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International Journal of Engineering Business Management Performance Measurement Model for the Supplier Selection Based on AHP | The performance of the supplier is a crucial factor for the success or failure of any company. Rational and effective decision making in terms of the supplier selection process can help the organization to optimize cost and quality functions. The nature of supplier selection processes is generally complex, especially when the company has a large variety of products and vendors. Over the years, several solutions and methods have emerged for address‐ ing the supplier selection problem (SSP). Experience and studies have shown that there is no best way for evaluating and selecting a specific supplier process, but that it varies from one organization to another. The aim of this research is to demonstrate how a multiple attribute decision making approach can be effectively applied for the supplier selection process. |
ARKref: a rule-based coreference resolution system | ARKref is a tool for noun phrase coreference that is based on the system described by Haghighi and Klein (2009) (which was never publicly released). It was originally written in 2009. At the time of writing, the last released version was in March 2011. This document describes that version, which is open-source and publicly available at http://www.ark.cs.cmu.edu/ARKref.1 ARKref is a deterministic, rule-based system that uses syntactic information from a constituent parser, and semantic information from an entity recognition component, to constrain the set of possible mention candidates (i.e., noun phrases) that could be antecedents for a given mention. It encodes syntactic constraints such as the fact that the noun phrases in predicative nominative constructions corefer (e.g., John was the teacher.), as well as semantic constraints such as the fact that he cannot corefer with a noun labeled as a location. After filtering candidates with these constraints, it selects as the antecedent the candidate noun phrase with the shortest (cross-sentence) tree distance from the target. Antecedent decisions are aggregated with a transitive closure to create the final entity graph. ARKref belongs to a family of rule-based coreference systems that use rich syntactic and semantic information to make antecedent selection decisions. Besides Haghighi and Klein, current work in this vein includes Lee et al. (2013), which was one of the best performing systems in a recent CoNLL shared task. The following example provides an illustration of ARKref’s output, in which brackets denote the extent of noun phrases and indices denote the entity to which each noun phrase refers. This example emphasizes the syntactic selection criteria: |
Proliferation, cell cycle and apoptosis in cancer | Beneath the complexity and idiopathy of every cancer lies a limited number of 'mission critical' events that have propelled the tumour cell and its progeny into uncontrolled expansion and invasion. One of these is deregulated cell proliferation, which, together with the obligate compensatory suppression of apoptosis needed to support it, provides a minimal 'platform' necessary to support further neoplastic progression. Adroit targeting of these critical events should have potent and specific therapeutic consequences. |
Carcinoma Ex Pleomorphic Adenoma of the Palate Composed of Invasive Micropapillary Salivary Duct Carcinoma and Adenoid Cystic Carcinoma Components | Carcinoma ex pleomorphic adenoma (CXPA) is an unusual epithelial malignancy that develops from a primary or recurrent pleomorphic adenoma (PA), the most common tumor of salivary glands, and constitutes about 11.5% of all carcinomas that affect these glands. Intraoral minor salivary glands and seromucous glands of the oropharynx are uncommon locations of CXPA. On histopathological examination, the tumor comprises a wide morphological spectrum with a variable proportion between the benign and malignant components with the latter often predominating and overlapping the PA, which may cause misdiagnosis. Here, we report a case of palatal minor salivary gland CXPA composed of invasive micropapillary salivary duct carcinoma and adenoid cystic carcinoma components with multiple nodal metastases in a 74-year-old woman. Neoplastic cells showed heterogeneous immunohistochemical profile with both luminal and myoepithelial differentiation. The invasive micropapillary salivary duct carcinoma component demonstrated overexpression of the oncoprotein human epidermal growth factor receptor-2. This feature should be considered and evaluated as a possible target for adjuvant therapy in case of metastatic disease. |
Global catches , exploitation rates , and rebuilding options for sharks | Adequate conservation and management of shark populations is becoming increasingly important on a global scale, especially because many species are exceptionally vulnerable to overfishing. Yet, reported catch statistics for sharks are incomplete, and mortality estimates have not been available for sharks as a group. Here, the global catch and mortality of sharks from reported and unreported landings, discards, and shark finning are being estimated at 1.44 million metric tons for the year 2000, and at only slightly less in 2010 (1.41 million tons). Based on an analysis of average shark weights, this translates into a total annual mortality estimate of about 100 million sharks in 2000, and about 97 million sharks in 2010, with a total range of possible values between 63 and 273 million sharks per year. Further, the exploitation rate for sharks as a group was calculated by dividing two independent mortality estimates by an estimate of total global biomass. As an alternative approach, exploitation rates for individual shark populations were compiled and averaged from stock assessments and other published sources. The resulting three independent estimates of the average exploitation rate ranged between 6.4% and 7.9% of sharks killed per year. This exceeds the average rebound rate for many shark populations, estimated from the life history information on 62 shark species (rebound rates averaged 4.9% per year), and explains the ongoing declines in most populations for which data exist. The consequences of these unsustainable catch and mortality rates for marine ecosystems could be substantial. Global total shark mortality, therefore, needs to be reduced drastically in order to rebuild depleted populations and restore marine ecosystems with functional top predators. & 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. |
Boosting energy efficiency with mirrored data block replication policy and energy scheduler | Energy efficiency is one of the major challenges in big datacenters. To facilitate processing of large data sets in a distributed fashion, the MapReduce programming model is employed in these datacenters. Hadoop is an open-source implementation of MapReduce which contains a distributed file system. Hadoop Distributed File System provides a data block replication scheme to preserve reliability and data availability. The distribution of the data block replicas over the nodes is performed randomly by meeting some constraints (e.g., preventing storage of two replicas of a data block on a single node). This study makes use of flexibility in the data block placement policy to increase energy efficiency in datacenters. Furthermore, inspired by Zaharia et al.'s delay scheduling algorithm, a scheduling algorithm is introduced, which takes into account energy efficiency in addition to fairness and data locality properties. Computer simulations of the proposed method suggest its superiority over Hadoop's standard settings. |
Rail defect detection using Gabor filters with texture analysis | Railways is the major means of transport in most of the countries. Rails are the backbone of the track structure and should be protected from defects. Surface defects are irregularities in the rails caused due to the shear stresses between the rails and wheels of the trains. This type of defects should be detected to avoid rail fractures. The objective of this paper is to propose an innovative technique to detect the surface defect on rail heads. In order to identify the defects, it is essential to extract the rails from the background and further enhance the image for thresholding. The proposed method uses Binary Image Based Rail Extraction (BIBRE) algorithm to extract the rails from the background. The extracted rails are enhanced to achieve uniform background with the help of direct enhancement method. The direct enhancement method enhance the image by enhancing the brightness difference between objects and their backgrounds. The enhanced rail image uses Gabor filters to identify the defects from the rails. The Gabor filters maximizes the energy difference between defect and defect less surface. Thresholding is done based on the energy of the defects. From the thresholded image the defects are identified and a message box is generated when there is a presence of defects. |
Defending Web Servers with Feints, Distraction and Obfuscation | In this paper we investigate deceptive defense strategies for web servers. Web servers are widely exploited resources in the modern cyber threat landscape. Often these servers are exposed in the Internet and accessible for a broad range of valid as well as malicious users. Common security strategies like firewalls are not sufficient to protect web servers. Deception based Information Security enables a large set of counter measures to decrease the efficiency of intrusions. In this work we depict several techniques out of the reconnaissance process of an attacker. We match these with deceptive counter measures. All proposed measures are implemented in an experimental web server with deceptive counter measure abilities. We also conducted an experiment with honeytokens and evaluated delay strategies against automated scanner tools. |
The interacting effects of clumped seed dispersal and distance‐ and density‐dependent mortality on seedling recruitment patterns | Noelle G. Beckman*†, Claudia Neuhauser and Helene C. Muller-Landau Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, 100 Ecology, 1987 Upper Buford Circle, Saint Paul, MN 55108, USA; Biomedical Informatics and Computational Biology, University of Minnesota-Rochester, 300 University Square, 111 S Broadway, Rochester, MN 55904, USA; and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Unit 9100 Box 0948, DPO, AA 34002-9948, Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, 100 Ecology, 1987 Upper Buford Circle, Saint Paul, MN 55108, USA |
Noncontact capacitive torque sensor for use on a rotating axle | Abstruct-The measurement of the torque in a mechanically loaded axle is often required for automotive power-train and engine control systems. Up to the present, torque sensing has been performed by mainly using strain gauges connected to the axle with slip rings to enable the electrical contacting. Noncontact magnetic and optical techniques have also been employed. In the proposed capacitive torque sensor, two angular displacement sensors are spaced a well-defined distance apart. The rotor of each of these capacitive displacement sensors is composed of an artay of electrodes and sinewave voltages with phase angles in the sequence O " , 90", 180", 270" applied to it. These voltages are capacitively coupled from the stator to the rotor. The stator is also equipped with a readout electrode. The phase angle of the sinewave on this readout electrode is proportional to the rotor-to-stator electrode overlapping and, thus proportional to the angular position. The phase difference between the output signals of the two angular displacement transducers is a direct measure of the twist angle and, thus of the torque in the axle. The sensor enables the noncontact torque measurement bn a IO-mm diameter steel axle in the 0-100 Nm range. |
Silymarin protects liver against toxic effects of anti-tuberculosis drugs in experimental animals | BACKGROUND
The first line anti-tuberculosis drugs isoniazid (INH), rifampicin (RIF) and pyrazinamide (PZA) continues to be the effective drugs in the treatment of tuberculosis, however, the use of these drugs is associated with toxic reactions in tissues, particularly in the liver, leading to hepatitis. Silymarin, a standard plant extract with strong antioxidant activity obtained from S. marianum, is known to be an effective agent for liver protection and liver regeneration. The aim of this study was to investigate the protective actions of silymarin against hepatotoxicity caused by different combinations of anti-tuberculosis drugs.
METHODS
Male Wistar albino rats weighing 250-300 g were used to form 6 study groups, each group consisting of 10 rats. Animals were treated with intra-peritoneal injection of isoniazid (50 mg/kg) and rifampicin (100 mg/kg); and intra-gastric administration of pyrazinamid (350 mg/kg) and silymarin (200 mg/kg). Hepatotoxicity was induced by a combination of drugs with INH+RIF and INH+RIF+PZA. Hepatoprotective effect of silymarin was investigated by co-administration of silymarin together with the drugs. Serum biochemical tests for liver functions and histopathological examination of livers were carried out to demonstrate the protection of liver against anti-tuberculosis drugs by silymarin.
RESULTS
Treatment of rats with INH+RIF or INH+RIF+PZA induced hepatotoxicity as evidenced by biochemical measurements: serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT), aspartate aminotransferase (AST) and alkaline phosphatase (ALP) activities and the levels of total bilirubin were elevated, and the levels of albumin and total protein were decreased in drugs-treated animals. Histopathological changes were also observed in livers of animals that received drugs. Simultaneous administration of silymarin significantly decreased the biochemical and histological changes induced by the drugs.
