Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Point-to-RBox Network for Oriented Object Detection via Single Point Supervision

The Rotated Bounding Boxes used in Oriented object detection are labor-intensive and time-consuming to annotate manually. Unlike rotated boxes with fine granularity, point-level annotations only provide a single point for each object as supervision, greatly reducing the annotation burden. In this paper, we formalize the problem as using point annotations to generate high-quality pseudo rotated boxes that can be used to train existing detectors. To address the core challenge of generating pseudo rotated boxes, we pro-pose the Point-to-RBox (P2RBox) network. First, we introduce a coarse-to-fine strategy to generate precise pseudo rotated boxes. Second, to account for objects with arbitrary orientation, we design a three-stream detection head guided by orientation-sensitive features in P2RBox to select the best pseudo rotated box. The extensive experiments on the DOTA and DIOR-R datasets indicate that the pseudo rotated boxes generated by P2RBox are viable substitutes for manually annotated rotated boxes. Using pseudo rotated boxes, a fully-supervised object detector can attain more than 90% of the performance achieved by the same detector trained with manually annotations. In addition, our method not only outperforms image-level weakly supervised detectors but also exhibits competitive performance compared to the fully supervised detectors.
On the climatic interpretation of the hydrogen isotope ratios in recent and fossil wood

The deuterium/hydrogen ratio of carbon-bound hydrogen in tree cellulose is principally determined by the deuterium content of the precipitation, the isotopie enrichment in the leaves and the biochemical fractionation involved in the synthesis of cellulose. Measurements of ôD values on recent and fossil wood of Pinus syZvestvis L. from the Cairngorm mountains (Scotland) suggest a predominant influence of relative humidity on the overal fractionation. If this conclusion is confirmed, it will prove possible to use the deuterium content in fossils to detect pluvial periods.
Co-opetitive entrepreneurship : how to integrate competition in a co-operative context ? An empirical study of sami reindeer herders [Emprendimiento coopetitivo. ¿ Cómo generar un ambiente competitive en un contexto cooperativo ? Una investigación sobre los pastores sami de renos]

Almost all research about co-opetition examines the emergence of co-operation in a competitive environment. Can competition emerge from a co-operative context ? While there is growing literature about indigenous entrepreneurship, this article focuses on competitive relationships among Sami people – the indigenous nation of northern Norway, Sweden and Finland and Russia’s Kola Peninsula. Reindeer herding, an activity traditionally done as a family, holds strong social value. Our ethnographic study reveals that maximisation of profits is not a sufficient explanatory variable to explain traditional reindeer herding. With limited economic returns from herding, many Sami herders rely on secondary occupations for supplementary income. To manage the resulting co-opetitive relationships, entrepreneurs compartmentalise co-operative relationships based on cultural and territorial issues, and competitive relationships based on economic considerations. Implications in terms of co-opetition and entrepreneurship are drawn.
The AI Race: Why Current Neural Network-based Architectures are a Poor Basis for Artificial General Intelligence

Artificial General Intelligence is the idea that someday an hypothetical agent will arise from artificial intelligence (AI) progresses, and will surpass by far the brightest and most gifted human minds. This idea has been around since the early development of AI. Since then, scenarios on how such AI may behave towards humans have been the subject of many fictional and research works. This paper analyzes the current state of artificial intelligence progresses, and how the current AI race with the ever faster release of impressive new AI methods (that can deceive humans, outperform them at tasks we thought impossible to tackle by AI a mere decade ago, and that disrupt the job market) have raised concerns that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) might be coming faster that we thought. In particular, we focus on 3 specific families of modern AIs to develop the idea that deep neural networks, which are the current backbone of nearly all artificial intelligence methods, are poor candidates for any AGI to arise due to their many limitations, and therefore that any threat coming from the recent AI race does not lie in AGI but in the limitations, uses, and lack of regulations of our current models and algorithms. This article appears in the AI & Society track.
DECIDE A Gene Finding Evaluation Tool

