Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Wavelet-based stereo images reconstruction using depth images

It is believed by many that three-dimensional (3D) television will be the next logical development toward a more natural and vivid home entertaiment experience. While classical 3D approach requires the transmission of two video streams, one for each view, 3D TV systems based on depth image rendering (DIBR) require a single stream of monoscopic images and a second stream of associated images usually termed depth images or depth maps, that contain per-pixel depth information. Depth map is a two-dimensional function that contains information about distance from camera to a certain point of the object as a function of the image coordinates. By using this depth information and the original image it is possible to reconstruct a virtual image of a nearby viewpoint by projecting the pixels of available image to their locations in 3D space and finding their position in the desired view plane. One of the most significant advantages of the DIBR is that depth maps can be coded more efficiently than two streams corresponding to left and right view of the scene, thereby reducing the bandwidth required for transmission, which makes it possible to reuse existing transmission channels for the transmission of 3D TV. This technique can also be applied for other 3D technologies such as multimedia systems. In this paper we propose an advanced wavelet domain scheme for the reconstruction of stereoscopic images, which solves some of the shortcommings of the existing methods discussed above. We perform the wavelet transform of both the luminance and depth images in order to obtain significant geometric features, which enable more sensible reconstruction of the virtual view. Motion estimation employed in our approach uses Markov random field smoothness prior for regularization of the estimated motion field. The evaluation of the proposed reconstruction method is done on two video sequences which are typically used for comparison of stereo reconstruction algorithms. The results demonstrate advantages of the proposed approach with respect to the state-of-the-art methods, in terms of both objective and subjective performance measures.
Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy investigation of chlorinated rubber‐based coatings containing polyaniline as anticorrosion agent

Corrosion protection of mild steel by a newly developed chlorinated rubber (CR)‐based coating system containing the inherently conductive polymer polyaniline (PAni) as an anticorrosion agent was studied. The synthesis of PAni and preparation of CR‐based paint containing this polymer are described herein. The corrosion behavior of mild steel samples coated with a CR resin, CR/PAni‐EB (emeraldine base), CR/PAni‐ES (emeraldine salt), and CR/DBSA‐doped PAni were investigated in 3.5% NaCl solution. For this purpose, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy and corrosion potential versus time measurements were utilized. It was found that the addition of the two forms of PAni, doped and undoped, to the CR resin increased its corrosion protection efficiency.
1 Coordination of joint search in distributed innovation processes : Lessons from the effects of initial code release in Open Source Software development

This paper casts light on the role of initial code release for providing coordination of joint search processes, i.e., search processes that involve several agents who search together. We develop hypotheses about the role of initial code release for providing coordination, and for whether development projects remain active. We test these hypotheses on a dataset of 5703 open source software projects registered on SourceForge during a two-year period. We find that initial code release is indeed associated with improved coordination, and a higher chance that software development projects will actually release further code subsequently. We contribute to theory on coordination in joint search, common in distributed innovation settings. Acknowledgements: We thank Carliss Baldwin, Siobhan O'Mahony, Kannan Srikanth, Keld Laursen, Toke Reichstein, Marcel Bogers, Volker Mahnke, Giulia Trombini, Lorenzo Zirulia, Matteo Ploner, and all the participants to the seminars at University of Lugano, University of Vienna, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, University of Milan, ETH Zurich, University of Jena and Max Plank Institute, to the conferences “Organizing for Internal and External Knowledge Creation and Innovation: The Role of Resources” (Copenhagen, October 2009), DRUID 2012, Academy of Management 2010 and 2013, and at the Elisir network (Electronic List in Innovation Studies In Rome). Francesco Rullani gratefully acknowledges the support by the program PRIN 2010-2011 CUP: B81J12002690008. This Working Paper is published under the auspices of the Department of Management at Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia. Opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and not those of the Department or the University. The Working Paper series is designed to divulge preliminary or incomplete work, circulated to favour discussion and comments. Citation of this paper should consider its provisional nature.
Conceptualizing Resources and Claims in Consensual Economic Exchanges

The Core Ontology for Financial Reporting Information Systems (COFRIS) is grounded on Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO). In this paper, we build on COFRIS and attempt to detail the concepts of Economic Resources and Claims found in accounting frameworks, and to extract their features which are common to accounting and reporting standards. Economic Resources (Claims) are conceptualized as extensions of Complex Social and Legal Relators of UFO, within the consensual transaction-centric model. The application of this conceptualization and COFRIS in general aims to assist with standard-setting and the development of information systems, to facilitate understandability and reuse. The conceptualization is illustrated by examples presented in an ontology-inspired Event Table and is used to analyze the revised IASB® Conceptual Framework for Financial Reporting.
Gastrointestinal and Hepatic Tissue Fatty Acid Composition and Interleukin-6 Concentration in Broiler Chickens: Effect of Maternal Dietary n-3 Fatty Acids