CONCLUSION
The active components of silymarin had protective effects against hepatotoxic actions of drugs used in the chemotherapy of tuberculosis in animal models. Since no significant toxicity of silymarin is reported in human studies, this plant extract can be used as a dietary supplement by patients taking anti-tuberculosis medications. |
Comparison of Fixed and Variable Pitch Actuators for Agile Quadrotors | This paper presents the design, analysis and experimental testing of a variablepitch quadrotor. A custom in-lab built quadrotor with on-board attitude stabilization is developed and tested. An analysis of the dynamic differences in thrust output between a fixed-pitch and variable-pitch propeller is given and validated with simulation and experimental results. It is shown that variable-pitch actuation has significant advantages over the conventional fixed-pitch configuration, including increased thrust rate of change, decreased control saturation, and the ability to quickly and efficiently reverse thrust. These advantages result in improved quadrotor tracking of linear and angular acceleration command inputs in both simulation and hardware testing. The benefits should enable more aggressive and aerobatic flying with the variable-pitch quadrotor than with standard fixed-pitch actuation, while retaining much of the mechanical simplicity and robustness of the fixed-pitch quadrotor. |
Evolutionary dynamics of hepatitis C virus NS3 protease domain during and following treatment with narlaprevir, a potent NS3 protease inhibitor. | Narlaprevir, a hepatitis C virus (HCV) NS3/4A serine protease inhibitor, has demonstrated robust antiviral activity in a placebo-controlled phase 1 study. To study evolutionary dynamics of resistant variants, the NS3 protease sequence was clonally analysed in thirty-two HCV genotype 1-infected patients following treatment with narlaprevir. Narlaprevir monotherapy was administered for one week (period 1) followed by narlaprevir/pegylated interferon-alpha-2b combination therapy with or without ritonavir (period 2) during two weeks, interrupted by a washout period of one month. Thereafter, all patients initiated pegylated interferon-alpha-2b/ribavirin combination therapy. Longitudinal clonal analysis was performed in those patients with NS3 mutations. After narlaprevir re-exposure, resistance-associated mutations at position V36, T54, R155 and A156 were detected in five patients in >95% of the clones. Narlaprevir retreatment resulted in a 2.58 and 5.06 log10 IU/mL viral load decline in patients with and without mutations, respectively (P=<0.01). After treatment, resistant variants were replaced with wild-type virus within 2-24 weeks in three patients. However, the R155K mutation was still observed 3.1 years after narlaprevir dosing in two patients in 5% and 45% of the viral population. Resistant variants could be detected early during treatment with narlaprevir. A slower viral load decline was observed in those patients with resistance-associated mutations detectable by direct population sequencing. These mutations disappeared within six months following treatment with the exception of R155K mutation, which persisted in two patients. |
Antimalarial activity of methanolic extracts from plants used in Kenyan ethnomedicine and their interactions with chloroquine (CQ) against a CQ-tolerant rodent parasite, in mice. | Methanolic extracts from 15 medicinal plants representing 11 families, used traditionally for malaria treatment in Kenya were screened for their in vivo antimalarial activity in mice against a chloroquine (CQ)-tolerant Plasmodium berghei NK65, either alone or in combination with CQ. The plant parts used ranged from leaves (L), stem bark (SB), root bark (RB), seeds (S) and whole plant (W). When used alone, extracts from seven plants, Clerodendrum myricoides (RB), Ficus sur (L/SB/RB), Maytenus acuminata (L/RB), Rhamnus prinoides (L/RB), Rhamnus staddo (RB), Toddalia asiatica (RB) and Vernonia lasiopus (RB) had statistically significant parasitaemia suppressions of 31.7-59.3%. In combination with CQ, methanolic extracts of Albizia gummifera (SB), Ficus sur (RB), Rhamnus prinoides and Rhamnus staddo (L/RB), Caesalpinia volkensii (L), Maytenus senegalensis (L/RB), Withania somnifera (RB), Ekebergia capensis (L/SB), Toddalia asiatica (L/RB) and Vernonia lasiopus (L/SB/RB) gave statistically significant and improved suppressions which ranged from 45.5 to 85.1%. The fact that these activities were up to five-fold higher than that of extract alone may suggest synergistic interactions. Remarkable parasitaemia suppression by the extracts, either alone or in combination with CQ mostly resulted into longer mouse survival relative to the controls, in some cases by a further 2 weeks. Plants, which showed significant antimalarial activity including Vernonia lasiopus, Toddalia asiatica, Ficus sur, Rhamnus prinoides and Rhamnus staddo warrant further evaluation in the search for novel antimalarial agents against drug-resistant malaria. |
Solid State Marx Generator | Marx generators can produce high voltage pulses using multiple identical stages that operate at a fraction of the total output voltage, without the need for a step-up transformer that limits the pulse risetimes and lowers the efficiency of the system. Each Marx stage includes a capacitor or pulse forming network, and a high voltage switch. Typically, these switches are spark gaps resulting in Marx generators with low repetition rates and limited lifetimes. The development of economical, compact, high voltage, high di/dt, and fast turn-on solid-state switches make it easy to build economical, long lifetime, high voltage Marx generators capable of high pulse repetition rates. We have constructed a Marx generator using our 24 kV thyristor based switches, which are capable of conducting 14 kA peak currents with ringing discharges at >25 kA/mus rate of current risetimes. The switches have short turn-on delays, less than 200 ns, low timing jitters, and are triggered by a single 10 V isolated trigger pulse. This paper will include a description of a 4-stage solid-state Marx and triggering system, as well as show data from operation at 15 kV charging voltage. The Marx was used to drive a one-stage argon ion accelerator |
Embryology : constructing the organism | Primitive multicellular organisms radiate animal phyla bilateral animal phyla - acoelomates and pseudocoelomates bilateral animal phyla - protostome coelmates bilateral animal phyla - deuterstome coelomates plants. |
Dreaming and the brain: toward a cognitive neuroscience of conscious states. | Sleep researchers in different disciplines disagree about how fully dreaming can be explained in terms of brain physiology. Debate has focused on whether REM sleep dreaming is qualitatively different from nonREM (NREM) sleep and waking. A review of psychophysiological studies shows clear quantitative differences between REM and NREM mentation and between REM and waking mentation. Recent neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies also differentiate REM, NREM, and waking in features with phenomenological implications. Both evidence and theory suggest that there are isomorphisms between the phenomenology and the physiology of dreams. We present a three-dimensional model with specific examples from normally and abnormally changing conscious states. |
Clustering Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks : A Survey 1 st | In recent years, the applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have grown enormously. In WSNs there is one mechanism used to enlarge the lifespan of network and provide more efficient functioning procedures that is clustering. Clustering is a process to subdivide the sensing field of sensor network into number of clusters. Each cluster selects a leader called cluster head. A cluster head may be elected by the sensor node in the cluster or pre assigned by the network designer. Optimized Clustering can save lot of energy in the network. In our paper we have surveyed various clustering protocols for wireless sensor networks and compared on various parameters like cluster count, cluster size, cluster density, message count, node deployment, heterogeneity of nodes, location awareness and cluster head selection process etc. |
Experiential Learning Theory: A Dynamic, Holistic Approach to Management Learning, Education and Development | Experiential learning theory (ELT) has been widely used in management learning research and practice for over thirty-five years. Building on the foundational works of Kurt Lewin, John Dewey and others, experiential learning theory offers a dynamic theory based on a learning cycle driven by the resolution of the dual dialectics of action/reflection and experience/abstraction. These two dimensions define a holistic learning space wherein learning transactions take place between individuals and the environment. The learning space is multi-level and can describe learning and development in commensurate ways at the level of the individual, the group, and the organization. This approach is illustrated by reviewing current research on individual learning styles and managerial problem solving/decision making, the process of team learning and organizational learning. We describe how ELT can serve as a useful framework to design and implement management education programs in higher education and management training and development. |
A Distributed Hash Table based Address Resolution Scheme for Large-Scale Ethernet Networks | Ethernet's plug-&-play feature is built on its use of flat (location independent) addresses and use of broadcasts to resolve unknown MAC addresses. While plug-&-play is one of Ethernet's most attractive features, it also affects its scalability. As the number of active MAC addresses in the network grows beyond the capacity of forwarding caches in bridges, the odds of "cache-misses," each triggering a broadcast, grow as well. The resulting increase in broadcast bandwidth consumption affects scalability. To address this problem, we propose a simple address resolution scheme based on an adaptation of distributed hash tables where a single query suffices in the steady state. The new scheme is implemented on advanced bridges maintaining backward compatibility with legacy bridges and eliminating reliance on broadcasts for address discovery. Comparisons with a legacy, broadcast-based scheme are carried out along several metrics that demonstrate the new scheme's robustness and ability to improve scalability. |
A Processing Model for Free Word Order Languages | Like many verb-final languages, German displays considerable word-order freedom: there is no syntactic constraint on the ordering of the nominal arguments of a verb, as long as the verb remains in final position. This effect is referred to as “scrambling”, and is interpreted in transformational frameworks as leftward movement of the arguments. Furthermore, arguments from an embedded clause may move out of their clause; this effect is referred to as “long-distance scrambling”. While scrambling has recently received considerable attention in the syntactic literature, the status of long-distance scrambling has only rarely been addressed. The reason for this is the problematic status of the data: not only is long-distance scrambling highly dependent on pragmatic context, it also is strongly subject to degradation due to processing constraints. As in the case of center-embedding, it is not immediately clear whether to assume that observed unacceptability of highly complex sentences is due to grammatical restrictions, or whether we should assume that the competence grammar does not place any restrictions on scrambling (and that, therefore, all such sentences are in fact grammatical), and the unacceptability of some (or most) of the grammatically possible word orders is due to processing limitations. In this paper, we will argue for the second view by presenting a processing model for German. Comments University of Pennsylvania Institute for Research in Cognitive Science Technical Report No. IRCS-95-13. This technical report is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/ircs_reports/127 |
DeLS-3D: Deep Localization and Segmentation with a 3D Semantic Map | For applications such as augmented reality, autonomous driving, self-localization/camera pose estimation and scene parsing are crucial technologies. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to tackle these two problems simultaneously. The uniqueness of our design is a sensor fusion scheme which integrates camera videos, motion sensors (GPS/IMU), and a 3D semantic map in order to achieve robustness and efficiency of the system. Specifically, we first have an initial coarse camera pose obtained from consumer-grade GPS/IMU, based on which a label map can be rendered from the 3D semantic map. Then, the rendered label map and the RGB image are jointly fed into a pose CNN, yielding a corrected camera pose. In addition, to incorporate temporal information, a multi-layer recurrent neural network (RNN) is further deployed improve the pose accuracy. Finally, based on the pose from RNN, we render a new label map, which is fed together with the RGB image into a segment CNN which produces perpixel semantic label. In order to validate our approach, we build a dataset with registered 3D point clouds and video camera images. Both the point clouds and the images are semantically-labeled. Each video frame has ground truth pose from highly accurate motion sensors. We show that practically, pose estimation solely relying on images like PoseNet [25] may fail due to street view confusion, and it is important to fuse multiple sensors. Finally, various ablation studies are performed, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system. In particular, we show that scene parsing and pose estimation are mutually beneficial to achieve a more robust and accurate system. |
The Multi-User Security of Authenticated Encryption: AES-GCM in TLS 1.3 | We initiate the study of multi-user (mu) security of authenticated encryption (AE) schemes as a way to rigorously formulate, and answer, questions about the “randomized nonce” mechanism proposed for the use of the AE scheme GCM in TLS 1.3. We (1) Give definitions of mu ind (indistinguishability) and mu kr (key recovery) security for AE (2) Characterize the intent of nonce randomization as being improved mu security as a defense against mass surveillance (3) Cast the method as a (new) AE scheme RGCM (4) Analyze and compare the mu security of both GCM and RGCM in the model where the underlying block cipher is ideal, showing that the mu security of the latter is indeed superior in many practical contexts to that of the former, and (5) Propose an alternative AE scheme XGCM having the same efficiency as RGCM but better mu security and a more simple and modular design. |
An Overview of Cognitive Radio Networks | Radio spectrum needed for applications such as mobile telephony, digital video broadcasting (DVB), wireless local area networks (WiFi), wireless sensor networks (ZigBee), and internet of things is enormous and continues to grow exponentially. Since spectrum is limited and the current usage can be inefficient, cognitive radio paradigm has emerged to exploit the licensed and/or underutilized spectrum much more effectively. In this article, we present the motivation for and details of cognitive radio. A critical requirement for cognitive radio is the accurate, real-time estimation of spectrum usage. We thus review various spectrum sensing techniques, propagation effects, interference modeling, spatial randomness, upper layer details, and several existing cognitive radio standards. |