In this work we present DECIDE, a new interactive tool for the automatic evaluation of gene ﬁnding programs. This tool provides a standard environment, allowing new gene ﬁnding programs to be compared with existing ones. It can also be used to help the user in the choice of the most appropriate program and parameter setting to perform gene ﬁnding in a particular organism or dataset. To simplify the evaluation and the incorporation of new programs, a publicly available Web interface was developed. Several well known gene ﬁnding programs and datasets have been integrated and are accessible through this uniﬁed interface. The accuracy of the programs is reported as a function of several accuracy measures at different levels, that include: nucleotide level, exon level, exon length, signal type and G+C content.
Making Maps: A Visual Guide to Map Design for GIS

1. How to Make a Map 2. What's Your Map For? 3. Mappable Data 4. Map-Making Tools 5. The Geographic Framework 6. The Big Picture 7. Inner Workings 8. Map Generalization and Classification 9. Map Symbolization 10. Words on Maps 11. Color on Maps
ECOLOGÍA TRÓFICA DEL PEJERREY (Odontesthes bonariensis) EN LA LAGUNA DEL VENADO Y ALSINA, DOS AMBIENTES DEL SISTEMA ENCADENADAS DEL OESTE, PROV. DE BUENOS AIRES

The aim of the present study was to analyze the feeding of the silverside Odontesthes bonariensis in the Venado and Alsina lake. which are part of the Encadenadas del Oeste lake system. The stomach content of 206 individuals was analyzed. Total length ranged from 93 to 585 mm. The vacuity index (VI) and repletion index (RI) were estimated by season and site. Index of Relative Importance (IRI) for each food category and the trophic level (TL) of pejerrey were calculated by site. The diet of the silverside was composed of 68 prey items, most of which were occasional preys. Copepods and cladocerans were the main prey items in the diet in both lagoons. Copepods were the most important item in Venado lagoon and cladocerans were so in Alsina lagoon. The micro crustaceans were the main prey item for both size classes, however their %IRI decreased in the larger fish (95% IRI for the 93-299 mm Tl size class and 63% IRI for the 300-585 mm Tl size class). Silverside TL estimated for each lagoon (TL= 3) characterizes it as secondary consumer.
Contemporary Rural Social Work Contemporary Rural

This research explores individual and family reliance on non-homeless family members in coping with homelessness in a rural area. Drawing on 114 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with homeless adults and families in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, we found that almost all participants relied on non-homeless family members for assistance, but with variation in the amount of help sought and received. Some participants displayed high thresholds for help-seeking, only relying on family under extreme circumstances and generally asking for modest assistance. This was common among childless single homeless adults who often had different support. Other participants displayed low thresholds for help-seeking, frequently asking for and requiring much assistance from non-homeless family members. This was especially common among homeless persons with children. Implications for policy and services are presented.
Inﬂuence of Calcium, pH, and Moisture on Protein Matrix Structure and Functionality in Direct-Acidiﬁed Nonfat Mozzarella Cheese

Inﬂuence of calcium, moisture, and pH on structure and functionality of direct-acid, nonfat Mozzarella cheese was studied. Acetic acid and citric acid were used to acidify milk to pH 5.8 and 5.3 with the aim of producing cheeses with 70 and 66% moisture, and 0.6 and 0.3% calcium levels. Cheeses containing 0.3% calcium were softer and more adhesive than cheeses containing 0.6% calcium, and ﬂowed further when heated. Cheeses with the same calcium content (0.6%), the same moisture content, but set at different pH values (pH 5.3 and 5.8), exhibited no signiﬁcant differences in melting or ﬁrmness. Increasing cheese moisture content from 66 to 70% produced a softer cheese but did not increase meltability. Such differences in functionality corresponded with differences in structure and arrangement of proteins in the cheese protein matrix. Micro-structure of cheese with 0.6% calcium had an increase in protein folds and serum pockets compared with the 0.3% calcium cheeses that had a more homogeneous structure. Protein matrix in the low-calcium cheese appeared less dense indicating the proteins were more hydrated. In the 0.6% calcium cheeses, the proteins appeared more aggregated and had larger spaces be-tween protein aggregates. Thus, between pH 5.3 and 5.8, calcium controls cheese functionality, and pH has only an indirect affect related to its inﬂuence on the calcium in cheese.
Association Between Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) and Physical, Psychological, and Social Health Outcomes for Women in Bangladesh

