Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ROECS: A Robust Semi-direct Pipeline Towards Online Extrinsics Correction of the Surround-view System

Generally, a surround-view system (SVS), which is an indispensable component of advanced driving assistant systems (ADAS), consists of four to six wide-angle fisheye cameras. As long as both intrinsics and extrinsics of all cameras have been calibrated, a top-down surround-view with the real scale can be synthesized at runtime from fisheye images captured by these cameras. However, when the vehicle is driving on the road, relative poses between cameras in the SVS may change from the initial calibrated states due to bumps or collisions. In case that extrinsics' representations are not adjusted accordingly, on the surround-view, obvious geometric misalignment will appear. Currently, the researches on correcting the extrinsics of the SVS in an online manner are quite sporadic, and a mature and robust pipeline is still lacking. As an attempt to fill this research gap to some extent, in this work, we present a novel extrinsics correction pipeline designed specially for the SVS, namely ROECS (Robust Online Extrinsics Correction of the Surround-view system). Specifically, a "refined bi-camera error" model is firstly designed. Then, by minimizing the overall "bi-camera error" within a sparse and semi-direct framework, the SVS's extrinsics can be iteratively optimized and become accurate eventually. Besides, an innovative three-step pixel selection strategy is also proposed. The superior robustness and the generalization capability of ROECS are validated by both quantitative and qualitative experimental results. To make the results reproducible, the collected data and the source code have been released at https://cslinzhang.github. io/ROECS/.
Impacts of Petroleum, Petroleum Components, and Dispersants on Organisms and Populations

Following the Deepwater Horizon blowout, oil, degraded oil, oil mixed with dispersants, and management responses to the spill affected a variety of Gulf of Mexico organisms. This review provides examples of various documented impacts, common patterns, and trends across organisms and/or their environments, and discusses future implications as well as directions for future research. Organism effects are generally characterized as lethal and sublethal. Sublethal can be short term, long term, or permanent and multigenerational. We present individual examples of effects on behavioral response, olfaction, vision, cardiac function, and gene shift, based on research done in laboratories, mesocosm settings, and the field. Future research should emphasize collection and analysis of routine toxicological baselines and examine how and if molecular impacts cascade up to populations. This research will require development of rapid molecular tools and testing procedures to determine exposure compared to field-relevant exposure levels and to be able to extrapolate laboratory results to the field, especially given the mosaic of differing contaminant concentrations (below, at, or exceeding critical concentrations that result in lethal or sublethal effects) occurring in the environment. Recent chemical studies have identified a detectable suite of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon metabolites for which there are no toxicity data; further research is needed to determine their impacts on food webs.
The problem of diagnosing jet waveguidability in the presence of large-amplitude eddies

The waveguidability of an upper tropospheric zonal jet quantifies its propensity to duct Rossby waves in the zonal direction. This property has played a central role in previous attempts to explain large wave amplitudes and the subsequent occurrence of extreme weather. In these studies, waveguidability was diagnosed with the help of ray tracing arguments using the zonal average of the observed flow as the relevant background state. Here, it is argued that this method is problematic both conceptually and mathematically. The issue is investigated in the framework of the non-divergent barotropic model. This model allows the straightforward computation of an alternative “zonalized” background state, which is obtained through conservative symmetrization of potential vorticity contours and which is argued to be superior to the zonal average. Using an idealized prototypical flow configuration with large-amplitude eddies, it is shown that the two different choices for the background state yield very different results; in particular, the zonal-mean background state diagnoses a zonal waveguide, while the zonalized background state does not. This result suggests that the existence of a waveguide in the zonal mean background state is a consequence of, rather than a precondition for large wave amplitudes, and it would mean that the direction of causality is opposite to the usual argument. The analysis is applied to two heatwave episodes from summer 2003 and 2010, yielding essentially the same result. It is concluded that previous arguments about the role of waveguidability for extreme weather need to be carefully re-evaluated to prevent misinterpretation in the future.
Thermal structure of the Amery Ice Shelf from borehole observations and simulations

