Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
In-Vehicle Screen Density Driver Distraction and User Preferences for Low vs . High Screen Density in Integrated Displays

Many information technology artefacts can be found in today’s cars. The interaction with these artefacts is the driver’s secondary task while driving the car in a safe way is the primary task. When designing interfaces for in-vehicle usage, measures have to be taken in order to make the interaction with the artefact suit the in-vehicle environment. One of these measures is to have the appropriate screen density level, which is the amount of information present on the screen. This thesis compares the usability of two integrated in-vehicle display prototypes, one with low screen density and one with high screen density. The usability comparison considers both safety and user preferences. Safety was measured by a Lane Change Test (LCT) which measures distraction of a primary task while performing a secondary task, and user preferences was measured with a questionnaire. Before the comparison was made, controls and a graphical user interface were designed. Results showed no significant difference in driver distraction between performing tasks on the high screen density display and the low screen density display. However, a vast majority of the users preferred high screen density over low. Furthermore, the distraction levels for both the high and the low screen density displays were below the proposed 0.5 meter limit for allowed driver distraction. The results indicate that in-vehicle displays can have a high level of screen density without imposing a level of distraction on the driver that is unsuitable for driving.
A Slide Generation Approach Via Content Categorization

The wide accessibility of web documents in electronic forms requires an automatic technique to label the documents with a predefined set of area, what is recognized as automatic Text Categorization (TC). Over the earlier period, it has been observed a large number of advanced machine learning algorithms to address this tricky task. Created presentation slides can be used as drafts to help the presenters prepare their formal slides in a more quickly way. A novel scheme called PPS Gen is projected to address this task. Documents are frequently represented by the “bag-of-words”: that is to say, every word or phrase take place in papers once or more times is considered as a aspect. It innovative make use of the regression method to learn the importance scores of the sentences in an academic paper, and then utilize the integer linear programming (ILP) method to generate wellstructured slides by selecting and aligning key phrases and sentences. Recommend a novel system called PPS Gen to generate presentation slides from academic papers. Prepare a sentence scoring model based on SVR and then classification each and every word through the SVM and use the ILP method to align and extract key phrases and sentences for generating the slides. Experimental results prove that our method can make much better slides than traditional methods.
Cost awareness analysis on acute appendicitis treatment with social security agency for health ( BPJS in health sector ) at Budi Kemuliaan Hospital

Background: Financial costs are recognized as one of the causes of lack of access to adequate health services, not least in the treatment of Acute Appendicitis with Social Security Agency for Health (BPJS in Health) in Budi Kemuliaan Hospital, Batam. Data describing health workers’ awareness of costs is still limited. Increasing awareness of health workers can encourage increased treatment efficacy and reduce wasteful spending costs. This research aims to analyze the cost awareness of health workers’ in the efficiency of Acute Appendicitis treatment. Methods: This research was a qualitative descriptive study accompanied by direct observation on the implementation of clinical pathways and SOP in cases of Appendicitis Acute in Budi Kemuliaan Hospital, Batam. In this study also conducted interviews involving nine main informants and three triangulation informants. Results: The average loss value Budi Kemuliaan Hospital in 2017 was Rp. 3,898,635, and increased in 2018 to Rp.5,597,241,-. Low knowledge of health workers about case-mix which causes low cost awareness behavior. There was a low awareness of costs identified in the implementation of clinical pathways and SOP in cases of Appendicitis Acute in general surgeons, resulting in high financing. There was also low management monitoring. This has the potential to be a source of financial loss for hospitals. Conclusion: The lack of cost efficiency for Appendicitis Acute due to lack of cost awareness and monitoring of hospital management, so that it is necessary to carry out periodic monitoring related to the Cost awareness behavior of health workers.
Improving Worst-case Bounds for Plan Bouquet based Techniques

Given an SQL query, current database systems execute it using a least cost plan which is largely based on estimates of predicate selectivities. Due to insufficient statistics and invalid assumptions, errors in estimates can lead to highly sub-optimal plans. In the paper[1], a strategy named “Plan Bouquets” has been proposed which provides guarantees on the worst case execution performance which does not rely on the estimates of predicate selectivities. The PlanBouquet algorithm, in its basic form, implicitly discovers predicate selectivities by observing the completion status of a sequence of cost-budgeted plan executions. Our contribution includes improving two variants of PlanBouquet. In the first contribution, we analyze this “non-intrusive” bouquet technique in presence of assumptions on the acclivities of cost functions which generally hold in practice. Further, we show that we can achieve significant reduction in the preprocessing time and will get upper bound on worst-case performance which is independent of the plan densities. Next, we investigate an intrusive variant of PlanBouquet named SpillBound[2], which changes the plan execution component and gives worst-case performance bound of O(D), which is only dependent on D, the dimensionality of selectivity space. We propose Opt-SB, which dynamically optimizes SpillBound, such that, the worst-case bound oscillates between O(D) and O(D) based on the optimizer’s behaviour profile within the selectivity space.
Visual Interaction through Hand Gesture Recognition using Hausdorff Matching