A Survey of the Functional Splits Proposed for 5 G Mobile Crosshaul Networks Line | Pacing the way towards 5G has lead researchers and industry in the direction of centralized processing known from Cloud-Radio Access Networks (C-RAN). In C-RAN research, a variety of different functional splits is presented by different names and focusing on different directions. The functional split determines how many Base Station (BS) functions to leave locally, close to the user, with the benefit of relaxing fronthaul network bitrate and delay requirements, and how many functions to centralize with the possibility of achieving greater processing benefits. This work presents for the first time a comprehensive overview systematizing the different work directions for both research and industry, while providing a detailed description of each functional split option and an assessment of the advantages and disadvantages. This work gives an overview of where the most effort has been directed in terms of functional splits, and where there is room for further studies. The standardization currently taking place is also considered and mapped into the research directions. It is investigated how the fronthaul network will be affected by the choice of functional split, both in terms of bitrates and latency, and as the different functional splits provide different advantages and disadvantages, the option of flexible functional splits is also looked into. Keywords—Functional Split; Crosshaul; X-haul; C-RAN; Fronthaul; standardization; industry; network architecture; Please refer to the list of acronyms provided in the end of the paper, right before the references. |
Contextual Information Improves OOV Detection in Speech | Out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words represent an important source of error in large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) systems. These words cause recognition failures, which propagate through pipeline systems impacting the performance of downstream applications. The detection of OOV regions in the output of a LVCSR system is typically addressed as a binary classification task, where each region is independently classified using local information. In this paper, we show that jointly predicting OOV regions, and including contextual information from each region, leads to substantial improvement in OOV detection. Compared to the state-of-the-art, we reduce the missed OOV rate from 42.6% to 28.4% at 10% false alarm rate. |
The Impact of Power Allocation on Cooperative Non-orthogonal Multiple Access Networks With SWIPT | In this paper, a cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) network is considered, where a source communicates with two users through an energy harvesting relay. The impact of two types of NOMA power allocation policies, namely NOMA with fixed power allocation (F-NOMA) and cognitive radio inspired NOMA (CR-NOMA), on the considered cooperative simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) system is investigated. In particular, closed-form expressions for the outage probability and their high SNR approximations are derived to characterize the performance of SWIPT-F-NOMA and SWIPT-CR-NOMA. These developed analytical results demonstrate that the two power allocation policies realize different tradeoffs between the reception reliability, user fairness and system complexity. Compared with the conventional SWIPT relaying networks with orthogonal multiple access (OMA), the proposed NOMA schemes can effectively reduce the outage probability, although all of them realize the same diversity gain. |
Large-Scale Parallel Multibody Dynamics with Frictional Contact on the Graphical Processing Unit | In the context of simulating the frictional contact dynamic s of large systems of rigid bodies, this paper reviews a novel method for solving large cone complementarity proble ms by means of a fixed-point iteration algorithm. The method is an extension of the Gauss-Seidel and Gauss-Jacobi methods with overrelaxation for symmetric convex linear complementarity problems. Convergent under fairly standa rd assumptions, the method is implemented in a parallel framework by using a single instruction multiple data compu tation paradigm promoted by the Compute Unified Device Architecture library for graphical processing unit progra mming. The framework supports the simulation of problems with more than 1 million bodies in contact. Simulation thus b ecomes a viable tool for investigating the dynamics of complex systems such as ground vehicles running on sand, pow der composites, and granular material flow. |
Dyscalculia : Characteristics , Causes , and Treatments | Developmental Dyscalculia (DD) is a learning disorder affecting the ability to acquire school-level arithmetic skills, affecting approximately 3-6% of individuals. Progress in understanding the root causes of DD and how best to treat it have been impeded by lack of widespread research and variation in characterizations of the disorder across studies. However, recent years have witnessed significant growth in the field, and a growing body of behavioral and neuroimaging evidence now points to an underlying deficit in the representation and processing of numerical magnitude information as a potential core deficit in DD. An additional product of the recent progress in understanding DD is the resurgence of a distinction between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ developmental dyscalculia. The first appears related to impaired development of brain mechanisms for processing numerical magnitude information, while the latter refers to mathematical deficits stemming from external factors such as poor teaching, low socio-economic status, and behavioral attention problems or domain-general cognitive deficits. Increased awareness of this distinction going forward, in combination with longitudinal empirical research, offers great potential for deepening our understanding of the disorder and developing effective educational interventions. |
Mokken scale analysis of mental health and well-being questionnaire item responses: a non-parametric IRT method in empirical research for applied health researchers | BACKGROUND
Mokken scaling techniques are a useful tool for researchers who wish to construct unidimensional tests or use questionnaires that comprise multiple binary or polytomous items. The stochastic cumulative scaling model offered by this approach is ideally suited when the intention is to score an underlying latent trait by simple addition of the item response values. In our experience, the Mokken model appears to be less well-known than for example the (related) Rasch model, but is seeing increasing use in contemporary clinical research and public health. Mokken's method is a generalisation of Guttman scaling that can assist in the determination of the dimensionality of tests or scales, and enables consideration of reliability, without reliance on Cronbach's alpha. This paper provides a practical guide to the application and interpretation of this non-parametric item response theory method in empirical research with health and well-being questionnaires.
METHODS
Scalability of data from 1) a cross-sectional health survey (the Scottish Health Education Population Survey) and 2) a general population birth cohort study (the National Child Development Study) illustrate the method and modeling steps for dichotomous and polytomous items respectively. The questionnaire data analyzed comprise responses to the 12 item General Health Questionnaire, under the binary recoding recommended for screening applications, and the ordinal/polytomous responses to the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS
After an initial analysis example in which we select items by phrasing (six positive versus six negatively worded items) we show that all items from the 12-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12)--when binary scored--were scalable according to the double monotonicity model, in two short scales comprising six items each (Bech's "well-being" and "distress" clinical scales). An illustration of ordinal item analysis confirmed that all 14 positively worded items of the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (WEMWBS) met criteria for the monotone homogeneity model but four items violated double monotonicity with respect to a single underlying dimension.Software availability and commands used to specify unidimensionality and reliability analysis and graphical displays for diagnosing monotone homogeneity and double monotonicity are discussed, with an emphasis on current implementations in freeware. |
Adolescent Anorexia Nervosa: cognitive performance after weight recovery. | OBJECTIVE
Although there is no definitive consensus on the impairment of neuropsychological functions, most studies of adults with Anorexia Nervosa (AN) find impaired functioning in cognitive domains such as visual-spatial abilities. The objective of this study is to assess the cognitive functions in adolescents with AN before and after weight recovery and to explore the relationship between cognitive performance and menstruation.
METHODS
Twenty-five female adolescents with AN were assessed by a neuropsychological battery while underweight and then following six months of treatment and weight recovery. Twenty-six healthy female subjects of a similar age were also evaluated at both time points.
RESULTS
Underweight patients with AN showed worse cognitive performance than control subjects in immediate recall, organization and time taken to copy the Rey's Complex Figure Test (RCFT). After weight recovery, AN patients presented significant improvements in all tests, and differences between patients and controls disappeared. Patients with AN and persistence of amenorrhea at follow-up (n=8) performed worse on Block Design, delayed recall of Visual Reproduction and Stroop Test than patients with resumed menstruation (n=14) and the control group, though the two AN groups were similar in body mass index, age and psychopathological scale scores.
CONCLUSION
Weight recovery improves cognitive functioning in adolescents with AN. The normalization of neuropsychological performance is better in patients who have recovered at least one menstrual cycle. The normalization of hormonal function seems to be essential for the normalization of cognitive performance, even in adolescents with a very short recovery time. |
Daily Routine in Cosmetic Dermatology | Increasingly, patients are requesting information and treatments to ameliorate the effects of skin aging. Skin aging is a biological process determinated by endogenous and exogenous factors. Cosmetic interventions may have a significant impact on the health and well-being of patients. Over the last years, several antiaging strategies have been developed, and doctors must be up to date with these constant advances. Interventions, for the facial aging mainly, may be categorized into four “Rs” of facial rejuvenation: resurfacing (chemical peels, dermabrasion, microneedling, and ablative and non-ablative lasers), redraping (the various pulling and lifting facial surgical procedures), relaxing (chemodenervation with paralytic agents), and replacement/recontouring (the use of filling agent for superficial and deep soft tissue augmentation). However, before delving into the techniques to perform cosmetic procedures, it is essential to have full knowledge of the histology, physiology, and topographic particularities of the skin. This first chapter is also the first and essential step for the construction of your knowledge on cosmetic procedures. So, make sure you understand every detail before you |
A Trust Based Framework for Secure Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks | In unattended and hostile environments, node compromise can become a disastrous threat to wireless sensor networks and introduce uncertainty in the aggregation results. A compromised node often tends to completely reveal its secrets to the adversary which in turn renders purely cryptography-based approaches vulnerable. How to secure the information aggregation process against compromised-node attacks and quantify the uncertainty existing in the aggregation results has become an important research issue. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a trust based framework, which is rooted in sound statistics and some other distinct and yet closely coupled techniques. The trustworthiness (reputation) of each individual sensor node is evaluated by using an information theoretic concept, Kullback-Leibler (KL) distance, to identify the compromised nodes through an unsupervised learning algorithm. Upon aggregating, an opinion, a metric of the degree of belief, is generated to represent the uncertainty in the aggregation result. As the result is being disseminated and assembled through the routes to the sink, this opinion will be propagated and regulated by Josang's belief model. Following this model, the uncertainty within the data and aggregation results can be effectively quantified throughout the network. Simulation results demonstrate that our trust based framework provides a powerful mechanism for detecting compromised nodes and reasoning about the uncertainty in the network. It further can purge false data to accomplish robust aggregation in the presence of multiple compromised nodes |
Measuring Information Security Awareness - A West Africa Gold Mining Environment Case | AngloGold Ashanti is an international gold mining company that has recently implemented an information security awareness program worldwide at all of their operations. Following the implementation, there was a normal business need to evaluate and measure the success and effectiveness of the program. A measuring tool that can be applied globally and that addressed AngloGold Ashanti’s unique requirements was developed and applied at the mining sites located in the West Africa region. The objective of this paper is, firstly, to give a brief overview on the measuring tool developed and, secondly to report on the application and results in the West Africa region. |
Diagnosis of physical illness in psychiatric patients using axis III and a standardized medical history. | Psychiatrists' axis III diagnoses of physical illnesses in 357 psychiatric patients were compared with diagnoses by a physician's assistant using a standardized medical history form. The physician's assistant detected nearly three times as many physical illnesses as the psychiatrists. The psychiatrists were significantly more likely to miss diagnoses among older patients and women. Patients who met criteria for depressive disorders appeared to be at greatest risk for undetected illnesses, followed by patients with bipolar disorders and schizophrenia. Patients with a secondary diagnosis of substance abuse had significantly more undetected illness than those who did not abuse substances. The authors suggest that current axis III guidelines are inadequate and that a systematic review of physical health problems should be part of the psychiatric diagnostic assessment. |
ARITHMETIC PROPERTIES OF COEFFICIENTS OF HALF-INTEGRAL WEIGHT MAASS-POINCARÉ SERIES | Let j(z) be the usual modular function for SL2(Z) j(z) = q−1 + 744 + 196884q + 21493760q + · · · , where q = e . The values of modular functions such as j(z) at imaginary quadratic arguments in H, the upper half of the complex plane, are known as singular moduli. Singular moduli are algebraic integers which play many roles in number theory. For example, they generate class fields of imaginary quadratic fields, and they parameterize isomorphism classes of elliptic curves with complex multiplication. We shall slightly abuse terminology by referring to the value of any modular invariant at an imaginary quadratic argument as a singular modulus. In an important paper [23], Zagier gave a new proof of Borcherds’ famous theorem on the infinite product expansions of integer weight modular forms on SL2(Z) with Heegner divisor. This proof, as well as all of the results of [23], are connected to his beautiful observation that the generating functions for traces of singular moduli are essentially weight 3/2 weakly holomorphic modular forms. |