Early exposure to nutrients and fetal programming has gained increased attention because of its association with chick quality and viability. In chickens, the 21-d incubational period contributes to over 35% of a bird’s life span. During this period, the egg provides polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) to the chick embryo. We hypothesized that early exposure of n-3 and n-6 PUFA through egg lipids can alter tissue fatty acid (FA) composition and interleukin-6 (IL-6) production in the progeny chickens during growth. The objectives of the study were to determine: 1) the extent to which maternal (yolk) n-3 or n-6 FA are retained in the duodenum, jejunum, ileum, and liver tissue of the chicken, and, 2) the effect of maternal FA composition on IL-6 concentrations in serum and hepatic tissue in broiler chickens when fed a diet lacking in long chain ( > 20-C) n-3 and n-6 FA during growth. Fertile eggs obtained from Lohman-Brown layer hens (n = 75) fed corn-soy diets supplemented with 3.5% yellow grease, sunflower oil or fish oil were incubated. These fat supplements were selected as sources of saturated, n-6 or n-3 FA. Chicks were raised up to d 14 on a commercial diet lacking long-chain n-6 and n-3 FA. Chick tissues (duodenum, jejunum, ileum, liver, and blood) were collected on Day 1, 7, and 14 and were subjected to FA and IL-6 analysis. The egg yolk arachidonic (20:4 n-6) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA, 22:6 n-3) content was 3.1, 3.6, 1.0 and 1.6, 1.0, and 6.1 for eggs from hens fed yellow grease, sunflower or fish oil diets (P < 0.001). The DHA content in duodenum was highest up to d 14 of growth in chicks from fish oil-fed hens (P < 0.001). The long-chain n-6 to n-3 ratio was lowest in the duodenum, jejunum, ileum, and liver in chicks hatched from fish oil-fed hens (P < 0.001) up to d 14 post-hatch. A significant maternal diet by age interaction was observed for liver and serum IL-6 concentrations (P < 0.001). On the day of hatch, chicks from fish oil-fed hens had the lowest liver and serum IL-6 concentrations, whereas at d 14, chicks from fish oil-fed hens had higher liver and serum IL-6 concentrations than chicks from sunflower oil-fed hens (P < 0.05). In conclusion, our results indicate that inflammatory pathways and eicosanoid metabolism of broiler chicks can be altered by the maternal dietary ratio of long-chain n-6: n-3 FA.
Labor Market Signaling and Self-Confidence: Wage Compression and the Gender Pay Gap

I extend Spence’s signaling model by assuming that some workers are overconfident—they underestimate their marginal cost of acquiring education—and some are underconfident. Firms cannot observe workers’ productive abilities and beliefs but know the fractions of high-ability, overconfident, and underconfident workers. I find that biased beliefs lower the wage spread and compress the wages of unbiased workers. I show that gender differences in self-confidence can contribute to the gender pay gap. If education raises productivity, men are overconfident, and women underconfident, then women will, on average, earn less than men. Finally, I show that biased beliefs can improve welfare.
Effects of B-Site Donor and Acceptor Doping in Pb-Free (Bi0.5Na0.5)TiO3 Ceramics

(PZT)-based ceramics have been used extensively in various dielectric, piezoelectric, and ferroelectric applications because of their superior properties and versatility (Jaffe et al., 1971). The lead (Pb) content of PZT materials, however, poses serious problems for human health and the environment that can no longer be overlooked. It is inevitable that PZT will be replaced with Pb-free materials. PZT-based ceramics are still in use only because there are no materials that exhibit properties comparable to those of PZT. The scientific community has intensively searched for and studied Pb-free piezoelectric materials. Among the few Pb-free materials available, solid solutions based on (Bi
Applied to Legal Context yths and legends : The reality of rape offences reported to a UK olice force enevieve

Rape myths affect many aspects of the investigative and criminal justice systems. One such myth, the ‘real rape’ myth, states that most rapes involve a stranger using a weapon attacking a woman violently at night in an isolated, outdoor area, and that women sustain serious injuries from these attacks. The present study examined how often actual offences reported to a central UK police force over a two year period matched the ‘real rape’ myth. Out of 400 cases of rape reported, not a single incident was found with all the characteristics of the ‘real rape’ myth. The few stranger rapes that occurred had a strong link to night-time economy activities, such as the victim and offender both having visited pubs, bars, and clubs. By contrast, the majority of reported rape offences (280 cases, 70.7%) were committed by people known to the victim (e.g., domestic and acquaintance rapes), occurred inside a residence, with most victims sustaining no physical injuries from the attack. The benefits of these naturalistic findings from the field for educating people about the inaccuracy of rape myths are discussed. © 2015 Colegio Oficial de Psicólogos de Madrid. Published by Elsevier España, S.L. U. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Mitos y leyendas: la realidad de los delitos de violación denunciados a la policía británica
Realistic Hair Simulator for Skin lesion Images Using Conditional Generative Adversarial Network