Background: Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a global issue impacting 1 in 3 women worldwide. IPV has been shown to have direct impact on the physical, psychological, and social aspects of life and overall well-being. Objective: The purpose of this study was to explore associations between report of IPV and physical, psychological, and social health outcomes with special emphasis on relationship of IPV to pelvic floor, pelvic pain, and urinary incontinence for Bangladeshi women. Study Design: A cross-sectional study was conducted using purposive sampling. Methods: Married women between 18 and 50 years were recruited in the study. IPV was measured using the Hurt-Insult-Threaten-Scream (HITS) screening tool and complex trauma was measured utilizing the Complex Trauma Inventory (CTI) Scale. Data were analyzed through SPSS version 21.0, and reported as descriptive statistics. Results: The total number of the respondents was n = 100. The mean age of respondents was 36.57 years (standard deviation ± 9.66). According to the HITS screening tool 27% respondents reported IPV. There was a significant, strong correlation between HITS scores for IPV and negative health outcomes of chronic disease and disability (r = 0.8; P ≤ .05). There was a direct association between HITS scores and (1) CTI scores for complex trauma, (2) pelvic floor dysfunction, and (3) duration of marriage. Conclusion: High prevalence of IPV was reported for this cohort of women living in Bangladesh. HITS scores for IPV were direct significant associations with severity and intensity of posttraumatic stress disorder on the CTI, and with low back pain, pelvic floor dysfunction, postpartum complications, and cardiac problems.
Multimodal Neurophysiological Representations of High School Students’ Situational Interest: A Machine Learning Approach

Interest plays a vital role in students’ learning performance. Accurately measuring situational interest in the classroom environment is important for understanding the learning mechanism and improving teaching. However, self-report measurements frequently encounter issues of subjectivity and ambiguity, and it is hard to collect dynamic self-report scales without disturbance in the naturalistic environment. Thanks to the development of neuroscience and portable biosensors, it has become possible to represent psychological states with neurophysiological features in the classroom environment. In this study, multimodal neurophysiological signals, including electroencephalograph (EEG), electrodermal activity (EDA), and photoplethysmography (PPG), were applied to represent situational interest under both laboratory (Study 1) and naturalistic (Study 2) paradigms. A total of 33 features were extracted, and 7 different statistical indicators were calculated for each of them across all the epochs. Among these features, 47 in Study 1 and 49 in Study 2 demonstrated significant correlation with self-report situational interest. Employing a machine learning model, the analysis yielded a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.772 and mean squared error (MSE) of 0.883 for the dataset in Study 1. However, the model was not robust on data from Study 2. These findings offer empirical support for the conceptual framework of situational interest, demonstrate the potential of neurophysiological data in educational assessments, and also highlight the challenges in naturalistic paradigm.
Symmetric NMF with Information-Theoretic Metric Learning regularization for Graph Clustering

—Symmetric nonnegative matrix factorization (Sym-NMF) is an unsupervised method that seeks to approximate a symmetric matrix A , often a similarity or kernel matrix, by the product of low-rank factors. Most existing models deal with a factorization of the form A ≈ HH T , which may not yield a satisfactory approximation in cases where the matrix is indeﬁnite. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a new SymNMF model based on the more general formulation A ≈ HSH T , that is more stable. To ensure a low-rank representation on the positive semi-deﬁnite cone, the LogDet divergence is incorporated as a regularization term. An alternative optimization algorithm is proposed to optimize the proposed objective. Experimental results on various synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms or performs comparably to many state-of-the-art methods while maintaining superior computational efﬁciency.
Survey of Wearable Haptic Technologies for Navigation Guidance