IEC 61850 based OPC UA Communication-The Future of Smart Grid Automation | Within this contribution, we outline the use of the new automation standards family OPC Unified Architecture (IEC 62541) in scope with the IEC 61850 field automation standard. The IEC 61850 provides both an abstract data model and an abstract communication interface. Different technology mappings to implement the model exist. With the upcoming OPC UA, a new communication model to implement abstract interfaces has been introduced. We outline its use in this contribution and also give examples on how it can be used alongside the IEC 61970 Common Information Model to properly integrate ICT and field automation at communication standards level. |
An empirical evaluation of information metrics for low-rate and high-rate DDoS attack detection | Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks represent a major threat to uninterrupted and efficient Internet service. In this paper, we empirically evaluate several major information metrics, namely, Hartley entropy, Shannon entropy, Renyi’s entropy, generalized entropy, Kullback–Leibler divergence and generalized information distance measure in their ability to detect both low-rate and high-rate DDoS attacks. These metrics can be used to describe characteristics of network traffic data and an appropriate metric facilitates building an effective model to detect both low-rate and high-rate DDoS attacks. We use MIT Lincoln Laboratory, CAIDA and TUIDS DDoS datasets to illustrate the efficiency and effectiveness of each metric for DDoS detection. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. |
The Scrum Software Development Process for Small Teams | Why Scrum? As members of the Software Technology Group, our group is responsible for introducing new technologies and processes into our organization at AG Communication Systems in Phoenix, Arizona. We research new approaches and sponsor their introduction and growth. We also conduct development project checkups for ongoing projects and postmortems for completed ones. In our periodic postmortems and checkups, we noticed some recurring problems for our New Business Opportunity (NBO) projects. Figure 1 lists some comments arising from projects at our organization that faced significant challenges. In the new telecommunications market where our company operates, change is overwhelming. Software developers have always complained about changing requirements, but in traditional approaches they assumed they would understand the requirements before moving on to the next phase. In the current environment, however, project requirements might be unclear or unknown even as the project gets underway. Indeed, the market might not be defined—it might even be that no one clearly understands the product under development. Most development teams respond with, “Make the chaos go away! Give us better requirements!” Unfortunately or not, chaos is the reality in this new business environfocus |
Trainable frontend for robust and far-field keyword spotting | Robust and far-field speech recognition is critical to enable true hands-free communication. In far-field conditions, signals are attenuated due to distance. To improve robustness to loudness variation, we introduce a novel frontend called per-channel energy normalization (PCEN). The key ingredient of PCEN is the use of an automatic gain control based dynamic compression to replace the widely used static (such as log or root) compression. We evaluate PCEN on the keyword spotting task. On our large rerecorded noisy and far-field eval sets, we show that PCEN significantly improves recognition performance. Furthermore, we model PCEN as neural network layers and optimize high-dimensional PCEN parameters jointly with the keyword spotting acoustic model. The trained PCEN frontend demonstrates significant further improvements without increasing model complexity or inference-time cost. |
Lectures on Superconformal Quantum Mechanics and Multi-Black Hole Moduli Spaces | This contribution to the proceedings of the 1999 NATO ASI on Quantum Geometry at Akureyri, Iceland, is based on notes of lectures given by A. Strominger. Topics include N-particle conformal quantum mechanics, extended superconformal quantum mechanics and multi-black hole moduli spaces. |
Exploring social influence via posterior effect of word-of-mouth recommendations | Word-of-mouth has proven an effective strategy for promoting products through social relations. Particularly, existing studies have convincingly demonstrated that word-of-mouth recommendations can boost users' prior expectation and hence encourage them to adopt a certain innovation, such as buying a book or watching a movie. However, less attention has been paid to studying the posterior effect of word-of-mouth recommendations, i.e., whether or not word-of-mouth recommendations can influence users' posterior evaluation on the products or services recommended to them, the answer to which is critical to estimating user satisfaction when proposing a word-of-mouth marketing strategy. In order to fill this gap, in this paper we empirically study the above issue and verify that word-of-mouth recommendations are strongly associated with users' posterior evaluation. Through elaborately designed statistical hypothesis tests we prove the causality that word-of-mouth recommendations directly prompt the posterior evaluation of receivers. Finally, we propose a method for investigating users' social influence, namely, their ability to affect followers' posterior evaluation via word-of-mouth recommendations, by examining the number of their followers and their sensitivity of discovering good items. The experimental results on real datasets show that our method can successfully identify 78% influential friends with strong social influence. |
Preference Analyses of Residential Appliances in Demand Response: A Novel Perspective Based on Behavioral Economics | Although considerable of literature on residential demand response strategy takes user satisfaction into account, we argue that those researches cannot accurately reflect user satisfaction because they do not theoretically analyze the user's decision-making process from a cost-benefit perspective. In order to precisely characterize the user satisfaction of electricity consumption, this paper proposes a utility function (in an economic sense)-based approach for sophisticatedly formulating user satisfaction. Additionally, behavioral economics is introduced to describe user's decision-making process in demand response, and a washer dryer and a PEV are taken as examples. Since the proposed method can provide a theoretically practical analytical framework which indeed and elaborately takes human factors into consideration, user enthusiasm for demand response can be ensured and the effectiveness of the demand response strategy can be more easily realized. |
Super-resolution image reconstruction: a technical overview | MAY 2003 IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE 21 1053-5888/03/$17.00©2003IEEE In most electronic imaging applications, images with high resolution (HR) are desired and often required. HR means that pixel density within an image is high, and therefore an HR image can offer more details that may be critical in various applications. For example, HR medical images are very helpful for a doctor to make a correct diagnosis. It may be easy to distinguish an object from similar ones using HR satellite images, and the performance of pattern recognition in computer vision can be improved if an HR image is provided. Since the 1970s, charge-coupled device (CCD) and CMOS image sensors have been widely used to capture digital images. Although these sensors are suitable for most imaging applications, the current resolution level and consumer price will not satisfy the future demand. For example, people want an inexpensive HR digital camera/camcorder or see the price gradually reduce, and scientists often need a very HR level close to that of an analog 35 mm film that has no visible artifacts when an image is magnified. Thus, finding a way to increase the current resolution level is needed. The most direct solution to increase spatial resolution is to reduce the pixel size (i.e., increase the number of pixels per unit area) by sensor manufacturing techniques. As the pixel size decreases, however, the amount of light available also decreases. It generates shot noise that degrades the image quality severely. To reduce the pixel size without suffering the effects of shot noise, therefore, there exists the limitation of the pixel size reduction, and the optimally limited pixel size is estimated at about 40 μm2 for a 0.35 μm CMOS process. The current image sensor technology has almost reached this level. Another approach for enhancing the spatial resolution is to increase the chip size, which leads to an increase in capacitance [1]. Since large capacitance makes it difficult to speed up a charge transfer rate, this approach is not considered effective. The high cost for high precision optics and image sensors is also an important concern in many commercial applications regarding HR imaging. Therefore, a new approach toward increasing spatial resolution is required to overcome these limitations of the sensors and optics manufacturing technology. One promising approach is to use signal processing techniques to obtain an HR image (or sequence) from observed multiple low-resolution (LR) images. Recently, such a resolution enhancement approach has been one of the most active research areas, and it is called super resolution (SR) (or HR) image reconstruction or simply resolution enhancement in the literature [1]-[61]. In this article, we use the term “SR image reconstruction” to refer to a signal processing approach toward resolution enhancement because the term “super” in “super ©DIGITAL VISION, LTD. |
Immune Disorders and Its Correlation with Gut Microbiome | Allergic disorders such as atopic dermatitis and asthma are common hyper-immune disorders in industrialized countries. Along with genetic association, environmental factors and gut microbiota have been suggested as major triggering factors for the development of atopic dermatitis. Numerous studies support the association of hygiene hypothesis in allergic immune disorders that a lack of early childhood exposure to diverse microorganism increases susceptibility to allergic diseases. Among the symbiotic microorganisms (e.g. gut flora or probiotics), probiotics confer health benefits through multiple action mechanisms including modification of immune response in gut associated lymphoid tissue (GALT). Although many human clinical trials and mouse studies demonstrated the beneficial effects of probiotics in diverse immune disorders, this effect is strain specific and needs to apply specific probiotics for specific allergic diseases. Herein, we briefly review the diverse functions and regulation mechanisms of probiotics in diverse disorders. |
Planning for Conjunctive Goals | The problem of achieving COnlUnCtlve goals has been central to domain-independent planning research, the nonhnear constraint-posting approach has been most successful Previous planners of this type have been comphcated, heurtstw, and ill-defined 1 have combmed and dtstdled the state of the art into a simple, precise, Implemented algorithm (TWEAK) which I have proved correct and complete 1 analyze previous work on domam-mdependent conlunctwe plannmg; tn retrospect tt becomes clear that all conluncttve planners, hnear and nonhnear, work the same way The efficiency and correctness of these planners depends on the traditional add/ delete-hst representation for actions, which drastically limits their usefulness I present theorems that suggest that efficient general purpose planning with more expressive action representations ts impossible, and suggest ways to avoid this problem |
A corpus-linguistic analysis of English-ic vs-ical adjectives | 1. It turns out to be very difficult to detect any pattern governing the distribution of suffixes: when does an adjective end in -ic only (cf acrobatic/*acrobatical) and when does it end in -ical only (*zoologic/zoological)? 2. There are cases where one adjective root takes both suffixes (electric(al), historic(al) etc), which raise further, even more complex questions: a. are the two forms that constitute a pair synonymous? Put differently, to what degree are the adjective forms differentiated today? – if they are not synonymous, b. does each suffix contribute some constant meaning component according to which the adjectives constituting a pair can be reliably distinguished or is there some other possibility to distinguish between the different adjective forms? |
On the Waveform for 5G | In this article, an overview and an in-depth analysis of the most discussed 5G waveform candidates are presented. In addition to general requirements, the nature of each waveform is revealed including the motivation, the underlying methodology, and the associated advantages and disadvantages. Furthermore, these waveform candidates are categorized and compared both qualitatively and quantitatively. By doing all these, the study in this work offers not only design guidelines but also operational suggestions for the 5G waveform. |
Learning the Curriculum with Bayesian Optimization for Task-Specific Word Representation Learning | We use Bayesian optimization to learn curricula for word representation learning, optimizing performance on downstream tasks that depend on the learned representations as features. The curricula are modeled by a linear ranking function which is the scalar product of a learned weight vector and an engineered feature vector that characterizes the different aspects of the complexity of each instance in the training corpus. We show that learning the curriculum improves performance on a variety of downstream tasks over random orders and in comparison to the natural corpus order. |
Joint Entity Recognition and Linking in Technical Domains Using Undirected Probabilistic Graphical Models | The problems of recognizing mentions of entities in texts and linking them to unique knowledge base identifiers have received considerable attention in recent years. In this paper we present a probabilistic system based on undirected graphical models that jointly addresses both the entity recognition and the linking task. Our framework considers the span of mentions of entities as well as the corresponding knowledge base identifier as random variables and models the joint assignment using a factorized distribution. We show that our approach can be easily applied to different technical domains by merely exchanging the underlying ontology. On the task of recognizing and linking disease names, we show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art systems DNorm and TaggerOne, as well as two strong lexicon-based baselines. On the task of recognizing and linking chemical names, our system achieves comparable performance to the state-of-the-art. |
