Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prefrontal Modulation of Visual Processing and Sustained Attention in Aging , a Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation – Electroencephalogram Coregistration Approach

■ The ability to sustain attention is integral to healthy cognition in aging. The right PFC (rPFC) is critical for maintaining high levels of attentional focus. Whether plasticity of this region can be harnessed to support sustained attention in older adults is unknown. We used transcranial direct current stimulation to increase cortical excitability of the rPFC, while monitoring behavioral and electrophysiological markers of sustained attention in older adults with suboptimal sustained attention capacity. During rPFC transcranial direct current stimulation, fewer lapses of attention occurred and electroencephalography signals of frontal engagement and early visual attention were enhanced. To further verify these results, we repeated the experiment in an independent cohort of cognitively typical older adults using a different sustained attention paradigm. Again, prefrontal stimulation was associated with better sustained attention. These experiments suggest the rPFC can be manipulated in later years to increase top–down modulation over early sensory processing and improve sustained attention performance. This holds valuable information for the development of neurorehabilitation protocols to ameliorate age-related deficits in this capacity. ■
Comparing Availability in Controlled Query Evaluation Using Unordered Query Evaluation for Known Potential Secrets

Controlled Query Evaluation (CQE) is an inference control mechanism used to dynamically preserve confidentiality in secure information systems. In this note we introduce the notion of unordered query evaluation as a vehicle for comparing availability of various CQE methods, a recurring theme in the CQE literature. Moreover, we show that the various procedural approaches introduced thus far in the literature for imposing the declarative requirements of CQE lead to maximally available mechanisms. Finally, we characterize maximally available unordered query evaluation for various enforcement methods for known potential secrets as the unordered query evaluation resulting from CQE mechanisms for some suitably chosen ordering of the queries.
Working Paper Series Currency Depreciation and Korean Stock Market Performance during the Asian Financial Crisis

Structural shifts characterize the volatility of the Korean stock and foreign exchange markets during the 1997 Asian financial crisis. This paper employs an unrestricted bivariate GARCH-M model of stock market returns to investigate empirically the effects of daily currency depreciation on Korean stock market returns. The evidence shows that currency depreciation significantly affects stock market performance through three distinct channels: exchange rate depreciation adversely affects stock market returns, higher exchange rate depreciation volatility induces higher stock market returns, and exchange rate depreciation volatility raises stock market return volatility. The evidence suggests that small open stock markets are vulnerable to exchange rate movements. Currency Depreciation and Korean Stock Market Performance during the Asian Financial Crisis
Using the Factor Separation Method for land-use landcover change impacts on weather and climate process with the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System

The use of the Factor Separation Method (FacSep) has been applied effectively in the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS) to assess the relative contribution of different factors on weather and climate processes. In this chapter we will discuss model sensitivities to historical and future changes in land use land cover, biophysical and radiative effects of increased CO2 concentration and land cover representation assessed using the FacSep in weather and regional climate simulations for various regions around the world. This method emphasizes the importance of land cover changes and CO2 biological effects when addressing regional-scale future climate change impacts.
APPROXIMATION TECHNIQUES FOR EXECUTION OF AGGREGATE QUERIES ON BIG DATA

: Many enterprises are facing the Big Data challenge, wherein, huge volumes of data are generated by the enterprises at high velocity. This Big Data can influence the future directions for the enterprise. Hence, it is important to effectively and efficiently perform knowledge mining on Big Data. Most of the Big Data is generated in unstructured format, and performing structuring becomes extremely difficult due to high velocity of data generation. Due to such scenario, most of the analytical queries have to be executed over unstructured data. Knowledge mining involves execution of analytical queries. Most of the analytical queries involve aggregate operations such as-sum, variance etc. Executing analytical queries on Big Data can lead to explosion in query execution time due to huge data volume and unstructured data format. In many situations, large number of analytical queries needs to be executed for effective knowledge mining, and this execution exercise can become infeasible. The obvious and one of the most attractive solutions to overcome this bottleneck is to perform approximate query processing, wherein, approximate answers to the aggregate operations are provided through sampling in limited execution time. But, approximate query processing on Big Data has significant challenges. Since, the data is stored in unstructured format, random access to data might be difficult due to possible data dependency between the tuples stored inside the same data block, and due to the absence of efficient random access mechanisms such as-indexes. Sampling schemes, in many cases also require the total number of tuples present in the data repository, which is again difficult to calculate due to unstructured flavor of stored data. Until now, this problem has not been effectively addressed in the literature. In this work, a new sampling scheme is proposed for approximate aggregate query execution on Big Data by using the Map Reduce model, which overcomes all the above mentioned bottlenecks. A randomization framework is proposed, which provides the facility to perform random data access. A new estimation scheme for estimating the number of tuples present in the data repository with good estimation accuracy is proposed. Sampling scheme based on Hoeffding in-equality theorem is proposed for approximate execution of aggregate operations. The proposed sampling scheme is empirically evaluated over real world Big Data set. The proposed sampling schemes exhibits excellent effectiveness in-terms of providing approximate answers to aggregate operations with good accuracy, and demonstrates appreciable execution efficiency.
Military communication using orbital angular momentum based radio (MORAMBA)