—Wearable haptic technologies, known as wearable haptics , instantiate physical contacts with users, either to conﬁrm actions or to communicate a surrounding information - over a worn-type interface. Two factors require to be addressed for their design: the body locus - a function of comfort and sensitivity, and the types of stimuli they provide. Wearable haptics have gained great popularity in the last decade, thanks to their effectiveness, ease of use, and variety of application scenarios. This paper provides a non-exhaustive review of the state of the art on wearable haptics for navigation guidance. We classify the existing literature through two dimensions: (1) the body part they stimulate and (2) the haptic stimulation they provide through their actuation technology. We then analyze the navigation guidance strategies they adopt for communicating with the wearer, to ﬁnally identify challenges and limitations reﬂected in their evaluation protocols. Compromises are to be drawn when eliciting guidance through wearable haptics, between acceptability, cognitive workload, usability and accuracy.
Mobile application for the management of diabetic foot ulcers

Objective: To develop and validate a mobile application that help nurses in the decision-making process with regard to topical treatment in diabetic foot ulcers. Method: Methodological study carried out in four stages: Defi nition of requirements and construction of the conceptual map of the application; Generation of alternatives for implementation and prototyping; Tests; Implementation. The software Nativescript for Android was used for the development of the application. Usability tests were carried out with 18 participants, considering Nielsen’s heuristics and adaptations of usability heuristics for mobile devices. Results: The application provides current information about the concept of diabetic foot ulcer, ulcer assessment, principles of treatment, clinical recommendations for better healing and dressings for topical care. Conclusion: The methods used for development and validation proved to be adequate to achieve the proposed objectives. The implementation of this technological tool is expected to contribute to a better management of diabetic foot ulcers, contributing to an evidence-based nursing practice.
Host Heterogeneous Ribonucleoprotein K (hnRNP K) as a Potential Target to Suppress Hepatitis B Virus Replication

Background Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection results in complications such as cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. Suppressing viral replication in chronic HBV carriers is an effective approach to controlling disease progression. Although antiviral compounds are available, we aimed to identify host factors that have a significant effect on viral replication efficiency. Methods and Findings We studied a group of hepatitis B carriers by associating serum viral load with their respective HBV genomes, and observed a significant association between high patient serum viral load with a natural sequence variant within the HBV enhancer II (Enh II) regulatory region at position 1752. Using a viral fragment as an affinity binding probe, we isolated a host DNA-binding protein belonging to the class of heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoproteins—hnRNP K—that binds to and modulates the replicative efficiency of HBV. In cell transfection studies, overexpression of hnRNP K augmented HBV replication, while gene silencing of endogenous hnRNP K carried out by small interfering RNAs resulted in a significant reduction of HBV viral load. Conclusion The evidence presented in this study describes a wider role for hnRNP K beyond maintenance of host cellular functions and may represent a novel target for pharmacologic intervention of HBV replication.
Demo paper : Fidelity-aware Distributed Network Emulation

—The design and development of new network protocols, architectures, and technologies require an evaluation phase where the researcher must provide empirical evidence for the performance of their contributions. In this context, network emulation has proven to be an attractive approach as it offers more flexibility compared to traditional testing platforms, and more realism compared to simulation software. However, as emulation requires running multiple concurrent virtual network components on a limited amount of resources, it faces well-documented limitations in its scalability and accuracy. Our work is an attempt to address these issues by developing a lightweight and highly scalable distributed emulator, and by designing a framework for fidelity monitoring through passive measurement of emulated packet delays. The preliminary evaluation shows promising results and demonstrates the high potential of our approach.
Sustainability Initiatives in East Bayside Neighborhood Portland, Maine