Multisensory control of hippocampal spatiotemporal selectivity. | The hippocampal cognitive map is thought to be driven by distal visual cues and self-motion cues. However, other sensory cues also influence place cells. Hence, we measured rat hippocampal activity in virtual reality (VR), where only distal visual and nonvestibular self-motion cues provided spatial information, and in the real world (RW). In VR, place cells showed robust spatial selectivity; however, only 20% were track active, compared with 45% in the RW. This indicates that distal visual and nonvestibular self-motion cues are sufficient to provide selectivity, but vestibular and other sensory cues present in RW are necessary to fully activate the place-cell population. In addition, bidirectional cells preferentially encoded distance along the track in VR, while encoding absolute position in RW. Taken together, these results suggest the differential contributions of these sensory cues in shaping the hippocampal population code. Theta frequency was reduced, and its speed dependence was abolished in VR, but phase precession was unaffected, constraining mechanisms governing both hippocampal theta oscillations and temporal coding. These results reveal cooperative and competitive interactions between sensory cues for control over hippocampal spatiotemporal selectivity and theta rhythm. |
Running head : FAKING GOOD & FAKING BAD Faking good and faking bad among military conscripts | A question that continues to worry practitioners and researchers is how much recruiters can trust self-reported measures of personality. Several models of faking assume that applicants differ in their motivation to fake, but field evidence regarding these differences is still rare. For the current field study, we exploited a unique setting: The examination for compulsory military service in Switzerland. We were able to show that differences in the military service motivation of Swiss conscripts (N = 918) were associated with faking good or faking bad, respectively. In particular, military service motivation was related to self-admitted faking, mean personality scores, and increased correlations between personality dimensions, which supports faking models that stress the importance of motivational differences. |
Computer-Based Clinical Decision Support System for Prediction of Heart Diseases Using Naïve Bayes Algorithm | Our healthcare sector daily collects a huge data including clinical examination, vital parameters, investigation reports, treatment follow-up and drug decisions etc. But very unfortunately it is not analyzed and mined in an appropriate way. The Health care industry collects the huge amounts of health care data which unfortunately are not “mined” to discover hidden information for effective decision making for health care practitioners. Data mining refers to using a variety of techniques to identify suggest of information or decision making knowledge in database and extracting these in a way that they can put to use in areas such as decision support , Clustering ,Classification and Prediction. This paper has developed a Computer-Based Clinical Decision Support System for Prediction of Heart Diseases (CCDSS) using Naïve Bayes data mining algorithm. CCDSS can answer complex “what if” queries which traditional decision support systems cannot. Using medical profiles such as age, sex, spO2,chest pain type, heart rate, blood pressure and blood sugar it can predict the likelihood of patients getting a heart disease. CCDSS is Webbased, user-friendly, scalable, reliable and expandable. It is implemented on the PHPplatform. Keywords—Computer-Based Clinical Decision Support System(CCDSS), Heart disease, Data mining, Naïve Bayes. |
Correlation Between Chemical Composition and Antifungal Activity of the Essential Oils of Eight Cinnamomum. Species | Fourteen essential oils hydrodistilled from eight Cinnamomum (Lauraceae) species (C. pubescens Kochummen, C. impressicostatum Kosterm, C. microphyllum Ridl., C. scortechinii Gamb., C. rhyncophyllum Miq., C. cordatum Kosterm, C. zeylanicum Blume, and C. mollissimum Hook f.) were examined for their antifungal activity against six dermatophytes (Trichophyton rubrum, T. mentagrophytes, T. tonsurans, Microsporum canis, M. gypseum, and M. audouini), one filamentous fungi (Aspergillus fumigatus), and five strains of yeasts (Candida albicans, C. glabrata, C. tropicalis, C. parapsilosis, and Crytococcus neoformans) by using the broth microdilution method. The antifungal activities of 13 standard compounds that are prevalent constituents in Cinnamomum oils were also investigated in an effort to correlate the effectiveness of the oils with those of the components of the oils. The chemical composition of the oils was analyzed by GC and GC-MS. Most of the oils showed moderate to strong activity against the fungi. Among the oils, the leaf and bark oils of C. zeylanicum showed the highest activity against all the fungi with MIC values of 0.04 to 0.63 μg μL−1. Other oils that gave a strong inhibition on fungal growth were the leaf oil of C. cordatum and bark and twig oils of C. pubescens and C. impressicostatum. Cinnamaldehyde, which was the most abundant component of the bark oil of C. zeylanicum, showed the strongest activity against all the fungi studied. Based on the results of the assay on standard samples, it may be that the high levels of cinnamaldehyde, eugenol, geraniol, benzyl benzoate, and methyl cinnamate in the oils and in combination with the minor components is responsible for the high antifungal activity of the oils. Accepted: January14, 2008. Address correspondence to: Ibrahim bin Jantan, Department of Pharmacy, Faculty of Allied Health Sciences, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Jalan Raja Muda Abdul Aziz, 50300 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Tel.: (03) 40405331; Fax: (603) 26983271; E-mail: [email protected] |
Protection of Location Privacy using Dummies for Location-based Services | Recently, highly accurate positioning devices enable us to provide various types of location-based services. On the other hand, because position data obtained by such devices include deeply personal information, protection of location privacy is one of the most significant issues of location-based services. Therefore, we propose a technique to anonymize position data. In our proposed technique, the psrsonal user of a location-based service generates several false position data (dummies) sent to the service provider with the true position data of the user. Because the service provider cannot distinguish the true position data, the user’s location privacy is protected. We conducted performance study experiments on our proposed technique using practical trajectory data. As a result of the experiments, we observed that our proposed technique protects the location privacy of users. |
Automatic song composition from the lyrics exploiting prosody of Japanese language | Automatic composition techniques are important in sense of upgrading musical applications for amateur musicians such as composition support systems. In this paper, we present an algorithm that can automatically generate songs from Japanese lyrics. The algorithm is designed by considering composition as an optimal-solution search problem under constraints given by the prosody of the lyrics. To verify the algorithm, we launched Orpheus which composes with the visitor’s lyrics on the web-site, and 56,000 songs were produced within a year. Evaluation results on the generated songs are also reported, indicating that Orpheus can help users to compose their own original Japanese songs. |
Gender, ethnicity and race in incarcerated and detained youth: services and policy implications for girls. | OBJECTIVE
While work has been conducted on gender differences to inform gender-specific programming, relatively little work has been done regarding racial and ethnic differences among incarcerated and detained girls in particular. This is an important gap, considering gender, race, and ethnicity may be important factors in responding to the needs of incarcerated and detained girls within the Risk-Needs-Responsivity (RNR) model. We hypothesize girls will show relatively more pathology than boys, and that White girls will show relatively more pathology as compared to girls of other groups. Implications of findings for services delivery and policy are presented.
METHOD
Data were collected on N = 657 youth using structured interview and record review. Analyses included χ2 and t tests.
RESULTS
As compared to boys, girls were older at first arrest yet younger during most lock-up, received poorer grades, experienced more family difficulty, and more were lesbian/bisexual. As compared to minority girls, White girls began hard drugs at a younger age, had more conduct disorder symptoms, and more frequently experienced parental difficulty and abuse.
CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE
Age-appropriate programming that addresses family difficulty and sexuality is needed for girls. As compared to White girls, reentry planning may more readily rely on family support for minority girls. Systems should consider use of actuarial methods in order to reduce bias in making placement decisions. (PsycINFO Database Record |
PAC Bounds for Multi-armed Bandit and Markov Decision Processes | The bandit problem is revisited and considered under the PAC model. Our main contribution in this part is to show that given n arms, it suffices to pull the arms O( n 2 log 1 δ ) times to find an -optimal arm with probability of at least 1 − δ. This is in contrast to the naive bound of O( n 2 log n δ ). We derive another algorithm whose complexity depends on the specific setting of the rewards, rather than the worst case setting. We also provide a matching lower bound. We show how given an algorithm for the PAC model Multi-Armed Bandit problem, one can derive a batch learning algorithm for Markov Decision Processes. This is done essentially by simulating Value Iteration, and in each iteration invoking the multi-armed bandit algorithm. Using our PAC algorithm for the multi-armed bandit problem we improve the dependence on the number of actions. |
Performance Modeling and System Management for Multi-component Online Services | Many dynamic-content online services are comprised of multiple interacting components and data partitions distributed across server clusters. Understanding the performance of these services is crucial for efficient system management. This paper presents a profile-driven performance model for cluster-based multi-component online services. Our offline constructed application profiles characterize component resource needs and inter-component communications. With a given component placement strategy, the application profile can be used to predict system throughput and average response time for the online service. Our model differentiates remote invocations from fast-path calls between co-located components and we measure the network delay caused by blocking inter-component communications. Validation with two J2EE-based online applications show that our model can predict application performance with small errors (less than 13% for throughput and less than 14% for the average response time). We also explore how this performance model can be used to assist system management functions for multi-component online services, with case examinations on optimized component placement, capacity planning, and cost-effectiveness analysis. |
The influence of low-, normal-, and high-carbohydrate meals on blood pressure in elderly patients with postprandial hypotension. | BACKGROUND
Postprandial hypotension (PPH) is a common and serious disorder of blood pressure (BP) regulation in elderly people. It has been suggested that primarily the carbohydrate (CH) content of a meal induces the BP decrease. Therefore, we examined the relationship between the CH content of meals and postprandial BP responses in elderly patients diagnosed with PPH.
METHODS
Twelve geriatric patients (aged 75 to 91 years; 6 men) who were previously diagnosed with PPH received standardized liquid meals with low- (25 g), normal- (65 g), and high- (125 g) CH content in random order on three separate days. Systolic BP (SBP), diastolic BP, and heart rate were measured every 5 minutes from 20 minutes before until 75 minutes after each meal. Postprandial symptoms were recorded every 15 minutes.
RESULTS
The maximum decrease in SBP was significantly smaller after the low-CH meal (-28 +/- 5 mm Hg) than after the normal- (-39 +/- 7 mm Hg) and high-CH meals (-40 +/- 5 mm Hg) (p <.050 between groups). In addition, the duration of PPH was significantly shorter (p <.010), and postprandial symptoms were less frequent and less severe after the low-CH meal.
CONCLUSIONS
Reducing the CH amount in meals induces significantly smaller decreases in SBP, shorter duration of PPH, and reduction of PPH-related symptoms. Therefore, limiting the CH content of an elderly patient's meal can be a clinically effective nonpharmacological treatment for PPH in elderly patients and can reduce the risk of developing symptomatic PPH. |
Psilocybin induces schizophrenia-like psychosis in humans via a serotonin-2 agonist action. | Psilocybin, an indoleamine hallucinogen, produces a psychosis-like syndrome in humans that resembles first episodes of schizophrenia. In healthy human volunteers, the psychotomimetic effects of psilocybin were blocked dose-dependently by the serotonin-2A antagonist ketanserin or the atypical antipsychotic risperidone, but were increased by the dopamine antagonist and typical antipsychotic haloperidol. These data are consistent with animal studies and provide the first evidence in humans that psilocybin-induced psychosis is due to serotonin-2A receptor activation, independently of dopamine stimulation. Thus, serotonin-2A overactivity may be involved in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia and serotonin-2A antagonism may contribute to therapeutic effects of antipsychotics. |
An efficient auction mechanism for service chains in the NFV market | Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is emerging as a new paradigm for providing elastic network functions through flexible virtual network function (VNF) instances executed on virtualized computing platforms exemplified by cloud datacenters. In the new NFV market, well defined VNF instances each realize an atomic function that can be chained to meet user demands in practice. This work studies the dynamic market mechanism design for the transaction of VNF service chains in the NFV market, to help relinquish the full power of NFV. Combining the techniques of primal-dual approximation algorithm design with Myerson's characterization of truthful mechanisms, we design a VNF chain auction that runs efficiently in polynomial time, guarantees truthfulness, and achieves near-optimal social welfare in the NFV eco-system. Extensive simulation studies verify the efficacy of our auction mechanism. |
Cluster reserves: a mechanism for resource management in cluster-based network servers | In network (e.g., Web) servers, it is often desirable to isolate the performance of different classes of requests from each other. That is, one seeks to achieve that a certain minimal proportion of server resources are available for a class of requests, independent of the load imposed by other requests. Recent work demonstrates how to achieve this performance isolation in servers consisting of a single, centralized node; however, achieving performance isolation in a distributed, cluster based server remains a problem.
This paper introduces a new abstraction, the cluster reserve, which represents a resource principal in a cluster based network server. We present a design and evaluate a prototype implementation that extends existing techniques for performance isolation on a single node server to cluster based servers.
In our design, the dynamic cluster-wide resource management problem is formulated as a constrained optimization problem, with the resource allocations on individual machines as independent variables, and the desired cluster-wide resource allocations as constraints. Periodically collected resource usages serve as further inputs to the problem.