<p>The Amery Ice Shelf (AIS), East Antarctica, has a layered structure, due to the presence of both meteoric and marine ice. In this study, the thermal structures of the AIS are evaluated from vertical temperature profiles, and its formation mechanism are demonstrated by numerical simulations. The temperature profiles, derived from borehole thermistor data at four different locations, indicate distinct temperature regimes in the areas with and without basal marine ice. The former shows a near-isothermal layer over 100 m at the bottom and stable internal temperature gradients, while the latter reveals a cold core ice resulting from upstream cold ice advection and large temperature gradients within 90 m at the bottom. The three-dimensional steady-state temperature fields are simulated by Elmer/Ice, a full-stokes ice sheet model, using three different basal mass balance datasets. We found the simulated temperature fields are highly sensitive to the choice of dynamic boundary conditions on both upper and lower surfaces. To better illustrate the formation of the vertical thermal regimes, we construct a one-dimensional temperature column model to simulate the process of ice columns moving on the flowlines with varying boundary conditions. The comparison of simulated and observed temperature profiles suggests that the basal mass balance and meteoric ice advection are both crucial factors determining the thermal structure of the ice shelf. The different basal mass balance datasets are indirectly evaluated as well. The improved understanding of the thermal structure of the AIS will assist with further studies on its thermodynamics and rheology. </p>
Human Health and Socioeconomic Effects of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico

In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, hundreds of miles of floating barriers, known as boom, were anchored in place to prevent oil from stranding on the shore and to reduce impacts to sensitive areas such as marshes and bird nesting grounds, as well as areas valued for human use like this fishing spot north of Dauphin Island, Alabama. Photo credit: US Navy Photo by Chief Mass Communication Specialist Joe Kane, Fleet Combat Camera Group Pacific (Released) By Paul A. Sandifer, Alesia Ferguson, Melissa L. Finucane, Melissa Partyka,
AN EMOTION BASED MUSIC RECOMMENDER SYSTEM USING DEEP LEARNING

Emotions are affective states which show an individual’s response to mental stimulus. In this paper, we propose the use of Deep Learning and music therapy to influence negative emotions associated with dementia episodes – (Anger, Fear, Sadness and Confusion) and therefore help the patient achieve neutral or positive emotion states – (Joy and Trust). Targeted emotions were identified with the help of a Convoluted Neural Network (CNN) model built on curated datasets containing annotated emotion-labelled audio clips. These audio clips were converted to Mel Frequency Spectrograms (MFS) for classification according to the emotions they represent. We then selected music according to this emotional state using content-based filtering. We achieved average classification results of accuracy: 95.25%, recall: 72.44%, precision: 87.42% and F1 score: 0.7922.
Moment Tensors of Ring‐Faulting at Active Volcanoes: Insights Into Vertical‐CLVD Earthquakes at the Sierra Negra Caldera, Galápagos Islands

Moderate earthquakes (Mw > 5) with moment tensors (MTs) dominated by a vertical compensated‐linear‐vector‐dipole (vertical‐CLVD) component are often generated by dip slip along a curved ring‐fault system at active volcanoes. However, relating their MTs to ring‐fault parameters has been proved difficult. The objective of this study is to find a robust way of estimating some ring‐fault parameters based on their MT solutions obtained from long‐period seismic records. We first model the MTs of idealized ring‐faulting and show that MT components representing the vertical‐CLVD and vertical strike‐slip mechanisms are resolvable by the deviatoric MT inversion using long‐period seismic waves, whereas a component representing the vertical dip‐slip mechanism is indeterminate owing to a shallow source depth. We then propose a new method for estimating the arc angle and orientation of ring‐faulting using the two resolvable MT components. For validation, we study a vertical‐CLVD earthquake that occurred during the 2005 volcanic activity at the Sierra Negra caldera, Galápagos Islands. The resolvable MT components are stably determined with long‐period seismic waves, and our estimation of the ring‐fault parameters is consistent with the ring‐fault geometry identified by previous geodetic studies and field surveys. We also estimate ring‐fault parameters of two earthquakes that took place during the 2018 activity at the caldera, revealing significant differences between the two earthquakes in terms of slip direction and location. These results show the usefulness of our method for estimating ring‐fault parameters, enabling us to examine the kinematics and structures below active volcanoes with ring faults that are distributed globally.
Pharmacological Assessment, Green synthesis and Characterization of Silver Nanoparticles of Sonneratia apetala Buch.-Ham. Leaves -

