Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A quality measure for halftones obtained by linear and nonlinear resampling.

Almost all printing techniques use halftoning to create the illusion of contones on bi-level printing devices. Still the most popular halftoning technique is classical halftoning, where dots of varying sizes are placed on a regular screen lattice. Since the screen lattice has a different resolution and geometry than the original lattice, i.e., an orthogonal 300 × 300 dpi grid, resampling techniques must be used. The quality of the halftone depends on the amount of aliasing and the amount of blurring due to this resampling. Aliasing can lead to dreaded moir e patterns, while blurring renders the image unsharp. Traditional linear resampling filters must trade-off between these two properties. Previous work has presented a new non-linear resampling technique based on spacefrequency analysis to combine the anti-aliasing and edge-preserving properties. Until now, these resampling filters were evaluated by visual inspection only. This paper proposes a new objective quality measure to evaluate and compare these resampling filters in a two-dimensional evaluation space, i.e., a measure for the amount of aliasing and the amount of sharpness. First, it is shown that existing techniques such as inverse halftoning or quality measures for evaluating compressed images are not appropriate for these purposes. Next, we present a new quality measure inspired on the human visual system which is able to compare an image with its halftoned result. Experimental results show that the non-linear resampling scheme is able to combine anti-aliasing and edge-preservation. Keywords— Image quality measure, human visual system, aliasing, halftones, resampling
CONVERGING BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY WITH THE INTERNET OF THINGS

We present the concept of leveraging Blockchain technology, for the management and security of information related to the Internet Of Things. Here, we put forth a model for the intercommunication of smart devices, their identity management and information security, with Blockchain posing as the backbone. The model proposes to serve as a robust and scalable solution, in order to address the security and identity concerns, arising due to the distributed nature of the Internet of Things. The proposed model is further compared to the existing ones in practice.
Cost Evaluation of Synchronization Algorithms for Multicore Architectures

In a multicore environment, a major focus is represented by the synchronization among threads and processes. Since synchronization mechanisms strongly affect the performance of multithread algorithms, the selection of an effective synchronization approach is critical for multicore environments. In this chapter, the cost of the main existing synchronization techniques is estimated. The current investigation covers both hardware and software solutions. A comparative analysis highlights benefits and drawbacks of the considered approaches. The results are intended to represent a useful aid for researchers and practitioners interested in optimization of parallel algorithms.
Identifying Modern Macro Equations with Old Shocks

Despite decades of research, the consistent estimation of structural forward-looking macroeconomic equations remains a formidable empirical challenge because of pervasive endogeneity issues. Prominent cases—the estimation of Phillips curves, Euler equations, or monetary policy rules—have typically relied on using predetermined variables as instruments, with mixed success. In this work, we propose a new approach that consists in using sequences of independently identified structural shocks as instrumental variables. Our approach is robust to weak instruments and is valid regardless of the shocks’ variance contribution. We estimate a Phillips curve using monetary shocks as instruments and find that conventional methods substantially underestimate the slope of the Phillips curve.
Study on Android Rootkit based on VFS

As an efficient means of attack,Rootkit is widely used in Windows and Linux platforms. The Android system based on Linux 2.6 kernel faces risks various of this attack. Based on analysis of the Android telephone system architecture,a Rootkit attack working on Android OS is proposed,which is based on LKM(loadable kernel module) and replacement of the system call in VFS(virtual file system).
Revision of the Effectiveness of China’s Sterilization Policies Considering the Role of the Reserve Requirement Ratio Adjustment

ABSTRACT This paper integrates changes in the reserve requirement ratio with other related monetary policies and estimates the offset and sterilization coefficients to examine the effectiveness of China’s sterilization operations. The results show that China’s sterilization operations have been fairly effective and China has been able to control domestic money supply relatively well despite a limited degree of exchange rate flexibility. The results also indicate that the failure to take changes in reserve requirements ratio into account leads to a substantial underestimate of the effectiveness of China’s sterilization operations, illustrating that this policy is nonnegligible in studying China’s sterilization operations.
Who You Should Not Follow: Extracting Word Embeddings from Tweets to Identify Groups of Interest and Hijackers in Demonstrations