For many humans, interacting with a computer is a cumbersome and frustrating experience. Most people would prefer more natural ways of dealing with computer. The PUI paradigm has emerged as a postWIMP interface paradigm in order to cover these preferences. In this paper, a computer vision system is proposed based on fast detection and accurate hand posture commands recognition in color images, that can be executed in a common PC system equipped with an USB webcam such that any user can use it in its office or home. The major contributions of the presented approach are: (1) a fast segmentation process to segment the moving hand from the image background, which is able to deal with a large number of hand shapes against different backgrounds. (2) A recognition process that identifies the hand posture from the temporal sequence of segmented hands, where postures which are really similar are properly classified. The kernel of the recognition process is a robust shape comparison carried out through a Hausdorff distance approach, which operates on edge maps and derive holistic similarity measures. We introduce the use of a visual memory, which allows handling with diverse visual aspects of each one of the stored patterns that composes this memory. This paper includes experimental evaluations of the recognition process of 26 hand postures and it discusses the results. Experiments show that the system can achieve a 90% recognition average rate and is suitable for real-time applications. Key-Words: Human-Machine Systems, Perceptual user interface, Computer Vision, Image sequence processing, Pattern analysis, Hand gesture recognition. * This work has been partially supported by the Canary Autonomous Government under Project PI2000/042.
Highly Secure Virtual Identity Approach in Cloud Computing Environment

In this technological era, cloud computing has become a buzz word for all the service sectors, be it banking, health or any other business sector. Primarily, it provides significant benefits in terms of storage and maintenance of data and services. However, data security has always remained one of the biggest challenge in cloud. Therefore it is very important to focus on the security measures and techniques on the cloud environment so that cloud usage can be increased. This paper proposes a novel approach for enhancing security in cloud environment using virtual identity by hiding actual user identity. For achieving high security, Diffie-Hellman algorithm with station to station protocol has been used by the system. Paper also analyses the performance of system by taking various scenarios and discussion of previous research works.
On the relation between decision rules and perceptual representation in multidimensional perceptual categorization

This article examines the relation between changing categorization decision rules and the nature of the underlying perceptual representation. Observers completed a matching task that required them to adjust the length and orientation of a single line stimulus until they perceived it to "match" a second line stimulus (Alfonso-Reese, 1996, 1997). The same observers then completed four categorization tasks with the same stimuli. Data from the matching task were used to estimate a perceptual representation for each stimulus and observer. Three hypotheses regarding potential interactions between categorization decision rules and perceptual representation were examined. One assumed that there was no interaction between decision rules and perceptual representation. The second assumed that linear categorization rules affect the perceptual representation differently from nonlinear categorization rules. The third assumed that dimensional integration rules affected the perceptual representation differently from decision rules that require the observer to set a criterion along one stimulus dimension while ignoring the other; this is referred to as decisional selective attention. The results suggested that (l) the matching task perceptual representation provided a good account of the categorization data, (2) decisional selective attention affected the perceptual representation differently from decisional integration, and (3) decisional selective attention generally decreased the perceptual variability along the attended dimension.
Determinants and implications of audit reporting lags in China

Determinants and Implications of Audit Reporting Lags in China by LUO Wei Master of Philosophy in Accounting Timeliness is an essential attribute of corporate financial reporting as it affects the usefulness of information made available to external investors. The recognition that the length of audit is the single most important determinant influencing the timeliness of earnings announcements has motivated investigations on audit reporting lags in different countries. Nevertheless, there is a lack of research on this issue in China where the institutional environment for accounting and auditing practices is different from that of other countries. The growing interest in the Chinese stock market from domestic and international investors further increases the importance of this research. In this study, I first explore the determinants of audit reporting lags in China based on the characteristics of the Chinese audit market and business environment. I then examine the implications of long audit reporting lags. The findings of this paper indicate that audit risk, audit complexity, and auditor expertise are all associated with the length of audit reporting lags in China. Firms with long audit reporting lags are more likely to have adverse consequences such as non-standard opinions and financial statement restatements in subsequent periods.
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES PRODUCTION TARGETS AND FREE DISPOSAL IN THE PRIVATE PROVISION OF PUBLIC GOODS

