Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
TOWARDS POINT CLOUD HARMONIZATION

The Geomatics Synthesis Project (GSP) is a project that combines scientific research with practical work by applying essential skills acquired in the Master’s programme Geomatics for the Built Environment at the Delft University of Technology. The topics of GSP 2017 are Point Clouds (PC) and Internet of Things (IoT). This report is prepared by the GEOloc team as part of the PC project, which focuses on the the accessibility, interoperability, and quality of different point cloud datasets. The main objective of this project is to research the process of harmonizing point cloud datasets of different origins and to incorporate the integrated dataset in a web viewer that allows for visualization and analysis. As a case study, the Three-Country Point (TCP) where Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands share a border will be evaluated. The project is split into several stages. The first step is a theoretical research, which aims to give the team members more knowledge and ideas about the main topics in the project. Then, the key requirements from the client are specified and a project plan is developed as a general overview of the main objectives. In the next step, the data are collected from the three countries bordering the TCP and the acquired point cloud datasets are processed. The main challenge in the GEOloc project will be the determination of an ideal common coordinate reference system (CRS) for the datasets and the transformation of the coordinates into the new CRS. In the process, spatial differences between the datasets originating from various sources are analyzed. Consequently, the harmonized datasets are stored using a spatial clustering method and visualized in a web viewer that allows for analysis.
Greed , Altruism , and the Gender Wage Gap 1

Using two single-cohort longitudinal surveys, the NLS72 and the NELS88, I investigate the impact of greed, ambition, leadership, altruism, gender role attitudes, family values and income expectations on the gender wage gap. Appealing to a hedonic wage function framework, I find that in the NLS72, gender differences in these values and linked behaviors account for a share of the gender wage gap that exceeds (is comparable) in 1979 (in 1986) the share attributable to gender differences in labor market experience and job tenure. In the NELS88, gender differences in work values have closed substantially. Thus in 2000, gender differences in income expectations, which are significantly linked to greed, become the most important soft explanatory factor of the gender gap in pay. Methodologically, this paper proposes a correction to the Oaxaca-Blinder-Ransom decomposition that results in a truly decomposable approach compatible with the simple pooled regression that includes a gender dummy.
Reliable multicast using remote direct memory access (RDMA) over a passive optical cross-connect fabric enhanced with wavelength division multiplexing (WDM)

It has been well studied that reliable multicast enables consistency protocols, including Byzantine Fault Tolerant protocols, for distributed systems. However, no transport-layer reliable multicast is used today due to limitations with existing switch fabrics and transport-layer protocols. In this paper, we introduce a layer-4 (L4) transport based on remote direct memory access (RDMA) datagram to achieve reliable multicast over a shared optical medium. By connecting a cluster of networking nodes using a passive optical cross-connect fabric enhanced with wavelength division multiplexing, all messages are broadcast to all nodes. This mechanism enables consistency in a distributed system to be maintained at a low latency cost. By further utilizing RDMA datagram as the L4 protocol, we have achieved a low-enough message loss-ratio (better than one in 68 billion) to make a simple Negative Acknowledge (NACK)-based L4 multicast practical to deploy. To our knowledge, it is the first multicast architecture able to demonstrate such low message loss-ratio. Furthermore, with this reliable multicast transport, end-to-end latencies of eight microseconds or less (< 8us) have been routinely achieved using an enhanced software RDMA implementation on a variety of commodity 10G Ethernet network adapters.
ZNF488 is an independent prognostic indicator in nasopharyngeal carcinoma and promotes cell adhesion and proliferation via collagen IV/FAK/ AKT/Cyclin D1 pathway