In the latest years, a number of citizen movements and protests have spread across the world. One of the characteristics of such events is that demonstrations have been aroused by the use of social networking channels such as Twitter, Facebook, and Whatsapp, among others. Different scholars are currently analyzing this phenomenon to better understand its impact on societies. Furthermore, the use of the Internet as a driver or tool for organizing different groups and demonstrations leaves traces of social changes that have been addressed by technology. Nevertheless, it is important to define ways of identifying different movements, as well as possible misuse by so-called Internet trolls or hijackers, whose objective is to start arguments and confuse or upset other users. In this work, the authors present the case of demonstrations in Ecuador from March 2015 to April 2016 and use data from Twitter users who engaged in those demonstrations. Ecuador has a long history of demonstrations against different governments, which makes this scenario very attractive for more in depth study. Moreover, the authors present a framework for identifying political interest groups as well as possible hashtag hijackers. Specifically, this work focuses on the problem of giving recommendations to groups in which a group of users with the same political view receives suggestions of users they should not follow because they have opposing political views but use hijacked hashtags. Experiments on real-world data collected from the previously mentioned demonstrations show the effectiveness of this approach in automatically identifying hijackers so that they can be effectively recommended to a group as people they should not follow.
Spatial and economic patterns in life expectancy among US States

ABSTRACT This study investigates the determinants of gender-specific life expectancy across US states over the period 1995–2007. We employ a production function specification where life expectancy depends on health expenditure, income, education and lifestyle variables, allowing for spatial effects. Empirical results suggest that education attainment and health expenditure are the main factors behind improving longevity, whereas smoking bears a strong negative influence. For robustness purposes, we also use health spending as well as education criteria, apart from geographical ones to model interstate spillovers. In the former case, states with similar health expenditure are ‘neighbors’ and affect positively the life expectancy process. If education is applied instead of health spending together with geographic proximity, the spatial correlation is insignificant, i.e. education ‘neighbors’ do not affect life expectancy. Our findings do not imply significant gender differences regarding health production. The results suggest that health care policy will have to focus on wider economic and social considerations, like education and lifestyle changes, except medical care provision in order to exploit the full potential for life expectancy improvements of the US population.
Using or abusing? Scrutinising employer demand for temporary sponsored skilled migrants in the Australian hospitality industry

This article analyses the function of temporary sponsored skilled migrants in Australian hospitality, an industry with acute difficulties attracting and retaining skilled workers. Drawing upon survey data, the findings indicate that rather than utilising temporary sponsored skilled migration to source hard skills, as assumed within the extant literature, employers’ recruitment practices are motivated by a desire to source soft skills and labour perceived as relatively controllable, productive and reliable. In explaining these findings, the article develops new insights regarding the dependence of temporary sponsored skilled migrants on their employer sponsors and the industry effects of hospitality. These factors make these workers a relatively more attractive source of labour and shape the nature of employer demand.
Memory-decay problems in a level-repetition switch task model

A classical example of a switch task is a task in which both a digit and a letter are presented to subjects, and, depending on the condition, where they are asked either if the letter is a vowel or a consonant, or if the digit is odd or even (e.g., see Rogers & Monsell, 1995). This can be done in the so-called alternating runs design, where the task is alternated in blocks of for instance four trials. Every first trial of a block is called a switch trial, and is compared to the other trials within a block. Performance on these switch trials is usually significantly slower and more error-prone than on the non-switch trials (e.g., Monsell, 2003). One of the hypotheses why this phenomenon occurs is that subjects do not have enough time to prepare for the new task. However, if one increases the time between trials, only part of the switch cost disappears (Rogers & Monsell, 1995; Altmann, 2004). Thus it is not possible to completely prepare for a new task. Even when the subjects are cued and when they may decide themselves when the next trial starts, a residual switch cost remains. A subset of the switch paradigm is the level-repetition task (Hubner, 2000). In this task, the stimulus level on which the response has to be based is changed. In one of the conditions, subjects have to pay attention to the global level of the stimulus, in the other condition to the local level. For example, a stimulus can be a large letter made up of small ones, where the task is to identify the letter (Hubner, 2000). These conditions can be presented in the alternating runs design. Besides the same switch effects as previously described, an additional task-level effect is observed. The identification of the local stimuli takes longer than of the global stimuli. This is in accordance with the global precedence theory (Navon, 1977), which states that stimuli-levels are processed sequentially: global features become available before local features.
On Coherence in Written Discourse

This paper is an inquiry into interaction in written discourse. It considers the signals and strategies the writer may use for guiding the reader towards the intended interpretation of a text and reports the findings of an analysis of coherence strategies in a corpus of UNESCO resolutions, a specimen of the colony text-type used in institutional discourse in intercultural settings.
3D computer vision measurement systems