Automated skin lesion analysis is one of the trending fields that has gained attention among the dermatologists and healthcare practitioners. Skin lesion restoration is an essential preprocessing step for lesion enhancements for accurate automated analysis and diagnosis. Digital hair removal is a non-invasive method for image enhancement by solving the hair-occlusion artefact in previously captured images. Several hair removal methods were proposed for skin delineation and removal. However, manual annotation is one of the main challenges that hinder the validation of these proposed methods on a large number of images or using benchmarking datasets for comparison purposes. In the presented work, we propose a realistic hair simulator based on context-aware image synthesis using image-to-image translation techniques via conditional adversarial generative networks for generation of different hair occlusions in skin images, along with the ground-truth mask for hair location. Besides, we explored using three loss functions including L1-norm, L2-norm and structural similarity index (SSIM) to maximise the synthesis quality. For quantitatively evaluate the realism of image synthesis, the t-SNE feature mapping and Bland-Altman test are employed as objective metrics. Experimental results show the superior performance of our proposed method compared to previous methods for hair synthesis with plausible colours and preserving the integrity of the lesion texture.
VLSI IMPLEMENTATION OF L 2 MEMORY DESIGN FOR 3-D INTEGRATION

Recently, three-dimensional integration technology has allowed researchers and designers to explore novel architectures for computing systems. Due to the memory-intensive nature of signal processing systems, DSPs can greatly benefit from 3D memory integration technology realized by vertically stacking high-density memory below processing cores. In this paper, we analyze the energy and performance impacts of 3D memory integration in DSP systems by exploring a wide variety of memory configurations the technology enables. Large required size, and tolerance to latency and variations in memory access time make L2 memory a suitable option for 3-D integration. In this paper, we present a synthesizable 3-D-stackable L2 memory IP component, which can be attached to a cluster-based multicore platform through its network-on-chip interfaces offering highbandwidth memory access with low average latency. Our design implements a scalable 3-D-nonuniform memory access (NUMA) architecture based on low latency logarithmic interconnects, which allows stacking of multiple identical memory dies (MDs), supports multiple outstanding transactions, and achieves high clock frequencies due to its highly pipelined nature.
Gender stereotypes about mathematics in elementary-school children . In

Stereotypes are mental images of qualities characterizing members of a social group without regard to individual variation. Here we focus on the development of stereotypes in children. We specifically examine the pervasive American stereotype that boys, more than girls, are identified with mathematics. In this entry, the term “math–gender stereotype” is used to indicate the belief that math is predominantly a male domain. We also distinguish stereotypes from self-concepts. These terms are often confused in the learning sciences, but they can be usefully differentiated in ways that allow for new empirical progress. Self-concepts concern the self (e.g., I am a math person) whereas stereotypes refer to a social group (e.g., boys go with math). A central empirical question is how cultural stereotypes influence children’s developing self-concepts. This entry emphasizes the new discoveries in developmental and social psychology concerning the nature and development of math– gender stereotypes in children. There has been progress in theory, measurement, and experimental data. This entry summarizes recent progress with respect to four interrelated topics: (a) findings concerning gender gaps in mathematics, (b) theories suggesting that cultural math–gender stereotypes contribute to such gaps, (c) measurement techniques assessing children’s beliefs about math–gender stereotypes, and (d) empirical results showing when and how cultural math–gender stereotypes may influence children’s developing math self-concepts. Overview
Chemistry and Use of Artificial Intense Sweeteners

Sweeteners are additives which provide the basic taste of sweetness to a food product. Traditionally sugars are used as sweeteners in food. In addition to sweet taste they provide energy of 4 kcal/g. However, rising obesity rates suggest avoiding over consumption of calories. The growing consumer interest in health and its relationship with diet has led to a considerable rise in the demand for low calorie fat products (Martínez-Cervera et al., 2012). The substances used to replace sugar are called alternative sweeteners or sugar substitute. These alternative sweeteners could either be from a natural source or artificially derived by chemical synthesis. These artificial sweeteners are chemically very different from the sucrose or other nutritive sweeteners that they are replacing in a food system. Therefore, it very is important to understand their physicochemical properties, taste characteristics and stability for formulation, processing and storage of food products and beverages in which these sweeteners are used (Nelson, 2000). International Journal of Current Microbiology and Applied Sciences ISSN: 2319-7706 Volume 6 Number 6 (2017) pp. 1283-1296 Journal homepage: http://www.ijcmas. com
Tax evasion and financial repression: a reconsideration using endogenous growth models