The present investigation involved the screening and evaluation of S. apetala leaf crude extracts for the phytochemicals, antibacterial activity and antioxidant activity. Green synthesis of AgNPs using aqueous leaf extract, Characterization and antibacterial activity of synthesized nanoparticles were also carried out in the study. Outcome of all the experiments carried out suggests the existence of most of the phytochemicals in the leaves and are having some important biological activities. Further work is needed to isolate, purify and identify the exact active principle which is the cause for the biological activities. The Green synthesis is a simple, low cost and ecofriendly approach without any huge inputs in terms of energy. This is the first report of Green synthesis of silver nanoparticles for this plant. Being exhibiting greater antibacterial activity, phytochemical based nanoparticles may stand as a potential remedy in developing drugs against antibiotic resistant bacteria.
Publicity Chair for Announcement and Web

Due to the criticality of spatial data in decision making processes that range from military targeting to urban planning it is vital that transmission of spatial data be authenticable and secure. Cryptographic methods can be utilized for this purpose; however, they can be relatively slow especially when encrypting voluminous quantities of data such as is found with spatial data. Previously a promising and fast method of low overhead spatially based visual authentication has been developed. This method considered the angular and temporal relationships of spatial object data. It was initially shown to be extremely fast and easily extended to an intuitive visual algebra that makes it easy for a human being to identify modifications to data such as deletion, movement or additions of spatial objects. Additionally, work was done to taxonomically classify spatial objects based on their spatial and temporal properties. This paper integrates the two approaches to i) introduce a new concept in security; that of pretty good security and ii) potentially dramatically increase the speed of the authentication method on top of the visual signature authentication methods developed previously. The approach integrates the notion of spatial and temporal taxonomic relationships when determining what key spatial objects should be authenticated.
Reprinted from ANNALS OF ALLERGY, ASTHMA, IMMUNOLOGY, February 1999, Volume 82, Number 2

Objective: The purpose of the study was to evaluate the efficacy of the reduced form of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NADH) i.e., ENADA® the stabilized oral absorbable form, in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover study in patients with CFS. Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide is known to trigger energy production through ATP generation which may form the basis of its potential effects.
E XPECTED R ECIPROCAL R ANK FOR E VALUATING M USICAL F INGERING A DVICE

We cast the computational modeling of musical ﬁngering as an information retrieval (IR) problem in which the task is to generate an optimally ranked list of ﬁngering suggestions for each phrase in a score. The audience for this list is a set of performers with potentially diverse ﬁngering preferences. Speciﬁcally, we adapt the expected reciprocal rank (ERR) metric—proposed by Chapelle and associates as an improved evaluation metric for retrieving documents with graded relevance—to develop a set of novel metrics tailored to the piano ﬁngering IR task. ERR, as originally described, relies on a heuristic function to estimate the probability that a user will be satisﬁed by a document with a particular graded relevance. For musical ﬁngering, we instead estimate the likelihood that a given performer will deem a suggested ﬁngering sequence sufﬁcient for arriving at a satisfactory solution. Finally, we attempt to validate our speciﬁc use of ERR by comparing how it judges several competing models.
The effect of lateral variations in Earth structure on Last Interglacial sea level