This paper introduces categories of 3D measurement systems which are 3D laser scanning system and multi-view stereo vision system. The principle, classification, advantages and disadvantages, key research points and application are all analyzed. The history of foreign and native lunar rovers is reviewed. This paper also summarizes the development state of vision system on rovers. Based on Chinese "the goddess of the moon" projection carried out progressively, the machine vision systems of domestic lunar rover and satellite are described. Finally, the overall trend of 3D computer vision measurement systems is presented.
Esp Research Trends in Asian Context

Due to the influence of global and regional economic changes, English for Specific Purposes (ESP) plays a more vital role in English language studies worldwide, including in Asian context. A look at any issues relat-ing to Asian ESP will shed light to the needs of English in this content. This present study therefore sur-veyed recent trends of ESP research in this context, with the purpose of the study which aimed to explore recent trends in Asian ESP research from 2005 to 2013. The Asian ESP Journal which has been a flagship in this area was chosen for the content analysis in this study. The results revealed that the research trends in ESP were primarily based on qualitative research method. Future research study may explore International ESP to compare the results of the study with this one. Keywords: ESP, trends in research, Asian context
Online Social Networks: Concepts for Data Collection and Analysis

This chapter presents on overview of social networks at a variety of scales that are accessible online. It begins with basic definitions of network analysis terms such as one-mode and multiplex networks. It continues by elaborating on sources of network data online. It shows a simple example of how to download a one-degree network from Twitter. It briefly mentions changes in data access through APIs and ethics. The penultimate section reviews approaches to analyzing networks such as by node, by cluster and for the whole network. The uploaded paper is the uncorrected proofs. Please consult the original text for proper pagination and corrected quotes.
Stateless Automatic IPv4 over IPv6 Encapsulation / Decapsulation Technology: Specification

This document specifies Stateless Automatic IPv4 over IPv6 Encapsulation / Decapsulation Technology (SA46T) base specification. SA46T makes backbone network to IPv6 only. And also, SA46T can stack many IPv4 networks, i.e. the networks using same IPv4 (private) addresses, without interdependence.
An Econometric Analysis of Crime Determinants in Nigeria

This paper attempts to investigate the impact of some macro-economic variables such as absolute poverty, unemployment rate, inflation rate, lending interest rate and population growth rate on crime level in Nigeria. The study uses annual time series data of the six listed variables from 1970–2015. The unit root and stationarity properties of the series are examined using Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) unit root test. Johansen cointegration, FMOLS, error correction model as well as Granger causality test based on Toda-Yamamoto procedure are employed to find the long-term relationship, impact of study variables on crime, the long-run and short-run dynamics, speed of adjustment as well as causality among study variables. The results shows that all variables are integrated of order one and hence cointegrated. The study finds population growth, unemployment, poverty and inflation as having positive and significant impact on crime level in Nigeria. The Error Correction Model identified a sizable speed of adjustment by 93.20% for disequilibrium correction annually for attaining long-run equilibrium steady state position. The Granger causality test results revealed that crime is Granger caused by population growth, absolute poverty, unemployment, inflation and lending interest rate in Nigeria. The study provides some policy recommendations.
Momentum Crashes and Variations to Market Liquidity

We document that the variation in market liquidity is an important determinant of momentum crashes that is independent of other known explanations surfaced on this topic. This relationship is driven by the asymmetric large return sensitivity of short-leg of momentum portfolio to changes in market liquidity that flares the tail risk of momentum strategy in panic states. This identification explains the forecasting ability of known predictors of tail risk of momentum strategy such that the contemporaneous increase in market liquidity predominantly sums up the trademark negative relationship between predictors and future momentum returns. Our results are robust using a different momentum portfolio and alternative measures of market liquidity that make a substantial part of the common source of variation in aggregate liquidity.
Multi-Scale Convolutional Network for Person Re-identification

In the last several years, methods with learning procedure held the state-of-the-art results for person re-identification (re-id) problem, especially the metric learning algorithm. Recently, with the success of deep learning methods on many computer vision tasks, researchers started to put their focuses on learning high-performance features. In this paper, we propose a method by fusing features learned from a multi-scale convolutional neural network and the traditional hand-crafted features, which improves the performance significantly. The Shinpuhkan2014dataset has been chosen as the training set, and we evaluate the performances of the proposed method on VIPeR, PRID and i-LIDS. Experiments show that our method outperforms the existing methods and even approaches the performances of the methods which have a training step on the testing sets.
Stakes, Stakeholders, and Urban Governance: A Theoretical Framework for the Chinese City