Background: ZNF488 acts as an oncogene which promotes cell invasion and endows tumor cells stem cell capacity in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC), but its correlation with clinicopathologic characteristics and patients ’ survival in NPC remain unde ﬁ ned. Methods: In this study, 158 cases of con ﬁ rmed NPC were subjected to immunohistochemistry staining for evaluating endogenous expression. Kaplan – Meier method and log-rank test were used to estimate the survival rates. The relationship between ZNF488 and clinicopathological characteristics was statistically calculated by chi-squared test, univariate and multivariate analysis. In addition, adhesion assay, MTT and colony formation assays were performed for measuring adhesion and proliferation capacity. Cell cycle analysis via ﬂ ow cytometry was conducted to explore cell cycle distribution. Western blot was used to detect pathway protein levels, and the pFAK (Y397) kit was used for focal adhesion kinase (FAK) activation. Results: We demonstrated that high expression of ZNF488 was signi ﬁ cantly correlated with locoregional failure ( P =0.018) and distant metastasis ( P =0.001). Patients with high ZNF488 expression had poorer overall survival ( P <0.001), loco-regional recurrence-free survival ( P <0.001), distance metastasis-free survival ( P <0.001) and progression-free survival ( P <0.001) than those with low ZNF488 group. Multivariate analysis showed that ZNF488 expression was an independent prognostic indicator for predicting NPC patients ’ survival (HR, 3.314; 95% CI, 1.489 – 7.386; P =0.003). Additionally, ZNF488-induced collagen IV/ FAK/AKT to enhance adhesion ability meanwhile led to the upregulation of Cyclin D1 to facilitate cell proliferation through promoting cell cycle progression and inhibition of apoptosis through caspase-independent way. Conclusion: These results reveal that ZNF488, as an independent prognostic indicator, promotes cell adhesion and proliferation through collagen IV/FAK/AKT/Cyclin D1 pathway in NPC.
The built environment and physical activity participation in a semi–urban area in Southern Gauteng

Public health researchers over the years have drawn the attention to the effects of community environments on health conditions such as physical inactivity. Physical inactivity has been reported to be the second leading risk factor for chronic diseases after smoking and contributes significantly to total mortality. A review of literature suggests that the built environment can either facilitate or constrain physical activity participation. The purpose of the study was to examine the influence of the physical environment on physical activity participation among semiurban residents. A structured questionnaire assessing physical activity participation and the built environment was administered to 148 respondents in a semi-urban township in the Southern part of the Gauteng province, South Africa. A descriptive analysis of the sample was undertaken, followed by the calculation of participants’ body mass index (BMI), classification of physical activity and the mean ranking of various environmental factors. Results indicate that respondents’ physical activity participation ranged from mild to moderate with majority of the respondents not meeting the minimum physical activity guidelines (30 minutes or more a day, most days of the week of at least moderate physical activity). In addition, the results indicate that the built environment or the lack thereof play an influential role in physical activity participation. Perceived access to various destinations, street planning in the neighbourhood, places for walking and cycling, neighbourhood surroundings, safety from traffic and safety from crime seem to prohibit residents from participation in physical activity. Government, policy makers and environmental planners need to take cognisance of future planning in the development of userfriendly environments so that residents can meaningfully participate in physical activity.
Well-being and Perfectionism in Students: Adaptive versus Maladaptive

: The prevalence of perfectionism among university students has been reported particularly high, and new theories have been presented to explain its impacts. This study was conducted to evaluate the effect of adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism on psychological well-being in undergraduate and graduate university students. 668 university students (386 undergraduate and 282 graduate students) who studied at Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz and Shiraz University participated voluntarily in this study. They completed the Revised Almost Perfect Scale (APS-R) questionnaire and Ryff’s Well-Being Scale. The results showed that the mean scores of adaptive perfectionist students in the psychological well-being and its sub-scales, autonomy, purpose in life, positive relations with others, and environmental mastery, were higher than the group of students with maladaptive perfectionist and non- perfectionist. The statistically significant difference was found (P <0.01). As a result, it can be said that adaptive perfectionist is accompanied by better and higher performance and consequently leads to a higher psychological well-being.
Estimation of serum electrolyte concentration among fuel pump/petrol station workers in Kirkuk city

