Breaking Down Walls: Increasing Access to Four-Year Colleges for High-Achieving Community College Students

Results from this study show that upon transferring to a four-year school, community college students do more than just "get by" -- they equal or surpass their peers at their new schools. Recent analyses from the National Student Clearinghouse indicate that nationally 60 percent of community college students who manage to transfer earn their bachelor's degree within four years. The highest performing college students do even better: 97 percent of Cooke Scholars earn their bachelor's degree in three years. Since 59 percent of bachelor's degree students graduate within six years, transfer students are completing their four-year degrees actually at a higher rate than students who came straight out of high school. The recent research and the experience of the Cooke Scholars makes it simply undeniable that community college transfer students are just as competent as students who begin their studies at a four-year college, and maybe more so

SoccerNet: A Scalable Dataset for Action Spotting in Soccer Videos

In this paper, we introduce SoccerNet, a benchmark for action spotting in soccer videos. The dataset is composed of 500 complete soccer games from six main European leagues, covering three seasons from 2014 to 2017 and a total duration of 764 hours. A total of 6,637 temporal annotations are automatically parsed from online match reports at a one minute resolution for three main classes of events (Goal, Yellow/Red Card, and Substitution). As such, the dataset is easily scalable. These annotations are manually refined to a one second resolution by anchoring them at a single timestamp following well-defined soccer rules. With an average of one event every 6.9 minutes, this dataset focuses on the problem of localizing very sparse events within long videos. We define the task of spotting as finding the anchors of soccer events in a video. Making use of recent developments in the realm of generic action recognition and detection in video, we provide strong baselines for detecting soccer events. We show that our best model for classifying temporal segments of length one minute reaches a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 67.8%. For the spotting task, our baseline reaches an Average-mAP of 49.7% for tolerances $\delta$ ranging from 5 to 60 seconds. Our dataset and models are available at https://silviogiancola.github.io/SoccerNet.Comment: CVPR Workshop on Computer Vision in Sports 201

True Merit: Ensuring Our Brightest Students Have Access to Our Best Colleges and Universities

America's top colleges and universities should institute an admissions preference for low-income students because such students -- even when they are high-achievers academically -- now face unjustified barriers and make up a mere 3 percent of enrollment at the elite schools, according this report from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. The Cooke Foundation found that such a "poverty preference" for admissions to selective higher education institutions, akin to existing preferences for athletes and the children of alumni, would create a more level playing field for disadvantaged students.The Cooke Foundation report shows dramatic differences between enrollment rates at the most selective schools for students from families with the highest and lowest incomes. It highlights the major challenges low-income, high-achieving students face when seeking admission to these colleges and universities.Perhaps the most significant new finding of the report is that the vast majority of students in America's most competitive institutions of higher education -- 72 percent -- come from the wealthiest 25 percent of the U.S. population. In sharp contrast, only 3 percent of students in the most selective schools come from the 25 percent of families with the lowest incomes. The report is the first comprehensive analysis conducted on the postsecondary admissions process as it affects high-achieving, low-income applicants

Integration of Absolute Orientation Measurements in the KinectFusion Reconstruction pipeline

In this paper, we show how absolute orientation measurements provided by low-cost but high-fidelity IMU sensors can be integrated into the KinectFusion pipeline. We show that integration improves both runtime, robustness and quality of the 3D reconstruction. In particular, we use this orientation data to seed and regularize the ICP registration technique. We also present a technique to filter the pairs of 3D matched points based on the distribution of their distances. This filter is implemented efficiently on the GPU. Estimating the distribution of the distances helps control the number of iterations necessary for the convergence of the ICP algorithm. Finally, we show experimental results that highlight improvements in robustness, a speed-up of almost 12%, and a gain in tracking quality of 53% for the ATE metric on the Freiburg benchmark.Comment: CVPR Workshop on Visual Odometry and Computer Vision Applications Based on Location Clues 201

THE ROLE OF HIGH-DOSE VITAMIN D IN RISK REDUCTION OF OSTEONECROSIS OF THE JAW IN CANCER PATIENTS RECEIVING ZOLEDRONIC ACID

Osteonecrosis of the jaw (ONJ) is a serious complication of oncological patients after or during drug therapy, whose manifestations range from asymptomatic to aspects requiring extensive operative treatment and adversely affecting patient’s qualify of life. Taking in account that the lack of supplementation vitamin D causes hypovitaminosis, increasing bone renewal, losing bone mass, and in severe cases determing osteomalacia (one of the risk factors for ONJ) and that the probability of developing ONJ increases significantly during the first 3 years of treatment, the main objective of the present study is to assess whether the implementation of high-dose vitamin D in oncologic patients treated with zoledronic acid plus the well-known primary prevention protocols for elimination of potential risk factors could effectively reduce the risk of ONJ. Given the simplicity, safety and low costs of vitamin D supplementation, the finding of a real protective effect on the development of ONJ may have important implications in clinical practice, making safer the administration of zoledronic acid

The oxidative damage to the human telomere: effects of 5-hydroxymethyl-2'-deoxyuridine on telomeric G-quadruplex structures

As part of the genome, human telomeric regions can be damaged by the chemically reactive molecules responsible for oxidative DNA damage. Considering that G-quadruplex structures have been proven to occur in human telomere regions, several studies have been devoted to investigating the effect of oxidation products on the properties of these structures. However only investigations concerning the presence in G-quadruplexes of the main oxidation products of deoxyguanosine and deoxyadenosine have appeared in the literature. Here, we investigated the effects of 5-hydroxymethyl-2’-deoxyuridine (5-hmdU), one of the main oxidation products of T, on the physical–chemical properties of the G-quadruplex structures formed by two human telomeric sequences. Collected calorimetric, circular dichroism and electrophoretic data suggest that, in contrast to most of the results on other damage, the replacement of a T with a 5-hmdU results in only negligible effects on structural stability. Reported results and other data from literature suggest a possible protecting effect of the loop residues on the other parts of the G-quadruplexes