Experimental results show that cluster reserves are effective in providing performance isolation in cluster based servers. We demonstrate that, in a number of different scenarios, cluster reserves are effective in ensuring performance isolation while enabling high utilization of the server resources. |
Introduction to Information Extraction Technology | We have prepared a set of notes incorporating the visual aids used during the Information Extraction Tu-torial for the IJCAI-99 tuto-rial series. This document also contains additional information , such as the URLs of stes on the World Wide Web containing additional information likely to be of interest. If you are reading this document using an appropriately configured Acrobat Reader (available free from Adobe at http:// w w w. a d o b e. c o m / p r o d i n d e x / a c r o b a t / readstep.html) is appropriately configured, you can go directly to these URLs in your web browser by clicking them. This tutorial is designed to introduce you to the fundamental concepts of information extraction (IE) technology, and to give you an idea of what the state of the art performance in extraction technology is, what is involved in building IE systems, and various approaches taken to their design and implementation, and the kinds of resources and tools that are available to assist in constructing information extraction systems, including linguistic resources such as lexicons and name lists, as well as tools for annotating training data for automatically trained systems. Most IE systems process texts in sequential steps (or " phases ") ranging from lexical and morphological processing, recognition and typing of proper names, parsing of larger syntactic constituents, resolution of anaphora and coreference, and the ultimate extraction of domain-relevent events and relationships from the text. We discuss each of these system components and various approaches to their design. 2 In addition to these tutorial notes, the authors have prepared several other resources related to information extraction of which you may wish to avail yourself. We have created a web page for this tutorial at the URL mentioned in the Power Point slide in the next illustration. This page provides many links of interest to anyone wanting more information about the field of information extraction, including pointers to research sites, commercial sites, and system development tools. We felt that providing this resource would be appreciated by those taking the tutorial, however, we subject ourselves to the risk that some interesting and relevant information has been inadvertently omitted during our preparations. Please do not interpret the presence or absence of a link to any system or research paper to be a positive or negative evaluation of the system or … |
Level- and Phase-Shifted PWM for Seven-Level Switched-Capacitor Inverter Using Series/Parallel Conversion | This paper presents a comparison of two modulation methods for the seven-level switched-capacitor (SC) inverter using series/parallel conversion (SCISPC). The SCISPC is a multilevel inverter which has the less number of switching devices than the conventional multilevel inverters. The level-shifted pulsewidth modulation (PWM) (LS-PWM) was applied to the seven-level SCISPC in the previous research. In this paper, the level- and phase-shifted PWM (LPS-PWM) and the LS-PWM are applied to the seven-level SCISPC, and LPS-PWM is compared with LS-PWM for the seven-level SCISPC. The LPS-PWM has both the characteristics of the phase-shifted PWM (PS-PWM) and the LS-PWM. The voltage reduction during the discharging term of the SCs is reduced by means of the shorter discharging period compared to LS-PWM. The voltage ripple of the capacitors is also reduced, which leads to higher power conversion efficiency. The difference of the two modulation methods is confirmed by the theoretical approach, simulation with PSIM, and circuit experiment. |
Mesh saliency | Research over the last decade has built a solid mathematical foundation for representation and analysis of 3D meshes in graphics and geometric modeling. Much of this work however does not explicitly incorporate models of low-level human visual attention. In this paper we introduce the idea of mesh saliency as a measure of regional importance for graphics meshes. Our notion of saliency is inspired by low-level human visual system cues. We define mesh saliency in a scale-dependent manner using a center-surround operator on Gaussian-weighted mean curvatures. We observe that such a definition of mesh saliency is able to capture what most would classify as visually interesting regions on a mesh. The human-perception-inspired importance measure computed by our mesh saliency operator results in more visually pleasing results in processing and viewing of 3D meshes. compared to using a purely geometric measure of shape. such as curvature. We discuss how mesh saliency can be incorporated in graphics applications such as mesh simplification and viewpoint selection and present examples that show visually appealing results from using mesh saliency. |
Evaluating operating system vulnerability to memory errors | Reliability is of great concern to the scalability of extreme-scale systems. Of particular concern are soft errors in main memory, which are a leading cause of failures on current systems and are predicted to be the leading cause on future systems. While great effort has gone into designing algorithms and applications that can continue to make progress in the presence of these errors without restarting, the most critical software running on a node, the operating system (OS), is currently left relatively unprotected. OS resiliency is of particular importance because, though this software typically represents a small footprint of a compute node's physical memory, recent studies show more memory errors in this region of memory than the remainder of the system. In this paper, we investigate the soft error vulnerability of two operating systems used in current and future high-performance computing systems: Kitten, the lightweight kernel developed at Sandia National Laboratories, and CLE, a high-performance Linux-based operating system developed by Cray. For each of these platforms, we outline major structures and subsystems that are vulnerable to soft errors and describe methods that could be used to reconstruct damaged state. Our results show the Kitten lightweight operating system may be an easier target to harden against memory errors due to its smaller memory footprint, largely deterministic state, and simpler system structure. |
Constructions of intriguing sets of polar spaces from field reduction and derivation | The concepts of a tight set of points and an m-ovoid of a generalised quadrangle were unified recently by Bamberg, Law and Penttila under the title of intriguing sets. This unification was subsequently extended to polar spaces of arbitrary rank. The first part of this paper deals with a method of constructing intriguing sets of one polar space from those of another via field reduction. In the second part of this paper, we generalise an ovoid derivation of Payne and Thas to a derivation of intriguing sets. |
History of Greece | Part II. Historical Greece (cont.): 91. First period of the reign of Alexander 92. Asiatic campaigns of Alexander 93. Second and third Asiatic campaigns of Alexander 94. Military operations and conquests of Alexander, down to his death at Babylon 95. Grecian affairs from the landing of Alexander in Asia to the close of the Lamian War 96. From the Lamian War to the close of the history of free Hellas and Hellenism 97. Sicilian and Italian Greeks - Agathokles 98. Outlying Hellenic cities Index. |
A Survey on Ensemble Learning for Data Stream Classification | Ensemble-based methods are among the most widely used techniques for data stream classification. Their popularity is attributable to their good performance in comparison to strong single learners while being relatively easy to deploy in real-world applications. Ensemble algorithms are especially useful for data stream learning as they can be integrated with drift detection algorithms and incorporate dynamic updates, such as selective removal or addition of classifiers. This work proposes a taxonomy for data stream ensemble learning as derived from reviewing over 60 algorithms. Important aspects such as combination, diversity, and dynamic updates, are thoroughly discussed. Additional contributions include a listing of popular open-source tools and a discussion about current data stream research challenges and how they relate to ensemble learning (big data streams, concept evolution, feature drifts, temporal dependencies, and others). |
Food and water intake and selective feeding in rabbits on four feeding regimes. | Diet plays an important role in maintaining rabbit health. Feeding an incorrect diet, particularly a low fibre diet, has been linked with digestive, dental and urinary tract disease. However, food intake and dietary requirements have been poorly studied in pet rabbits. This study assessed the effects of two commonly fed pet rabbit diets [extruded nuggets with hay (EH) and muesli with hay (MH)] alongside hay only (HO) and muesli only (MO) on food and water intake in 32 Dutch rabbits. Dry matter (DM) intake was greater in the HO group and lower in the MO group than in the EH and MH groups (p < 0.001). The portion of the diet made of hay was greater in the EH group than in the MH group (p < 0.001). Water intake was positively correlated with DM intake and was greatest in the HO group (p < 0.001). Selective feeding occurred in all rabbit groups fed muesli, whether or not hay was also available. Pellets were rejected, and grains and extrudates selected. The presence of selective feeding in all rabbits fed muesli leads to the consumption of an unbalanced diet. In addition, hay intake and water intake were lower when muesli was fed. Conclusions drawn from this study are based on general recommendations for pet rabbits, and clinical disease may have developed by feeding the study diets over a longer time period, as many diet-related conditions typically present in older rabbits. However, the study demonstrates that the feeding of muesli diets cannot be recommended. |
Psychopaths know right from wrong but don't care. | Adult psychopaths have deficits in emotional processing and inhibitory control, engage in morally inappropriate behavior, and generally fail to distinguish moral from conventional violations. These observations, together with a dominant tradition in the discipline which sees emotional processes as causally necessary for moral judgment, have led to the conclusion that psychopaths lack an understanding of moral rights and wrongs. We test an alternative explanation: psychopaths have normal understanding of right and wrong, but abnormal regulation of morally appropriate behavior. We presented psychopaths with moral dilemmas, contrasting their judgments with age- and sex-matched (i) healthy subjects and (ii) non-psychopathic, delinquents. Subjects in each group judged cases of personal harms (i.e. requiring physical contact) as less permissible than impersonal harms, even though both types of harms led to utilitarian gains. Importantly, however, psychopaths' pattern of judgments on different dilemmas was the same as those of the other subjects. These results force a rejection of the strong hypothesis that emotional processes are causally necessary for judgments of moral dilemmas, suggesting instead that psychopaths understand the distinction between right and wrong, but do not care about such knowledge, or the consequences that ensue from their morally inappropriate behavior. |
Adapting attributes by selecting features similar across domains | Attributes are semantic visual properties shared by objects. They have been shown to improve object recognition and to enhance content-based image search. While attributes are expected to cover multiple categories, e.g. a dalmatian and a whale can both have "smooth skin", we find that the appearance of a single attribute varies quite a bit across categories. Thus, an attribute model learned on one category may not be usable on another category. We show how to adapt attribute models towards new categories. We ensure that positive transfer can occur between a source domain of categories and a novel target domain, by learning in a feature subspace found by feature selection where the data distributions of the domains are similar. We demonstrate that when data from the novel domain is limited, regularizing attribute models for that novel domain with models trained on an auxiliary domain (via Adaptive SVM) improves the accuracy of attribute prediction. |
A control theoretic model of driver steering behavior | Following well-established feedback control design principles, a control theoretic model of driver steering behavior is presented. While accounting for the inherent manual control limitations of the human, the compensation dynamics of the driver are chosen to produce a stable, robust, closed-loop driver-vehicle system with a bandwidth commensurate with the demands of the driving task being analyzed. A technique for selecting driver model parameters is a natural by-product of the control theoretic modeling approach. Experimental verification shows the ability of the model to produce driver-vehicle responses similar to those obtained in a simulated lane-keeping driving task on a curving road.<<ETX>> |
Determining Usability Test Sample Size | Virzi (1992), Nielsen and Landauer (1993), and Lewis (1994) have published influential articles on the topic of sample size in usability testing. In these articles, the authors presented a mathematical model of problem discovery rates in usability testing. Using the problem discovery rate model, they showed that it was possible to determine the sample size needed to uncover a given proportion of problems in an interface during one test. The authors presented empirical evidence for the models and made several important claims: |
Effect of morphine in needle procedures in children with cancer. | BACKGROUND
The aim was to investigate whether children experience less fear, distress, and/or pain when they receive oral morphine vs. placebo before a needle is inserted in a subcutaneously implanted intravenous port when combined with topical anesthesia.
METHOD
Fifty children 1-18 years of age who were treated in a pediatric oncology and hematology setting were included consecutively when undergoing routine needle insertion into an intravenous port. All children were subjected to one needle insertion following topical anesthetic (EMLA) application in this randomized, triple-blind, placebo-controlled study comparing orally administered morphine (n=26) 0.25 mg/kg body weight with placebo (n=24). The patients' fear, distress, and pain were reported by parents, nurses and the children themselves (if ≥ 7 years of age) on 0-100 mm Visual Analogue Scales. In addition, observational methods were used to measure distress and procedure pain.
RESULTS
No differences between the morphine and the placebo group were found with respect to age, weight, height, physical status, sex, weeks from diagnosis, or weeks from latest needle insertion. According to, parents, nurses, and children, oral morphine at a dose of 0.25 mg/kg body weight did not reduce fear, distress or pain compared with placebo.