A taxonomy of stakes and stakeholders in urban governance is presented in this paper. In addition to property interests, business interests, political interests and the state, special attention is paid to ordinary people’s general interests in the city. It depends on a person’s indigeneity, the degree of his being an indigenous person or insider to the city. General interest is usually not revealed because urban governance is more distant from the person than his daily work and life, but its revelation could be ignited in an explosive way by particular events on some occasions. This is called the flash preference problem, which has important implications to urban governance. Both social control and civil society can be regarded as possible solutions to the problem. Built on the taxonomy of stakes and stakeholders, a theoretical framework for urban governance in China includes growing property interests and business interests that have formed growth coalition with local government. Social control remains important but difficult because street office and residents committee are expected to strengthen social control while they are gradually being marginalized in neighborhood governance of gated communities. The dilemma of social control in the Chinese city hints at the ultimate importance of democracy and civil society to urban governance.
Structural Breaks in Volatility Transmission from Developed Markets to Major Asian Emerging Markets

The study investigates the volatility transmission from developed markets (the United States [US], the United Kingdom [UK] and Japan) to the major Asian emerging markets (India, China, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia) during a period from 1996 to 2015. We make use of the opening, high, low and closing prices to estimate unbiased extreme value volatility estimator and implement heterogeneous autoregressive distributed lag (HAR-DL) framework to study the spillover effects. Based on time-varying spillover analysis, we observe sudden changes in the spillover effect during the periods of major crises. Initially, we find evidence of contagion during the period of global financial crisis of 2007–2009. However, after accounting for conditional heteroscedasticity, we observe a decline in the strength of volatility transmission from developed markets to the Asian emerging markets. Moreover, the initial evidence of contagion is not detectable anymore. We also test the economic significance of the findings by implementing three trading strategies based on risk averse and risk-taking investors that make use of the forecasted variance based on HAR-DL specification. Our findings indicate that substantial average annualised gains in returns can be earned based on the lagged volatility components of the USA and the UK. JEL Classification: C32, C58, G01, G15
A brief analysis of comparative sentences in modern Chinese

In modern Chinese,comparative sentences are sentences whose predicates contain comparative words or comparative patterns.The sentence structure are formed by comparative subject、comparative objective、comparative word、comparative point and comparative result.According to their semantics,they include equal comparative sentence,less comparative sentence and limited comparative sentence,all of which have their own bright characteristics of syntax and semantics.
High-resolution mapping of aboveground biomass for forest carbon monitoring system in the Tri-State region of Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware, USA

Accurate estimation of forest aboveground biomass at high-resolution continues to remain a challenge and long-term goal for carbon monitoring and accounting systems. Here, we present an exhaustive evaluation and validation of a robust, replicable and scalable framework that maps forest aboveground biomass over large areas at fine-resolution by linking airborne lidar and field data with machine learning algorithms. We developed this framework over multiple phases of bottom-up monitoring efforts within NASA’s Carbon Monitoring Program. Lidar data were collected by different local and federal agencies and provided a wall-to-wall coverage of three states in the USA (Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware with a total area of 157 865 km2). We generated a set of standardized forestry metrics from lidar-derived imagery (i.e. canopy height model, CHM) to minimize inconsistency of data quality. We then estimated plot-scale biomass from field data that had the closet acquisition time to lidar data, and linked to lidar metrics using Random Forest models at four USDA Forest Service ecological regions. Additionally, we examined pixel-scale errors using independent field plot measurements across these ecoregions. Collectively, we estimate a total of ∼680 Tg C in aboveground biomass over the Tri-State region (13 DE, 103 MD, 564 PA) circa 2011. A comparison with existing products at pixel-, county-, and state-scale highlighted the contribution of trees over ‘non-forested’ areas, including urban trees and small patches of trees, an important biomass component largely omitted by previous studies due to insufficient spatial resolution. Our results indicated that integrating field data and low point density (∼1 pt m−2) airborne lidar can generate large-scale aboveground biomass products at an accuracy close to mainstream lidar forestry applications (R2 = 0.46–0.54, RMSE = 51.4–54.7 Mg ha−1; and R2 = 0.33–0.61, RMSE = 65.3–100.9 Mg ha−1; independent validation). Local, high-resolution lidar-derived biomass maps such as products from this study, provide a valuable bottom-up reference to improve the analysis and interpretation of large-scale mapping efforts and future development of a national carbon monitoring system.