The major weakness of any wireless communication system is the ease of intercepting or jamming radio signals, which increases the risk of using or altering radio signals by unauthorized persons or prevents the usability of a communication system. In this work, we propose to study the applicability of a novel radio transmission technique that exploits orbital angular momentum (OAM) state of radio beam to securely transmit information in military systems. In particular, we will develop methods to generate, receive, detect, and possibly intercept the OAM-based radio transmission. Research results can be used to design critical communication systems, for example, emergency services or civil protection, such that they will not be susceptible to electronic attacks or cyber-attacks. In Linturi et al. report, OAM-based transmission has recently been recognized as one of the 50 most important future technologies for Finland.
Rural Non-Farm Engagement and Agriculture Commercialization in Ghana : Complements or Competitors ? working paper 2018-07 November 2018

We used an endogenous switching probit and a generalized structural equation model (GSEM) to assess the effect of non-farm participation on householders’ decisions to sell and on the level of commercialization of agricultural goods in Ghana. For this study, we used the Ghana Living Standards Survey for the years 2012-2013 and found that non-farm participation consistently increased both the probability of selling crops and quantities sold. We concluded that non-farm engagement by farmers boosts market participation and commercialization in Ghana, implying that non-farm engagement and agricultural commercialization are complementary. Developing the agricultural sector requires the government to create the conditions necessary to stimulate farmers’ participation in nonfarm activities. JEL: D13; 012; Q13
Athens Institute for Education and Research ATINER ATINER ' s Conference Paper Series TOU 2018-2580

Morocco situated in the north western Africa facing Europe on the Mediterranean and on the other side open to the Atlantic ocean benefiting from a favourable geographical location as Africa‟s gate on Europe. The country has four inscribed biosphere reserves, and nine UNESCO inscribed world heritage sites. The performance of tourism in the country kept a steady growth rate in the last decade despite being slightly affected by the 2008 world economic crisis just to recover later by taking advantage of the unstable political situation in competing neighbour countries, after the so-called „Arab Spring‟. This improvement in the performance of the Moroccan tourism sector is also among the planned objectives of the two major tourism management plans in modern Morocco (Vision 2010 and Vision 2020). Evidently, the second strategic plan (2010) came as a continuation of the first one but with wider plans and bigger ambition. However, these management plans were not all „la vie en rose‟. The objectives of both programs were not completely achieved (2020 vision is still two years away from completing its execution but various gaps can be found in the realised points). A descriptive study was conducted to evaluate the performance of the tourism marketing practices within Moroccan public policy management. The tourism marketing strategy of both management programs was critically reviewed to identify both their strengths and weaknesses. The findings of this study show that public policy concerning tourism sector drove the country in the right development path but still, the chosen marketing strategies were not highly efficient, given the considerable various Moroccan tourism potential. Nevertheless, analysis also showed that public tourism management policy was initially designed with some inadequate approaches concerning the development of the sector. It has been suggested that the government should concentrate more on a wider marketing approach that takes into consideration the valorisation of the sustainable touristic product of the country and more importantly empowering the human potential to be centric in parallel with the touristic product.
CLIPS at TRECVID : Shot Boundary Detection and Feature Detection

This paper presents the systems used by CLIPS-IMAG to perform the Shot Boundary Detection (SBD) task and the Feature Extraction (FE) task of the TRECvid workshop. Results obtained for the 2003 evaluation are presented. The CLIPS SBD system based on image difference with motion compensation and direct dissolve detection was second among 14 systems. This system gives control of the silence to noise ratio over a wide range of values and for an equal value of noise and silence (or recall and precision), the value is 12 % for all types of transitions. Detection of person X from speaker recognition alone was deceiving due to the small number of shots containing person X in the overall test collection (about 1/700) and the even small number in which person X was actually speaking (about 1/6000). Detection of person X from speech transcription performed much better but was still lower than other systems using also the image track for the detection.
Isolation , Characterization and Partial Purification of Keratinase from Keratinolytic Bacteria Article Information