It is generally agreed that the Last Interglacial (LIG; ∼130–115 ka) was a time when global average temperatures and global mean sea level were higher than they are today. However, the exact timing, magnitude and spatial pattern of ice melt is much debated. One difficulty in extracting past global mean sea level from local observations is that their elevations need to be corrected for glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA), which requires knowledge of Earth’s internal viscoelastic structure. While this structure is generally assumed to be radially symmetric, evidence from seismology, geodynamics and mineral physics indicates that large lateral variations in viscosity exist within the mantle. In this study, we construct a new model of Earth’s internal structure by converting shear wave speed into viscosity using parametrizations from mineral physics experiments and geodynamic constraints on Earth’s thermal structure. We use this 3-D Earth structure, which includes both variations in lithospheric thickness and lateral variations in viscosity, to calculate the first 3-D GIA prediction for LIG sea level. We find that the difference between predictions with and without lateral Earth structure can be metres to 10s of metres in the near field of former ice sheets, and up to a few metres in their far field. We demonstrate how forebulge dynamics and continental levering are affected by laterally varying Earth structure, with a particular focus on those sites with prominent LIG sea level records. Results from four 3-D GIA calculations show that accounting for lateral structure can act to increase local sea level by up to ∼1.5 m at the Seychelles and minimally decrease it in Western Australia. We acknowledge that this result is only based on a few simulations, but if robust, this shift brings estimates of global mean sea level from these two sites into closer agreement with each other. We further demonstrate that simulations with a suitable radial viscosity profile can be used to locally approximate the 3-D GIA result, but that these radial profiles cannot be found by simply averaging viscosity below the sea level indicator site.
Characterizing Toxicity in Facebook Comments

In social media platforms, comments associated with news pieces are usually carried with negativity and toxicity, many times promoting flamed discussions and insults among users. Although designed to promote discussions and interactions, the high toxicity might end up contributing to create a hostile environment in the online space, which is not good neither to social media platforms and neither to its users. In this work, we provide a large scale diagnostic about the toxicity in the comments associated with posts in news shared on Facebook, the largest social media platform. To do that we collected all posts and comments from relevant pages during a major political in Brazil, shared by a polarized nation with different narratives. We then used the Perspective API from Google to measure the toxicity of the comments and posts. Our analysis of the toxicity in different types of pages, posts, and comments posted in different moments unveil key factors that influence toxicity in comments associate with the news. We hope our findings may influence the design of better content policies able to mitigate the problem.
Reduzierung der Schallemission von Axialventilatoren durch Vorderkantenmodifikationen

Axialventilatoren werden in einer Vielzahl von technischen Systemen eingesetzt. Dabei rückt neben der aerodynamischen Effizienz des Ventilators dessen Schallabstrahlung immer mehr in den Vordergrund. Das abgestrahlte Schallfeld setzt sich dabei aus tonalen, subhamronischen und breitbandigen Anteilen zusammen [1–3]. Die tonalen Komponenten entstehen durch eine instationäre Belastung der Laufradschaufeln, insbesondere durch hohe Turbulenzgrade oder durch eine ungleichförmige Zuströmung [4, 5]. Bei bestimmten Betriebsbedingungen entsteht Blattspitzenlärm. Dieser Schallentstehungsmechanismus resultiert aus der Spaltströmung und deren Wechselwirkung mit den Laufradschaufeln [3, 6]. Die hochfrequente breitbandige Schallabstrahlung wird durch Hinterkantenlärm oder Grenzschichtlärm dominiert, wobei in den meisten Fällen der Grenzschichtlärm nur einen geringen Anteil zur Schallabstrahlung beisteuert [7, 8]. Der niederfrequente breitbandige Schall, der sog. Zuströmturbulenzschall, wird durch die Interaktion der Schaufelvorderkante mit der Zuströmung erzeugt [7, 9]. Dieser Schallentstehungsmechanismus ist insbesondere bei hohen Zuströmturbulenzgraden stark ausgeprägt. Basierend auf Untersuchungen an Tragflügen [10, 11] gibt es Ansätze den Zuströmturbulenzschall durch eine Modifikation der Schaufelvorderkante zu reduzieren.
AN ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORK METIIOD FOR MINERAL PROSPECTIVITY MAPPING: A COMPARISON WITH FUZZY LOGIC AND BAYESIAN PROBABILITY METIIODS

A multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network is used to combine multi-source exploration data in a Geographic Infonnation System (GIS) database and produce a mineral prospectivity map for gold deposits in the Tenterfield 1: 100,000 sheet area, NSW, Australia. Statistical and probability measures of map quality indicate that the neural network method perfonns better than the empirical weights-of-evidence (Bayesian probability) and conceptual fuzzy logic methods in the generation of the mineral prospectivity map. The neural network has several important advantages over existing methods, including the ability to respond to critical combinations of parameters, rather than automatically increasing the prospectivity estimate in response to every favourable parameter.
Melatonine en stemmingsstoornissen

Summary Melatonin is a hormone secreted by the pineal gland mainly during the night. The discovery that this melatonin secretion decreases under the influence of bright light, gave rise to the use of light therapy in some affective disorders. The literature on the relationship between melatonin secretion and mood is reviewed concerning seasonal affective disorder, non-seasonal affective disorder and premenstrual syndrome. Light therapy could reduce an abnormal high melatonin secretion back to normal proportions. None of the affective disorders, however, is accompanied by an unusual high melatonin level. Nevertheless, light therapy as well as other therapies that suppress melatonin have a therapeutic effect. This is not the case with the administration of melatonin. Mood is not affected by extra melatonin in seasonal affective disorder but it is in both other affective disorders. Melatonin plays a part in the pathogenesis of the affective disorders but it is not yet clear which one.
NDT_A_265872 2467..2477

1Department of Psychiatry, Armed Forces Hospital, Khamis Mushayt, Saudi Arabia; 2Saudi Commission for Health Specialties, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; 3Preventive Medicine, Armed Forces Hospital, Khamis Mushayt, Saudi Arabia; 4Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, Mansoura University, Mansoura, Egypt; 5Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine for Boys, Al-Azhar University, Cairo, Egypt Purpose: Our objectives are to assess the public attitude toward mentally ill people and mental health services and to compare the attitudes of those who have past history of mental illness, those who have been exposed to mentally ill people, and those who have not. Materials and Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study among subjects (n=1268) in four Saudi Arabian cities (Riyadh, Abha, Dammam, and Jizan), recruiting participants from malls and parks. All participants were administered “the knowledge and attitudes toward mental illness and mental health services scale”. Results: Participants were divided into three groups; non-exposed to mental illness group (n=687, 54.1%), exposed to mental illness group (n=305, 24%), and having past history of mental illness group (n=276, 21.8%). Results revealed that non-exposed group had the lowest knowledge about mental illness (p <0.001). Exposed group had the best attitude toward mentally ill people (p=0.002), mental health services (p< 0.001), the lowest impact of traditional beliefs (p<0.001), and the best help-seeking decisions (p = 0.001). Regression models show the variables that predicted attitude toward the mentally ill were the attitude toward mental health services (p=0.001), impact of traditional beliefs (p=0.001), and residency (p=0.04). The predictors of attitude toward mental health services were impact of traditional beliefs (p<0.001), knowledge (p<0.001), and residency (p=0.028). And the variables that account for predicting future decisions were impact of traditional beliefs (p<0.001), attitude toward mental health services (p=0.001), and having past history of mental illness (p=0.006). Conclusion: This study demonstrates significant differences in attitudes toward mental illness among different groups of participants. Lesser impact of traditional beliefs and better knowledge about mental illness were the factors most associated with better attitudes toward mentally ill people and mental health services and with better help-seeking behavior.