CONCLUSION
We could not reject the null hypothesis that there is no difference between the oral morphine and placebo groups assuming an effect size of 15 mm on VAS. Therefore it seems that oral morphine at 0.25 mg/kg does not give any additional reduction of fear, distress or pain compared with placebo when combined with topical anesthesia in pediatric patients undergoing subcutaneous port needle insertion, and would not be expected to be of any advantage for similar procedures such as venipuncture and venous cannulation when topical anesthesia is used. |
Large Unbalanced Credit Scoring Using Lasso-Logistic Regression Ensemble | Recently, various ensemble learning methods with different base classifiers have been proposed for credit scoring problems. However, for various reasons, there has been little research using logistic regression as the base classifier. In this paper, given large unbalanced data, we consider the plausibility of ensemble learning using regularized logistic regression as the base classifier to deal with credit scoring problems. In this research, the data is first balanced and diversified by clustering and bagging algorithms. Then we apply a Lasso-logistic regression learning ensemble to evaluate the credit risks. We show that the proposed algorithm outperforms popular credit scoring models such as decision tree, Lasso-logistic regression and random forests in terms of AUC and F-measure. We also provide two importance measures for the proposed model to identify important variables in the data. |
4-channel, 40 Gb/s front-end amplifier for parallel optical receiver in 0.18 μm CMOS | This paper proposed a 4-channel parallel 40 Gb/s front-end amplifier (FEA) in optical receiver for parallel optical transmission system. A novel enhancement type regulated cascade (ETRGC) configuration with an active inductor is originated in this paper for the transimpedance amplifier to significantly increase the bandwidth. The technique of three-order interleaving active feedback expands the bandwidth of the gain stage of transimpedance amplifier and limiting amplifier. Experimental results show that the output swing is 210 mV (Vpp) when the input voltage varies from 5 mV to 500 mV. The power consumption of the 4-channel parallel 40 Gb/s front-end amplifier (FEA) is 370 mW with 1.8 V power supply and the chip area is 650 μm×1300 μm. |
A neurophilosophical slant on consciousness research. | Explaining the nature and mechanisms of conscious experience in neurobiological terms seems to be an attainable, if yet unattained, goal. Research at many levels is important, including research at the cellular level that explores the role of recurrent pathways between thalamic nuclei and the cortex, and research that explores consciousness from the perspective of action. Conceptually, a clearer understanding of the logic of expressions such as "causes" and "correlates", and about what to expect from a theory of consciousness are required. The logic of some terms, such as "qualia" and "reductionism", continues to generate misunderstandings about the scientific possibilities and limits. Experimentally, a deeper understanding of the role of the thalamus in coordinating activity across cortical levels, and a readiness to reconsider the orthodox approach to thalamocortical organization are also required. |
Neural computation and self-organizing maps - an introduction | In this age of modern era, the use of internet must be maximized. Yeah, internet will help us very much not only for important thing but also for daily activities. Many people now, from any level can use internet. The sources of internet connection can also be enjoyed in many places. As one of the benefits is to get the on-line neural computation and self organizing maps an introduction computation neural systems series book, as the world window, as many people suggest. |
A New B7:CD28 Family Checkpoint Target for Cancer Immunotherapy: HHLA2. | HHLA2 is a newly identified B7 family member that modulates T-cell functions through interaction with TMIGD2 and possibly a second receptor, with coinhibition in two studies and costimulation in one study. HHLA2 is expressed on a variety of human cancers, and its coinhibitory function makes it a candidate for cancer immunotherapy. |
Design and use of the Simple Event Model (SEM) | Events have become central elements in the representation of data from domains such as history, cultural heritage, multimedia and geography. The Simple Event Model (SEM) is created to model events in these various domains, without making assumptions about the domain-specific vocabularies used. SEM is designed with a minimum of semantic commitment to guarantee maximal interoperability. In this paper, we discuss the general requirements of an event model for web data and give examples from two use cases: historic events and events in the maritime safety and security domain. The advantages and disadvantages of several existing event models are discussed in the context of the historic example. We discuss the design decisions underlying SEM. SEM is coupled with a Prolog API that enables users to create instances of events without going into the details of the implementation of the model. By a tight coupling to existing Prolog packages, the API facilitates easy integration of event instances to Linked Open Data. We illustrate use of the API with examples from the maritime domain. |
Microstructure and electrical characteristics of Ni–Cr thin films | Abstract Microstructure of thin films of different compositions of Ni–Cr alloy, over the range from 40 wt.% to 80 wt.% Ni, deposited on silicon nitride coated GaAs substrates, is investigated under Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM) in as-deposited and annealed conditions. The procedure of wet etching vias through GaAs substrates is used for preparing samples for TEM. Microstructures of as-deposited films of different Ni–Cr alloys are related to the nature of the parent alloy in the binary phase diagram. The microstructural transformations in annealed films of single and two-phase alloy materials are interpreted based on the comparison of TEM micrographs in conjunction with the X-ray diffraction and electron diffraction data. The changes in the electrical characteristics such as resistivity and temperature coefficient of resistance (TCR) of the films in relation to the microstructural transformations are discussed. The effect of superimposing a polyimide layer on the TCR of Ni–Cr films is also discussed. |
On inserter regularization method | There exist certain intrinsic relations between the ultraviolet divergent graphs and the convergent ones at the same loop order in renormalizable quantum field theories. Whereupon we present a new method, the inserter regularization method, to regulate those divergent graphs. In this letter, we demonstrate this method with the φ theory and QED at the one loop order. Some applications to SUSY-models are also made at the one loop order, which shows that supersymmetry is preserved manifestly and consistently. Talk by H.Y.Guo at ITP workshop on Gauge Theory and WZW model during Dec. 5-10, also a concise version of hep-th/9412034. Permanent address. Email: [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected] for HYG, YC, and HBT respectively. |
Traffic Flow Prediction using Adaboost Algorithm with Random Forests as a Weak Learner | Traffic Management and Information Systems, which rely on a system of sensors, aim to describe in real-time traffic in urban areas using a set of parameters and estimating them. Though the state of the art focuses on data analysis, little is done in the sense of prediction. In this paper, we describe a machine learning system for traffic flow management and control for a prediction of traffic flow problem. This new algorithm is obtained by combining Random Forests algorithm into Adaboost algorithm as a weak learner. We show that our algorithm performs relatively well on real data, and enables, according to the Traffic Flow Evaluation model, to estimate and predict whether there is congestion or not at a given time on road intersections. Keywords—Machine Learning, Boosting, Classification, Traffic Congestion, Data Collecting, Magnetic Loop Detectors, Signalized Intersections, Traffic Signal Timing Optimization. |
LSD-induced entropic brain activity predicts subsequent personality change. | Personality is known to be relatively stable throughout adulthood. Nevertheless, it has been shown that major life events with high personal significance, including experiences engendered by psychedelic drugs, can have an enduring impact on some core facets of personality. In the present, balanced-order, placebo-controlled study, we investigated biological predictors of post-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) changes in personality. Nineteen healthy adults underwent resting state functional MRI scans under LSD (75µg, I.V.) and placebo (saline I.V.). The Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) was completed at screening and 2 weeks after LSD/placebo. Scanning sessions consisted of three 7.5-min eyes-closed resting-state scans, one of which involved music listening. A standardized preprocessing pipeline was used to extract measures of sample entropy, which characterizes the predictability of an fMRI time-series. Mixed-effects models were used to evaluate drug-induced shifts in brain entropy and their relationship with the observed increases in the personality trait openness at the 2-week follow-up. Overall, LSD had a pronounced global effect on brain entropy, increasing it in both sensory and hierarchically higher networks across multiple time scales. These shifts predicted enduring increases in trait openness. Moreover, the predictive power of the entropy increases was greatest for the music-listening scans and when "ego-dissolution" was reported during the acute experience. These results shed new light on how LSD-induced shifts in brain dynamics and concomitant subjective experience can be predictive of lasting changes in personality. Hum Brain Mapp 37:3203-3213, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. |
Efficacy of music therapy treatment based on cycles of sessions: a randomised controlled trial. | We undertook a randomised controlled trial to assess whether a music therapy (MT) scheme of administration, including three working cycles of one month spaced out by one month of no treatment, is effective to reduce behavioural disturbances in severely demented patients. Sixty persons with severe dementia (30 in the experimental and 30 in the control group) were enrolled. Baseline multidimensional assessment included demographics, Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE), Barthel Index and Neuropsychiatry Inventory (NPI) for all patients. All the patients of the experimental and control groups received standard care (educational and entertainment activities). In addition, the experimental group received three cycles of 12 active MT sessions each, three times a week. Each 30-min session included a group of three patients. Every cycle of treatment was followed by one month of wash-out. At the end of this study, MT treatment resulted to be more effective than standard care to reduce behavioural disorders. We observed a significant reduction over time in the NPI global scores in both groups (F(7,357) = 9.06, p < 0.001) and a significant difference between groups (F(1,51) = 4.84, p < 0.05) due to a higher reduction of behavioural disturbances in the experimental group at the end of the treatment (Cohen's d = 0.63). The analysis of single NPI items shows that delusions, agitation and apathy significantly improved in the experimental, but not in the control group. This study suggests the effectiveness of MT approach with working cycles in reducing behavioural disorders of severely demented patients. |
The intergenerational effects of Indian Residential Schools: Implications for the concept of historical trauma | The current paper reviews research that has explored the intergenerational effects of the Indian Residential School (IRS) system in Canada, in which Aboriginal children were forced to live at schools where various forms of neglect and abuse were common. Intergenerational IRS trauma continues to undermine the well-being of today's Aboriginal population, and having a familial history of IRS attendance has also been linked with more frequent contemporary stressor experiences and relatively greater effects of stressors on well-being. It is also suggested that familial IRS attendance across several generations within a family appears to have cumulative effects. Together, these findings provide empirical support for the concept of historical trauma, which takes the perspective that the consequences of numerous and sustained attacks against a group may accumulate over generations and interact with proximal stressors to undermine collective well-being. As much as historical trauma might be linked to pathology, it is not possible to go back in time to assess how previous traumas endured by Aboriginal peoples might be related to subsequent responses to IRS trauma. Nonetheless, the currently available research demonstrating the intergenerational effects of IRSs provides support for the enduring negative consequences of these experiences and the role of historical trauma in contributing to present day disparities in well-being. |
Visual Thinking Design Patterns | In visual analytics, interactive data visualizations provide a bridge between analytic computations, often involving “big data”, and computations in the brain of the user. Visualization provides a high bandwidth channel from the computer to the user by means of the visual display, with interactions including brushing, dynamic queries, and generalized fisheye views designed to select and control what is shown. In this paper we introduce Visual Thinking Design Patterns (VTDPs) as part of a methodology for producing cognitively efficient designs. We describe their main components, including epistemic actions (actions to seek knowledge) and visual queries (pattern searches that provide a whole or partial solution to a problem). We summarize the set of 20 VTDPs we have identified so far and show how they can be used in a design methodology. Keywords—design patterns, visual thinking, data visualization, visual analytics. |
Extensions of Initial Models and their Second-Order Proof Systems | Besides explicit axioms, an algebraic specification language contains model-theoretic constraints such as initiality. For proving properties of specifications and refining them to programs, an axiomatization of these constraints is needed; unfortunately, no effective, sound and complete proof system can be constructed for initial models, and a fortiori for their extensions. |
A simple and efficient estimator for hyperbolic location | An effective technique in locating a source based on intersections of hyperbolic curves defined by the time differences of arrival of a signal received at a number of sensors is proposed. The approach is noniterative and gives au explicit solution. It is an approximate realization of the maximum-likelihood estimator and is shown to attain the Cramer-Rao lower bound near the small error region. Comparisons of performance with existing techniques of beamformer, sphericat-interpolation, divide and conquer, and iterative Taylor-series methods are made. The proposed technique performs significantly better than sphericalinterpolation, and has a higher noise threshold than divide and conquer before performance breaks away from the Cramer-Rao lower bound. It provides an explicit solution form that is not available in the beamformmg and Taylor-series methods. Computational complexity is comparable to spherical-interpolation but substantially less than the Taylor-series method. |
Electromagnetic Design and Realization of Innovative Fiber-Reinforced Broad-Band Absorbing Screens | This paper presents the design and the realization process for radar absorbing panels made of composite materials. It is demonstrated that the proper selection of the carbon fiber length and volume fraction allows reducing sensibly the overall thickness of the screen compared to a standard absorber, and obtaining at the same time broad-band absorption response in the X- and Ku-bands. To this end, the carbon fiber composite material realizing the lossy sheet of the absorbing screen is designed by simulation in order to have tailored complex effective permittivity. Two prototypes of absorbing screens are realized and tested experimentally. The first one is a three-layer panel, characterized by reflection coefficient lower than -10 dB in the frequency range from 8 to 14 GHz, and total thickness of 4.5 mm. The second one is a five-layer panel with reflection coefficient less than -20 dB in the range 9-18 GHz, and total thickness of 5.5 mm. |
