos subjetivos que geram as metaforas primarias.
THE H I ?> KINEMATICS OF NGC 4013: A STEEP AND RADIALLY SHALLOWING EXTRA-PLANAR ROTATIONAL LAG

NGC 4013 is a distinctly warped galaxy with evidence of disk–halo activity. Through deep H i observations and modeling we confirm that the H i disk is thin (central exponential scale height with an upper limit of 4″ or 280 pc), but flaring. We detect a vertical gradient in rotation velocity (lag), which shallows radially from a value of −35 − 28 + 7 ? > km s−1 kpc−1 at 1. ′4 (5.8 kpc), to a value of zero near R25 (11.2 kpc). Over much of this radial range, the lag is relatively steep. Both the steepness and the radial shallowing are consistent with recent determinations for a number of edge-ons, which have been difficult to explain. We briefly consider the lag measured in NGC 4013 in the context of this larger sample and theoretical models, further illuminating disk–halo flows.
Diophantine Approximation and Dynamics of Unipotent Flows on Homogeneous Spaces

It was around 1980 that Margulis got interested in the area of Diophantine approximation. The main focus at that time was on the Oppenheim conjecture, and the Raghunathan conjecture formulated in that connection for flows on homogeneous spaces induced by unipotent one-parameter subgroups. Raghunathan’s conjecture was formulated around 1975, and some of my work during the interim was driven by it. In print it was introduced in my paper on invariant measures of horospherical flows [6], where its connection with the Oppenheim conjecture, pointed out to me by Raghunathan, was also noted. By mid-eighties it was in the air that Margulis had proved the Oppenheim conjecture. I got a preprint, with complete proof, in 1987. An announcement with a sketch appeared in Comptes Rendus in 1987 [34], and expositions of proof followed [35], [36].