In a collective-action game a player’s payoff is the sum of (i) a private component that depends only on that player’s action, and (ii) a public component, common to all players and dependent upon all actions. A classic application is the private provision of a public good. Play evolves: strategy revisions are made according to a multinomial-logit choice rule. Long-run behaviour is determined by a potential function, which incorporates the private (not social) benefits of activity. Behaviour may be influenced only by reducing public-good output (an application of a free-disposal property). When welfare is the expected time average of aggregate payoffs, it is socially optimal to either leave production well alone, or damage it as much as possible. This often takes the form of a production target, where all output is discarded unless some threshold is reached, potentially generating an equilibriumselection problem. When the evolution of play approximates a best-reply process, the optimal threshold corresponds to the output level that an individual who pays all private costs but enjoys only private benefits would be just willing to provide. 1. Public-Good Production and Collective Action In this paper, a collective action is a situation in which private actions lead to common consequences. Examples include the private provision of a public good, or the private exploitation of a common resource. For the former case, the central issue addressed is this: what types of public-good production technology are conducive to the success of a collective action? More concretely, a general game is considered in which a player’s payoff is the sum of (i) a private component, specific to the individual and depending only on that player’s action, and (ii) a public component, common to all players and depending on all actions. Date Printed. March 24, 2005 (Prodv1.tex). JEL Classification. C72, C73, and H41.
Silencing of Id 2 Alleviates Chronic Neuropathic Pain Following Chronic Constriction Injury

Inhibitor of DNA binding/differentiation 2 (Id2) belongs to a helix-loop-helix family of proteins. Recent studies have showed that Id2 plays a pivotal role in neuronal survival and neuroprotection. However, under neuropathic pain conditions, the role of Id2 is still unclear. In this study, we investigated the effect of Id2 on neuropathic pain in a rat chronic constriction injury (CCI) model. Our results demonstrated that Id2 was upregulated in the dorsal root ganglion (DRG) in a CCI rat in a time-dependent manner. Intrathecal short-hairpin RNA (shRNA)-Id2 attenuates mechanical allodynia and thermal hyperalgesia in CCI rats, and inhibits the expression of TNF-α and IL-1β in the DRG in CCI rats. Furthermore, knockdown of Id2 reduces the expression of NF-κB p65 in the DRG of CCI rats. Taken together, our findings suggest that knockdown of Id2 may alleviate neuropathic pain by inhibiting the NF-κB activation to inhibit the production of pro-inflammatory mediators. Therefore, Id2 may provide an important target of neuropathic pain treatment.
Evaluation of Classification Algorithms for Text Dependent and Text Independent Speaker Identification

We present a comparative evaluation of different classification algorithms for the task of speaker identity selection based on GMM-UBM speaker identification scores. The performance of the evaluated classification algorithms was examined in both text-dependent and text-independent operation modes for speaker identification. The experimental results indicated a significant improvement in terms of speaker identification accuracy, which was approximately 7% and 14.5% for the text-dependent and the text-independent scenarios, respectively. Keywords— speaker identification; classification; machine learning.
Fiat Lingua Title : Alternations : An Introduction ( and Some Further Explorations ) for Conlangers Author :

This essay explores the nature of alternations: variations in form across different contexts. In addition to providing a basic introduction of the phenomena in both English and in other languages, it considers several frameworks for understanding the behavior of alternations in natural languages. This essay also offers some recommendations for the creation of alternations in constructed languages and gives some examples to illustrate these recommendations. It is a revised and expanded version of a talk given at the 7th Language Creation Conference (July, 2017) in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
A Pneumatically-Driven Soft Robot Biologically Inspired by Earthworms

We present the design, fabrication and feedback control of an earthworm-inspired soft robot capable of locomoting inside pipes. The bodies of natural earthworms are composed of repeated deformable structural units, actuated by axial and longitudinal muscles, employed to generate the body motions required for limbless locomotion, such as burrowing. Following this basic notion, we propose a new pneumatically-driven soft robotic system, built by integrating together two radial actuators with an axial actuator, which mimics the motion and functionality of one body segment of a natural earthworm. The suitability of the proposed approach is demonstrated experimentally through three basic locomotion tests: horizontal motion, vertical motion and oblique motion inside a varying-angle transparent pipe.
L-TRYPTOPHAN AMENDMENTS ENHANCED AUXIN PRODUCTION AND GROWTH OF TRITICUM AESTIVUM L . BY RHIZOBACTERIA