Occupational exposure to petrol has been reported to cause serious health hazards especially liver and kidney disease. Electrolytes like Na+, K+, and Cl- are the important mediators of several physiological functions. The present study aims to evaluate the effect of petrol exposure on the serum electrolyte concentration among the workers at the Kirkuk petrol station. The cross-sectional study analyzed 29 petrol pump workers who were continuously exposed to petrol more at least one year in the Kirkuk city and did not have a history of any systemic illness, and 10 healthy age-matched controls who never had exposure to petrol were enrolled. The serum electrolyte levels (Na+, K+, and Cl-) were assessed in the petrol station workers working at Kirkuk city petrol station and the controls by FUJI DRI-CHEM system (Fujifilm (Japan) and expressed as mmol/l. These serum electrolyte levels were compared between the workers and the controls by Mann-Whitney U test and p values ≤ 0.05 was considered statistically significant. All the participants in the study were males. None of the participants was smokers or alcohol consumers. No significant (p=0.32) difference was found in the mean age of the petrol station workers (34.22±6.57) years and the controls (36.70±6.33) years. The serum Na+ levels were significantly higher in the petrol station workers as compared to the controls. Similarly, serum Cl- levels were significantly higher in the petrol station workers as compared to the controls. Although the levels of the electrolytes studied were in the normal recommended range but the levels of Na+ and Cl-were significantly higher in the petrol station workers than the controls. Extensive studies involving larger sample sizes should be conducted to conclude the effect of petrol exposure on the electrolyte levels.
SSTL I/O Standard Based Environment Friendly Energy Efficient ROM Design on FPGA

— in this work, we are making energy efficient 32-bit ALU by using different classes of LVCMOS IO standard. Here, we are operating our design with operating speed of 4 th generation i7 processor in order to test the compatibility of our design with the latest state of the art technology based processor. When there is no demand of peak performance, then we can save 75.2% Clock power, 75% Logic power, 75.36% Signal power, 81.82% I/O power by operating our device with 1GHz frequency in place of maximum 4GHz. LVCMOS25 having 69.65%, 53.48%, 38.77% more power consumption with respect to LVCMOS12, LVCMOS15, LVCMOS 18 at 2.9GHz respectively. In this we used, VERILOG hardware description language, XILINX ISE simulator, and Virtex-6 FPGA and XPower analyzer.
ESTIMATION OF TREATMENT EFFECTS VIA MATCHING

Our goal is now to find M nearest neighbors for observation i, all of which must come from the opposite treatment group. How many do we need? Abadie and Imbens (2004) suggest a small number, such as three or four. This is because the quality of the matches (as measured by di,l will typically deteriorate as M increases. By convention, M is interpreted as the minimum number of matched observations. If there are ties, the actual set of matched observations might be larger than M .
Surface operators inN = 2 SQCD and Seiberg Duality

We study half-BPS surface operators in N = 2 supersymmetric asymptotically conformal gauge theories in four dimensions with SU(N ) gauge group and 2N fundamental flavours using localization methods and coupled 2d/4d quiver gauge theories. We show that contours specified by a particular Jeffrey–Kirwan residue prescription in the localization analysis map to particular realizations of the surface operator as flavour defects. Seiberg duality of the 2d/4d quivers is mapped to contour deformations of the localization integral which in this case involves a residue at infinity. This is reflected as a modified Seiberg duality rule that shifts the Lagrangian of the purported dual theory by non-perturbative terms. The new rules, that depend on the 4d gauge coupling, lead to a match between the low energy effective twisted chiral superpotentials for any pair of dual 2d/4d quivers.
(Recognition with Compression)

A new paradigm for processing signals with sparse representation in some basis is actively developed for some time past. It relies largely on the ideas of measurement randomization and 1-optimization. The recent methods of acquisition and representation of the compressed data were christened compressive sensing. DOI: 10.1134/S0005117910110019
Probabilistic Deep Ordinal Regression Based on Gaussian Processes