Portland’s East Bayside area is the gateway into the City of Portland. Unfortunately, due to an amalgam of mixed land-use planning, ranging from light industrial to open space, East Bayside is home not only to bad transit schemes and poor development, but a community that embodies fragmentation, dead-end streets, broken pedestrian connects, and soil contamination. The lack of pedestrian connectivity and sense of community within East Bayside is a characteristic that sheds light on the unsustainable side of Portland. Reconnecting key components of the neighborhood, energizing urban agriculture, streetscaping, and generating high performance recreational spaces will be the key dynamics in establishing a sense of “place” within this tired region of Portland, Maine. While cultivating the community by means of urban agriculture, there will be an increasingly practical obligation to procure fundamental scientific technologies for the constituents within East Bayside to create a budding beta community for sustainability. Phytroremediation, soil remediation by planting Brassica oleracea, may be one lesson plan in establishing a community driven effort to enhance urban agriculture while mitigating the presence of soil containment. A more community oriented neighborhood within the East Bayside area must incorporate stewardship and stakeholder involvement. This will play a pivotal role in yielding budding connectivity while eliminating pathways of exposure to both biological and socioeconomic dangers that persist within East Bayside.
KNOWLEDGE, ATTITUDE AND PREVALENCE OF SNUFF USE: A DESCRIPTIVE CROSS-SECTIONAL STUDY AMONG ADULTS IN THE SAGNERIGU MUNICIPALITY OF THE NORTHERN REGION OF GHANA

This study sought to assess snuff use among adults in the Sagnerigu Municipality of the Northern Region of Ghana. This study employed an analytical study design. The study used simple random sampling technique to sample 272 respondents in the study setting who were aged above 18 years at the time of the study. The research survey was carried out at Sagnerigu Municipality of the Northern Region of Ghana. Adults between the ages of 18 and 65 years participated in the study. Findings from the study showed that, all the respondents representing 100% said they had ever heard about snuff. From the results, 96% said they had ever used snuff at the time of the study. The findings showed that, there was no statistical association between educational status of respondents and use of snuff (p=0.10). The findings however showed that there was an association between occupational status of respondents and use of snuff by respondents ( χ2=12.942; P= 0.02). From the results, 56% of the respondents aged 31-35 years dominated with the males leading in all the age categories of snuff use in the study area. From the results, majority of the respondents (81%) agreed with the statement that people take snuff to enable them perform a task. From the results, majority of the respondents (68%) identified that people take snuff to treat diseases such as cold and headache. The prevalence of snuff use was high among the participants in this study, though ignorance of the potential health dangers of snuff was also high. It is recommended that concerted efforts should be made by healthcare workers to discourage the use of all forms of snuff among people at the study area.
The Use of Green Tea Extract ( Camellia sinensis ) Orally to Prevent Dyslipidemia in Female Rats ( Rattus norvegicus ) Fed A High-Fat Diet

: One of the significant danger factors for cardiovascular disease and stroke is dyslipidemia. According to long-term prospective epidemiological research, coronary heart disease is less common in those with good lipid profiles who lead better lives. In this study, on a high-fat diet, female wistar rats ( Rattus norvegicus ) will be tested and analyzed to see if green tea extract ( Camellia sinensis ) can prevent dyslipidemia when given orally. Compared to a control group that received only distilled water, the trial group that received 5 milliliters of green tea extract ( Camellia sinensis ) had significantly lower total and LDL cholesterol levels and higher HDL cholesterol levels. This treatment was more effective in lowering cholesterol overall. The components found in green tea ( Camellia sinensis ), including tannins, steroids, alkaloids, saponins, and flavonoids, can induce this. When certain bioactive substances are off, the body can bring them back into normalcy. These results suggest that white wistar rats ( Rattus norvegicus ), given a high-fat diet, can benefit from green tea ( Camellia sinensis ) extract to avoid dyslipidemia. Your lipid profile can be improved by ingesting green tea extract. The primary polyphenol in tea, catechin, is responsible for this transformation. Therefore, the Camellia sinensis plant, from which green tea is made, is a valuable plant that can halt or slow the progression of several ailments, including hypertension, metabolic disorders, and cardiovascular disorders.