Background: Enzymes are proteins that catalyze the chemical reactions, such as biosynthetic and derivative, that occurring in living cells. In enzymatic reactions, the molecules at the beginning of process are called substrates and they are converted in to different molecules, called the product. Almost all processes in a biological cell need enzyme for catalytic reactions. The use of purified enzymes for generating a useful product or service constitutes enzyme technology. Enzymes have a wide variety of applications in industry, medicine research etc. Some out of this one industrially important enzyme is keratinase. It is an extracellular and proteolytic enzyme.
Review: algorithmic trading

Automated trading systems play an increasingly important role in equity markets. The challenge of trading large order volumes and baskets is often met today with automated trading algorithms. An investment decision generally leads to orders with specifications such as security, size, and urgency but also specifications (e.g., expected profit), and constraints (e.g., dollar neutrality) may be given. The trader has to choose a trading strategy ensuring best execution under given marginal constraints. This review provides an overview of how such trading algorithms work. The ideas behind some standard strategies are presented, as well as approaches to enhance them. For developing automated trading strategies for stock markets, a deep understanding in market microstructure is necessary, so we review this topic as well. We have a look on the issue how market quality is affected by market designs of trading platforms and fragmentation of the market. Trading costs are the main attribute of market quality. Trading strategies are implemented to optimize trading costs and execution risk by taking market microstructure aspects into account. Empirical analyses of trading volume and order book characteristics help to adjust the trading strategies.
COMPRESSED TRANSMISSION OF DEPTH MAPS IN 3D STREAM SERVICES FOR ROBOTICS & SURVEILLANCE

Building high end processing hardware for depth mapping in mobile robotics is a major drawback. The problem could be addressed by processing the scene through one end and then streaming it to the other robotic mobile platforms or actuators to perform physical operations; thereby rendering global depth map for all the arbitrary viewpoints of the robots. In this study, we present the algorithm for compressed transmission of depth maps over a network and provide a synthetic viewpoint with low geometric distortions.
Methods for Inference from Respondent-Driven Sampling Data

Respondent-driven sampling is a commonly used method for sampling from hard-to-reach human populations connected by an underlying social network of relations. Beginning with a convenience sample, participants pass coupons to invite their contacts to join the sample. Although the method is often effective at attaining large and varied samples, its reliance on convenience samples, social network contacts, and participant decisions makes it subject to a large number of statistical concerns. This article reviews inferential methods available for data collected by respondent-driven sampling.
Determination of mechanical properties of the Kathmandu World Heritage brick masonry buildings

One of the typical old brick masonry buildings and its surrounding area of the Patan Durbar Square area, one of the seven monument zones of the Kathmandu World Heritage site were selected to determine the mechanical material properties. Three testing methods elastic wave tomography at existing walls of the buildings, shear and compression loadings on the wallets made from bricks collected from old buildings, and micro-tremor measurements of the ground and ambient vibration measurements of the building were carried out. The first two tests were to find the properties of brick elements and walls such as, density, modulus of elasticity, Poisson’s ratio, shear modulus, shear wave velocity etc. and to verify the results each others. The third test was to determine the dynamic properties of the building and the surrounding ground such as natural frequencies of the building vibration, damping and fundamental frequency of the ground.
An empirical study of text classification using Latent Dirichlet Allocation

The most popular methodology proposed for document is to present each document as a weight vector of real numbers, each of which is a tf-idf weight [5] of each words in the document. This weight is based on the frequency of the word in a document, and tend to give a measure which shows the power of the word to present the document in a corpus. Language models are also used to represent documents, such as bigram [4], instead of unigram which is assumed in tf-idf method. Moreover, some more sophisticated ways for document modeling are emerging these years, such as laten dirichlet allocation (LDA). The central idea in LDA is to view each document as a mixture of topics, and try to learn these topics and words generated by each topic for each document. This model also provides a more compressed format to represent documents, which is very useful when handling large corpus.
Conversion of GISP 2-based sediment core age models to the GICC 05 extended chronology