With excellent representation power for complex data, deep neural networks (DNNs) based approaches are state-of-the-art for ordinal regression problem which aims to classify instances into ordinal categories. However, DNNs are not able to capture uncertainties and produce probabilistic interpretations. As a probabilistic model, Gaussian Processes (GPs) on the other hand offers uncertainty information, which is nonetheless lack of scalability for large datasets. This paper adapts traditional GPs regression for ordinal regression problem by using both conjugate and non-conjugate ordinal likelihood. Based on that, it proposes a deep neural network with a GPs layer on the top, which is trained end-to-end by the stochastic gradient descent method for both neural network parameters and GPs parameters. The parameters in the ordinal likelihood function are learned as neural network parameters so that the proposed framework is able to produce fitted likelihood functions for training sets and make probabilistic predictions for test points. Experimental results on three real-world benchmarks -- image aesthetics rating, historical image grading and age group estimation -- demonstrate that in terms of mean absolute error, the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art ordinal regression approaches and provides the confidence for predictions.
The Predictive Power of Morningstar’s New Rating System

A recent article in Investment News (“Morningstar’s Stars Shine After Overhaul,” September 10, 2007) cited a research study which showed Morningstar’s ratings “actually are meaningful in predicting future performance of a fund — at least for a while. ” Several of our readers asked us to look at this research in more detail, with the goal of evaluating whether Morningstar’s ratings convey useful predictive information for financial advisors and wealth managers.
Corporate Foresight in Europe

Foresight activities usually aim at decision-making and priority setting in the public sectors of systems of innovation, while the other parts of the RTDI-system have been largely left out of picture: most notably all the entrepreneurial actors on the private side (who actually bring the innovations to the market. This EU-study has been launched to take a first look at the current uses, practices and impacts of foresight in the private sector. It is based on personal interviews with 18 selected European enterprises from hightechnology industries, consumer goods and the service sectors. A workshop, organized in November 2002 with the participation of corporate foresight practitioners, confirmed the overall findings of the report.
The corpus based approach to sentiment analysis in modern standard Arabic and Arabic dialects: a literature review Modern standart Arapça ve Arap lehçelerinde duygu analizine külliyat (korpus) temelli yaklaşım: bir literatür incelemesi

Sentiment Analysis, is the analysis of ideas, emotions, evaluations, values, attitudes and feelings about products, services, companies, individuals, tasks, events, titles and their characteristics. With the increase in applications on the Internet and social networks, Sentiment Analysis has taken a considerable place in the field of text mining research and has since been used to explore the opinions of users about various products or topics discussed over the Internet. When the literature on Sentiment Analysis is examined, it is seen that the natural language of the Internet information sources that form the basis of the analysis is mostly English. Developments in the fields of Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics have contributed positively to Sentiment Analysis studies made from natural languages other than English. The purpose of this study is to examine the literature of Sentiment Analysis conducted in Arabic internet information sources. The literature review includes studies based on the corpus approach, which is made up of Arabic Internet information sources. Studies are being carried out on the works which constitute their own corpora for both Modern Standard Arabic and Arabic dialects and on which sentiment analysis is performed.
Yield-scaled N2O and CH4 emissions as affected by combined application of stabilized nitrogen fertilizer and pig manure in rice fields

A field experiment was conducted to study the effects of stabilized nitrogen fertilizer combined with pig manure on rice yield and nitrous oxide (N2O) and methane (CH4) emissions. Four treatments were established: urea (U); pig manure (PM); PM and urea (PM + U); PM and stabilized nitrogen fertilizer (urea plus 1% NBPT (N-(n-butyl) thiophosphoric triamide), 1% PPD (phenylphosphorodiamidate) and 2% DMPP (3,4-dimethylpyrazole phosphate)) (PM + U + I). In this study, compared with PM, PM + U significantly increased cumulative N2O emission, but PM + U + I showed no significant difference from PM on N2O cumulative emission, indicating that stabilized nitrogen fertilizer combined with PM is effective at reducing N2O emissions. The cumulative emission of CH4 from PM + U + I treatment was significantly lower than that from PM and PM + U, indicating that stabilized nitrogen fertilizer combined with PM can effectively reduce CH4 emissions as well. The yields of PM + U and PM + U + I were not significantly different from those of U and PM, indicating that local conventional nitrogen application and returns of PM can provide sufficient nitrogen for rice growth. For yield-scaled emissions (YSE), PM was the highest, while PM + U + I significantly decreased YSE. Concomitant application of stabilized nitrogen fertilizer can achieve the goal of reducing YSE when PM is returned to the field.
Small vessel disease to subcortical dementia: a dynamic model, which interfaces aging, cholinergic dysregulation and the neurovascular unit