Gender and the Use of Exclamation Points in Computer-Mediated Communication: An Analysis of Exclamations Posted to Two Electronic Discussion Lists | Past research has reported that females use exclamation points more frequently than do males. Such research often characterizes exclamation points as ‘‘markers of excitability,’’ a term that suggests instability and emotional randomness, yet it has not necessarily examined the contexts in which exclamation points appeared for evidence of ‘‘excitability.’’ The present study uses a 16-category coding frame in a content analysis of 200 exclamations posted to two electronic discussion groups serving the library and information science profession. The results indicate that exclamation points rarely function as markers of excitability in these professional forums, but may function as markers of friendly interaction, a finding with implications for understanding gender styles in email and other forms of computer-mediated communication. |
Mock objects for testing java systems | When testing software artifacts that have several dependencies, one has the possibility of either instantiating these dependencies or using mock objects to simulate the dependencies’ expected behavior. Even though recent quantitative studies showed that mock objects are widely used both in open source and proprietary projects, scientific knowledge is still lacking on how and why practitioners use mocks. An empirical understanding of the situations where developers have (and have not) been applying mocks, as well as the impact of such decisions in terms of coupling and software evolution can be used to help practitioners adapt and improve their future usage. To this aim, we study the usage of mock objects in three OSS projects and one industrial system. More specifically, we manually analyze more than 2,000 mock usages. We then discuss our findings with developers from these systems, and identify practices, rationales, and challenges. These results are supported by a structured survey with more than 100 professionals. Finally, we manually analyze how the usage of mock objects in test code evolve over time as well as the impact of their usage on the coupling between test and production code. Our study reveals that the usage of mocks is highly dependent on the responsibility and the architectural concern of the class. Developers report to frequently mock dependencies that make testing difficult (e.g., infrastructure-related dependencies) and to not mock classes that encapsulate domain concepts/rules of the system. Among the key challenges, developers report that maintaining the behavior of the mock compatible with the behavior of original class is hard and that mocking increases the coupling between the test and the production code. Their perceptions are confirmed by our data, as we observed that mocks mostly exist since the very first version of the test class, and that they tend to stay there for its whole lifetime, and that changes in production code often force the test code to also change. |
Glance: rapidly coding behavioral video with the crowd | Behavioral researchers spend considerable amount of time coding video data to systematically extract meaning from subtle human actions and emotions. In this paper, we present Glance, a tool that allows researchers to rapidly query, sample, and analyze large video datasets for behavioral events that are hard to detect automatically. Glance takes advantage of the parallelism available in paid online crowds to interpret natural language queries and then aggregates responses in a summary view of the video data. Glance provides analysts with rapid responses when initially exploring a dataset, and reliable codings when refining an analysis. Our experiments show that Glance can code nearly 50 minutes of video in 5 minutes by recruiting over 60 workers simultaneously, and can get initial feedback to analysts in under 10 seconds for most clips. We present and compare new methods for accurately aggregating the input of multiple workers marking the spans of events in video data, and for measuring the quality of their coding in real-time before a baseline is established by measuring the variance between workers. Glance's rapid responses to natural language queries, feedback regarding question ambiguity and anomalies in the data, and ability to build on prior context in followup queries allow users to have a conversation-like interaction with their data - opening up new possibilities for naturally exploring video data. |
Changes of microstructure of different quench sensitivity 7,000 aluminum alloy after end quenching | The quench sensitivity and their influential factors of 7,021, 7,085, and 7,050 alloys were investigated by the end quenching test method and the measurement of electrical conductivity, hardness, and microstructure after aging. The results indicate that 7,050 alloy has the largest changes with hardness decreasing from HV 199 to HV 167, and electrical conductivity increases from 16.6 to 18.2 MS·m−1 when the distance from quenched end increases from 2 to 100 mm. Alloys 7,085 and 7,021 have relatively smaller changes. According to the relationship between the hardness and electrical conductivity of a supersaturated solid solution, 7,050 alloy has higher quench sensitivity than 7,085 and 7,021 alloys. The microstructure of 7,050 alloy with higher major alloy element (Zn + Mg + Cu) addition and Cu element addition is mostly affected by the changes of distance from quenched end. In 7,050 alloy, the size of intragranular precipitates is from about 10–200 nm, and the (sub) grain boundary precipitates are about 20–300 nm. Alloy 7,085 with lower Cu content is moderately affected, while 7,021 is least affected. It is found that with the increase of distance from quenched end, quenched-induced precipitate preferentially nucleates and grows in the (sub) grain boundary and then on the pre-existing Al3Zr particles. |
EXpectation Propagation LOgistic REgRession (EXPLORER): Distributed privacy-preserving online model learning | We developed an EXpectation Propagation LOgistic REgRession (EXPLORER) model for distributed privacy-preserving online learning. The proposed framework provides a high level guarantee for protecting sensitive information, since the information exchanged between the server and the client is the encrypted posterior distribution of coefficients. Through experimental results, EXPLORER shows the same performance (e.g., discrimination, calibration, feature selection, etc.) as the traditional frequentist logistic regression model, but provides more flexibility in model updating. That is, EXPLORER can be updated one point at a time rather than having to retrain the entire data set when new observations are recorded. The proposed EXPLORER supports asynchronized communication, which relieves the participants from coordinating with one another, and prevents service breakdown from the absence of participants or interrupted communications. |
Humans and Automation : Use , Misuse , Disuse , | This paper addresses theoretical, empirical, and analytical studies pertaining to human use, misuse, disuse, and abuse of automation technology. Use refers to the voluntary activation or disengagement of automation by human operators. Trust, mental workload, and risk can influence automation use, but interactions between factors and large individual differences make prediction of automation use difficult. Misuse refers to overreliance on automation, which can result in failures of monitoring or decision biases. Factors affecting the monitoring of automation include workload, automation reliability and consistency, and the saliency of automation state indicators. Disuse, or the neglect or underutilization of automation, is commonly caused by alarms that activate falsely. This often occurs because the base rate of the condition to be detected is not considered in setting the trade-off between false alarms and omissions. Automation abuse, or the automation of functions by designers and implementation by managers without due regard for the consequences for human performance, tends to define the operator's roles as by-products of the automation. Automation abuse can also promote misuse and disuse of automation by human operators. Understanding the factors associated with each of these aspects of human use of automation can lead to improved system design, effective training methods, and judicious policies and procedures involving automation use. |
Residual neurobehavioural effects associated with chronic exposure to mercury vapour. | To find the residual effects of long term exposure to mercury vapour, neurobehavioural tests were given to ex-mercury miners about 18 years after the end of mercury exposure. Seventy six male ex-mercury miners who had been exposed to high concentrations of mercury vapour (over 1.0 mg/m3) and with a history of mercury intoxication were compared with controls matched for age (within 3 years), sex, and education. Although the extent of the workers' symptoms caused by mercury poisoning, termed erethismus merculialis, decreased considerably after the end of exposure, matched paired comparison showed that performances of motor coordination, simple reaction time, and short term memory had deteriorated significantly in the exposed group. Multiple linear regression analysis of exposure variables with neurological examination measures showed positive correlations between poorer neurological performance and variables related to mercury exposure. Thus the duration of exposure correlated with poorer performance of hand-eye coordination, tapping, and a colour card reading test. Job categories classified by exposure to mercury also had a significant negative correlation with these performances. The period of years after the end of exposure had a significant correlation with better performance of reaction time and digit span. On the other hand, the history of intoxication itself had no significant correlation with any of the current neurobehavioural performances. These results suggest that there are slight but persistent effects on neurobehavioural function, especially on motor coordination, among mercury miners even more than 10 years after the end of exposure. |
Cooperative Localization for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles | Self-localization of an underwater vehicle is particularly challenging due to the absence of Global Positioning System (GPS) reception or features at known positions that could otherwise have been used for position computation. Thus Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) applications typically require the pre-deployment of a set of beacons. This thesis examines the scenario in which the members of a group of AUVs exchange navigation information with one another so as to improve their individual position estimates. We describe how the underwater environment poses unique challenges to vehicle navigation not encountered in other environments in which robots operate and how cooperation can improve the performance of self-localization. As intra-vehicle communication is crucial to cooperation, we also address the constraints of the communication channel and the effect that these constraints have on the design of cooperation strategies. The classical approaches to underwater self-localization of a single vehicle, as well as more recently developed techniques are presented. We then examine how methods used for cooperating land-vehicles can be transferred to the underwater domain. An algorithm for distributed self-localization, which is designed to take the specific characteristics of the environment into account, is proposed. We also address how correlated position estimates of cooperating vehicles can lead to overconfidence in individual position estimates. Finally, key to any successful cooperative navigation strategy is the incorporation of the relative positioning between vehicles. The performance of localization algorithms with different geometries is analyzed and a distributed algorithm for the dynamic positioning of vehicles, which serve as dedicated navigation beacons for a fleet of AUVs, is proposed. Thesis Supervisor: John J. Leonard Title: Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering Massachusetts Institute of Technology Acknowledgments This thesis would not have been possible without the help and support of many friends and colleagues who made the last five years at MIT an exceptionally fulfilling experience. I would like to thank my advisor John Leonard who strongly supported me ever since our first email exchange in 2003. He guided me all the way through the application process, research, thesis and finding a post doc position. His broad range of research interests enabled me to find a thesis subject that exactly matched my interest. And I very much appreciated him allowing me to take a significant amount of time to pursue other projects as well as travel. I would also like to thank my other committee members: Henrik Schmidt for his continued support and great company during several research cruises, and Hanu Singh and Arjuna Balasuriya for their helpful suggestions during my thesis writing. Many thanks to David Battle who helped me through my first steps with Autonomous Underwater Vehicles and was a great mate to have around. Many of the experiments presented in this thesis would not have been possible without the support of Andrew Patrikalakis. The results owe a lot to his countless hours of coding assistance and his efforts to ensure that the kayaks would be ready when needed. They were also made possible by Joe Curcio, the builder of the kayaks, and the support of Jacques Leedekerken and Kevin Cockrell. The last years would not have been the same without the many great people I met at MIT. Most important was Matt Walter who convinced me in August 2003 that MIT is not only an interesting place, but that it can be very friendly as well. Throughout the years we shared many great personal and academic experiences. I wish him all the best, wherever life may take him. Patrycja unfortunately left our lab, but made up for it by taking me on a very memorable trip across the country. I wish Alec, Emma, Albert, Tom, Olivier and Aisha all the best for their remaining time and life beyond. Iuliu was always a welcome distraction in the United States and abroad and a great help with all hardware questions. I was glad to join Carrick, Marty and David on a number of exciting research and conference trips, as well as their advisor Daniela Rus. In the last months I was also very fortunate to meet a new group of people. First, I am very thankful to Maurice for carrying on what I started I cannot imagine somebody better suited for it and also Been, Georgios, Hordur and Rob. I would also like to thank the many people of the SEA 2007 cruise, particularly the B watch and Julian, Jamie, Heather, Chris, Toby and Jane. One of the most exciting things during my time at MIT was that I was not only able to pursue my thesis topic but also two other projects. First, the flood warning project introduced me to Elizabeth Basha. We shared many joyful moments as well as blood, sweat and tears in the Central American wilderness. I hope that the end of my PhD only marks the beginning of that partnership. Second, the harbor porpoise tag project led by Stacy DeRuiter was a great design challenge. It also provided an opportunity to reach into other areas of ocean sciences by contributing to marine biology research. Her dedication along with the support from Mark Johnson, Peter Tyack and Tom Hurst ensured the project’s success. The exciting results and the process leading up to them rewarded me with a better experience at MIT than I could have ever hoped for. I would like to thank John Leonard for letting me take this scenic route. The path that led me to MIT would not have been possible without the support from people in the early stages of my engineering career who I would like to thank here: Raimund Eich for patiently answering my first electrical engineering questions; my best friends Jan Horn, Daniel Steffensky, Alexander Zimmer and Ulf Radenz for helping me through my university time in Germany; and John Peatman, Ludger Becks and Uwe Zimmer for their academic guidance. Finally, I would like to thank my parents for their continued support and especially Melissa Pitotti for her encouragement not only to start the work at this institution but also to finish it when the time had come. This work was funded by Office of Naval Research grants N00014-97-1-0202, N00014-05-1-0255, N00014-02-C-0210, N00014-07-1-1102 and the ASAP MURI program led by Naomi Leonard of Princeton University. “One degree is not a large distance. On a compass it is scarcely the thickness of a fingernail. But in certain conditions, one degree can be a very large distance. Enough to unmake a man.” The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello, c © 3D Films, Australia 2005 Meinen Eltern & meinem Bruder |
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