Marine and lacustrine sediment-based paleoclimate records are often not comparable within the early to middle portion of the last glacial cycle. This is due in part to significant revisions over the past 15 years to the Greenland ice core chronologies commonly used to assign ages outside of the range of radiocarbon dating. Therefore, creation of a compatible chronology is required prior to analysis of the spatial and temporal nature of climate variability at multiple locations. Here we present an automated mathematical function that updates GISP2-based chronologies to the newer, NGRIP GICC05 age scale between 8.24 and 103.74 ka b2k. The script uses, to the extent currently available, climate-independent volcanic synchronization of these two ice cores, supplemented by oxygen isotope alignment. The modular design of the script allows substitution for a more comprehensive volcanic matching, once it becomes available. Usage of this function highlights on the GICC05 chronology, for the first time for the entire last glaciation, the proposed global climate relationships during the series of large and rapid millennial stadialinterstadial events. 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Urban Waterfront Regeneration and Public Participation. Confrontation or Cooperation?

This paper explores community movements’ role in town planning through a case study of a small waterfront regeneration project in Tallinn that was presented to the public in 2008 but has not yet been initiated owing to the strong opposition of the local community. The aim is to study the influence that active local communities may have on regeneration projects that tend to commercialize and privatize public space. The theoretical framework of the paper sets the context of revitalization of urban waterfronts through various examples of projects that have been undertaken in different cities with the aim of giving abandoned port areas a new use. It is discussed that many of these developments have common characteristics, such as disregard towards local cultural aspects of the place, which has lead to a certain standardization of urban waterfront areas. As an alternative, examples of waterfront interventions that have been recognized by the European Prize for Urban Public Space will be presented. The aim of it is to bring out the positive characteristics of those projects to construct a vision of a ‘humane waterfront’. The study case is dedicated on the development proposal of Kalarand, focusing on the role of the local community in the planning of this urban space. It will be argued that the participation of community movements in the planning process is essential for avoiding the stalling of the project owing to conflicts between developers, governors and the local community. Also, it will be dicussed that public intervention in terms of appropriating a place is necessary for the creation of lived spaces that are places of complexity and variety of activities, which is what characterizes a ‘humane waterfront’.
Suitability of Neurofeedback Protocol for Children with Dyslexia

Dyslexia is viewed as a neurological defect that causes the subject’s electrophysiological brain signal to process information differently from that of a normal learner. Subjects exhibit learning disorder in the form of reading and writing difficulties even though they possess an average intelligence quotient (IQ) level among their age group. Current intervention programmes for dyslexia rely on intensive repetitive exercises in phonemic and phonetic awareness which could be counterproductive. This paper looks into the possible application of neurofeedback towards the treatment of neurobiological dysfunction related to dyslexia. Through training or conditioning exercises, neurofeedback practise the control of brain waves in reaching a state most appropriate for a given situation. By understanding the alternate pathway of learning in capable dyslexic learner and looking into its application in various other neurobiological dysfunction, the potential neurofeedback for the treatment of dyslexia are discussed.
Swarm Grammars - A New Approach to Dynamic Growth

—In this paper we present a new approach to dynamically breed artiﬁcial structures. By embedding swarm agents into the framework of formal grammars we build a bridge between symbol-based production systems and three-dimensional, real-time construction procedures that are driven by moving, reactive, autonomous agents. In a small number of simulations we focus on the swarm agent abilities to coordinate with one another, and to respond to the environment. First results allow for a cautious, yet optimistic look at possible ﬁelds of application and future work.
服務接受模式之建構與實證研究 = The construction and empirical study of service acceptance model in service industry

In recent years, the service industry is growing rapidly and is becoming the greatest domestic industry in Taiwan. The development level of the service industry will become an important indication for the measurement to the economic development level of a country. The main concept followed by the sell product-oriented and sales-oriented has been gradually disappeared and replaced by the customer service-oriented. Many enterprises offer a variety of services in order to attract the customers. However, it doesn’t make any profit. Consequently, the enterprises should consider the issue regarding whether the service will be accepted by the customers which offered by the enterprises. This research is explored by the behavioral intentions and followed by the characteristic of the service industry and expects the customer behavior affected by their own attitude, social pressure and their own resource. Consequently, the built service acceptance model referred to the theory of planned behavior and then use the questionnaire to survey the shopping center consumers in Taiwan followed by information collection and analysis by SPSS and SmartPLS system. The result of this research is not only the service quality and cognitive value but also the customers’ own resource and the support by the main reference group are greatly significant. In addition, the perceived behavioral control doesn’t affect the sample of high income. The analysis result is different from the whole sample and the sample of low income. The perceived behavioral control of the sample of high income doesn’t affect the behavior intentions. The analysis result is different from the whole sample and the sample of low income.