Background: Small vessels have the pivotal role for the brain ’ s autoregulation. The arteriosclerosis-dependent alteration of the brain perfusion is one of the major determinants in small vessel disease. Endothelium distress can potentiate the ﬂ ow dysregulation and lead to subcortical vascular dementia (sVAD). sVAD increases morbidity and disability. Epidemiological studies have shown that sVAD shares with cerebrovascular disease most of the common risk factors. The molecular basis of this pathology remains controversial. Purpose: To detect the possible mechanisms between small vessel disease and sVAD, giving a broad vision on the topic, including pathological aspects, clinical and laboratory ﬁ ndings, metabolic process and cholinergic dysfunction. Methods: We searched MEDLINE using different search terms ( “ vascular dementia ” , “ subcortical vascular dementia ” , “ small vessel disease ” , “ cholinergic afferents ” , etc). Publications were selected from the past 20 years. Searches were extended to Embase, Cochrane Library, and LILIACS databases. All searches were done from January 1, 1998 up to January 31, 2018. Results: A total of 560 studies showed up, and appropriate studies were included. Associations between traditional vascular risk factors have been isolated. We remarked that SVD and white matter abnormalities are seen frequently with aging and also that vascular and endothelium changes are related with age; the changes can be accelerated by different vascular risk factors. Vascular function changes can be heavily in ﬂ uenced by genetic and epigenetic factors. Conclusion: Small vessel disease and the related dementia are two pathologies that deserve attention for their relevance and impact in clinical practice. Hypertension might be a historical problem for SVD and SVAD, but low pressure might be even more dangerous; CBF regional selective decrease seems to be a critical factor for small vessel disease-related dementia. In those patients, endothelium damage is a super-imposed condition. Several issues are still debatable, and more research is needed.
Comparison of Pair and Solo Programming through software metrics in University Students’ Projects

Introducción: La programación por pares es una práctica ágil que puede ser utilizada tanto en el desarrollo de software en los negocios como en la enseñanza universitaria de la programación. Objetivo: Este artículo presenta una investigación que se realizó para comparar la programación por pares y en solitario en cursos universitarios considerando las métricas de los programas creados por estudiantes de reciente ingreso a una carrera universitaria en tecnologías de la información. Método: Se dividió a los participantes en dos grupos: uno aplicó la programación por pares y otro programó individualmente. Ambos desarrollaron el mismo programa bajo las mismas condiciones. Las siguientes métricas fueron analizadas en sus programas: número de sentencias, porcentaje de comentarios, profundidad máxima, profundidad promedio, complejidad máxima, número de métodos por clase, número de llamadas por método y número de sentencias por método. Los valores de las métricas fueron obtenidos con el software Source Monitor. Posteriormente se realizaron pruebas Mann-Whitney en SPSS. Resultados: Se observó que quienes trabajaron en pares escribieron código con más sentencias (p=0.038, U=17.00) y mayor nivel de profundidad (p=0.032, U=18.00) que quienes programaron individualmente. Conclusiones: Este artículo contribuye a la enseñanza del desarrollo de software al proveer evidencia empírica cuantitativa de la efectividad de la programación por pares. Se concluye que la programación por pares puede ser un enfoque educativo apropiado para los primeros cursos universitarios de desarrollo de software.