Using two dynamic monetary general equilibrium models characterized by endogenous growth, financial repression and endogenously determined tax evasion, we analyze whether financial repression can be explained by tax evasion. When calibrated to four Southern European economies, we show that higher degrees of tax evasion within a country, resulting from a higher level of corruption and a lower penalty rate, yields higher degrees of financial repression as a social optimum. However, a higher degree of tax evasion, due to a lower tax rate, reduces the severity of the financial restriction. In addition, we find the results to be robust across growth models with or without productive public expenditures. The only difference being that the policy parameters in the former case have higher optimal values.
Novel Microgels Fabricated On Microfluidic Devices

Microgels are micrometer sized particles consisting of a polymer network that show potential for the delivery of both hydrophilic and hydrophobic drugs. Microfluidic devices provide an excellent format for the generation of monodispersed droplets due to the precise manipulation of fluids and flow rates within the microchannels. Microfluidic droplet generation chips were therefore designed using T<junction and flow focusing geometries in glass. For microgel synthesis, monomers, crosslinker and initiator were added to the dispersed phase and water was used as the continuous phase. Controlled formation of monodisperse droplets was achieved with both geometries and droplets were collected off<chip for photopolymerisation. Three types of microgel were formed using this setup: poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate, poly(propylene glycol) diacrylate, and tetrahydropyran acrylate < ethylene glycol dime thacrylate (THPA<EGDMA) microgels. THPA is a novel material for microgels that can be turned from hydrophobic to amphiphilic by hydrolysation. THPA<EGDMA microgels in particular demonstrated a strong response to pH changes due to the build<up of electrosta tic force under high pH, showing potential for the encapsulation and release of drugs.
Actionable Knowledge for Environmental Decision Making: Broadening the Usability of Climate Science

Despite the rapid evolution and growing complexity in models of science-society interaction, the rate and breadth of use of scientific knowledge in environmental decision making, especially related to climate variability and change, remain below expectations. This suggests a persistent gap between production and use that, to date, efforts to rethink and restructure science production have not been able to surmount. We review different models of science-policy interfaces to understand how they have influenced the organization of knowledge production and application. We then explore how new approaches to the creation of knowledge have emerged, involving both growing integration across disciplines and greater interaction with users. Finally, we review climate information use in the United States and United Kingdom to explore how the structure of knowledge production and the characteristics of users and their decision environments expose the challenges of broadening usable climate science.
THE INITIATION OF NORTHERN HEMISPHERE GLACIATION

For well over a century, scientists have speculated that variations in the atmospheric concentration of radiatively important trace gases, such as carbon dioxide, could control the Earth’s climate (e.g. Arrhenius 1896). Recent observations of significant glacial-interglacial variation in atmospheric CO2 in ice cores put this idea on a firm observational as well as theoretical footing (e.g. Barnola et al 1987). In this century, as atmospheric CO2 levels creep steadily upwards in response to the burning of fossil fuels and forests, the specter of manmade global climate change looms beforc us (IPCC 1990)--a possibility that has heightened interest in the natural variability of climate in the past. In particular, the ~ 3°C warming predicted for the next century has stimulated interest in past warm climates, such as the Middle Pliocene around 3.0 million years (Ma) ago, an interval that has often been invoked as a "greenhouse" world (Budyko et al 1985). In this paper, the climate transition from the warm mid-Pliocene (around 3.2 Ma) to the onset of northern hemisphere ice ages around 2.4 Ma is examined. Evidence for the initiation of significant northern hemisphere glaciation is examined as well as how this event affected climate around the globe. While the cause of individual glacial-interglacial oscillations is tied to Milankovitch variations in the Earth’s orbit around the sun (e.g. Imbrie et al 1992), these insolation changes cannot account for the longterm cooling trend which culminated in northern hemisphere glaciation. In the final section of this paper, mechanisms of long-term climate change
Gr upSM Obstructive Sleep Apnea and Diabetes

Obstructive sleep apnea is a spectrum of sleep disorders, which is caused by increased airway resistance during sleep, or structural abnormality of the upper airway. It is closely linked to obesity and metabolic syndrome, and may be linked to non-insulin dependent diabetes. Periods of intermittent nocturnal hypoxia may cause increased insulin resistance and glucose intolerance. The presence of diabetic neuropathy may also predispose individuals to obstructive sleep apnea through incomplete paralysis of the respiratory muscles. Though continuous positive airway pressure has demonstrated to aid in reducing the risk of obstructive sleep apnea that may lead to non-insulin dependent diabetes , the reduction of obesity is an optimal way to combat the impact of both these diseases affecting an individual’s quality of life.