The objective of the present study was to evaluate the effect of co-inoculations of auxin producing Bacillus and Streptomyces strains to enhance the growth of Triticum aestivum L. For auxin production, Bacillus cereus McR-3, B. subtilis McR-7, Enterobacter cloacae FR, Streptomyces sp. RSF, S. macrosporeus SCF and S. griseoincarnatus CTF were screened by using colorimetric method. Auxin production was determined in the absence and presence of precursor i.e. Ltryptophan (0, 100, 300, 500 μg ml -I ). Highest auxin production was recorded with B. subtilis McR-7 (31 μg ml -I ), B. cereus McR-3 (28 μg ml -I ) and E. cloacae (95 μg ml -I ), respectively, in the presence of 100, 500, 500 μg ml -I L-tryptophan. After in vitro auxin screening, strains were evaluated for their growth stimulatory effects on T. aestivum under axenic conditions. In pot trials, strains showed variable growth responses when inoculated with single or mixed cultures. In single cultures, significant increase for root length (49%), shoot length (42%) and shoot fresh biomass (31%) was recorded respectively with Streptomyces sp. RSF and S. macrosporeus SCF. For mixed cultures, McR-3+SCF, FR+RSF and McR-7+SCF were the most promising to enhance shoot length (35%), root length (18%) and shoot fresh biomass (20%), respectively, over control. Overall, single and a few combinations of mixed cultures were most suitable to enhance growth of T. aestivum under axenic conditions. Results also indicated that consortia comprising of plant growth promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) and Streptomyces offer good potential for the formulations of bio-inoculants for field trials.
HEALTHCARE QUALITY OF BANGLADESH AND OUTBOUND MEDICAL TRAVEL TO THAILAND

ЭКОНОМИКА РЕГИОНА Т. 14, вып. 2 (2018) For citation: Ali, M. M. & Medhekar, A. (2018). Healthcare Quality of Bangladesh and Outbound Medical Travel to Thailand. Ekonomika regiona [Economy of Region], 14(2), 575-588 doi 10.17059/2018-2-19 JEL: I11, I18, Z32 M. M. Ali a), A. Medhekar b) a) Dhaka School of Economics, University of Dhaka (Dhaka, Bangladesh; e-mail: pipulbd@gmail.com) b) School of Business & Law, Central Queensland University (Rockhampton, Australia)
How Well Do Parks Protect Fish Species At Risk In Ontario ?

In Ontario, national and provincial parks and conservation lands have been established for a variety of reasons including to provide recreational opportunities and to preserve areas of scientific, cultural or historical significance. Few, if any, parks and conservation areas have been established specifically to preserve aquatic biodiversity; however, as a result of their location and management practices, they may actually protect aquatic biodiversity. Over 165 fish species have been collected in Ontario. Of these species, 32 are listed as “Extinct,” “Extirpated,” “Endangered,” “Threatened,” or “Special Concern” by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC). For each COSEWIC-listed fish species, we conducted analyses to determine the percentage of populations found within parks and conservation areas, and the degree to which these areas actually protected the species. In general, parks and conservation areas offer limited protection to fish species at risk but may provide opportunities for better protection.
Photosynthetic characteristics of trees in seasonally tropical dry forests in Thailand

Leaf gas exchange and ecophysiological characteristics in sun leaves in uppermost canopies of adult trees were examined in mixed deciduous forest (MDF), dry dipterocarp forest (DDF), and dry evergreen forest (DEF) in Thailand. Leaf area-based and mass-based maximum assimilation rates (Amax) were lower in deciduous-tree forests (DDF and MDF) than in evergreen-tree forests (DEF). Between the deciduous forests, the maximum stomatal conductance (Gmax) in MDF were higher, and leaf mass per area (LMA) and carbon:nitrogen (C:N) ratio in MDF were lower than those in MDF. Across all species, area-based Amax was positively correlated to Gmax, mass-based and N-based Amax, and areaand mass-based N. Mass-based Amax was positively correlated to Gmax, area-based and N-based Amax, mass-based N, and was negatively correlated to LMA and intrinsic water use efficiency (iWUE= Amax/Gmax). Amax at a give N was higher in MDF and DDF than in DEF, because of a low photosynthetic N use efficiency (PNUE: N-based Amax) in evergreens. Area-based and mass-based Amax were estimated from leaf traits with multiple regression analysis. Area-based Amax was estimated by areaand mass-based N and Gmax (r 2 =0.488), whereas mass-based Amax was well estimated by mass-based N, SLA (=1/LMA), and Gmax (r 2 =0.775). The high contribution of Gmax to adequate estimation of Amax suggests that Amax and canopy gas flux are easily reduced by a decrease in precipitation and soil degradation in future. Key Word: Carbon assimilation, Climate change, Leaf mass per area, Leaf nitrogen, Stomatal conductance, Precipitation shift