Fast Fight Detection

Action recognition has become a hot topic within computer vision. However, the action recognition community has focused mainly on relatively simple actions like clapping, walking, jogging, etc. The detection of specific events with direct practical use such as fights or in general aggressive behavior has been comparatively less studied. Such capability may be extremely useful in some video surveillance scenarios like prisons, psychiatric centers or even embedded in camera phones. As a consequence, there is growing interest in developing violence detection algorithms. Recent work considered the well-known Bag-of-Words framework for the specific problem of fight detection. Under this framework, spatio-temporal features are extracted from the video sequences and used for classification. Despite encouraging results in which high accuracy rates were achieved, the computational cost of extracting such features is prohibitive for practical applications. This work proposes a novel method to detect violence sequences. Features extracted from motion blobs are used to discriminate fight and non-fight sequences. Although the method is outperformed in accuracy by state of the art, it has a significantly faster computation time thus making it amenable for real-time applications

An atlas of ECMWF analyses (1980-1987). Part 1: First moment quantities

This document is an atlas of the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) initialized analyses for 1980 to 1987. Various first moment quantities are presented for monthly, seasonal, and annual averages on a global cylindrical projection, as well as, cross section maps of zonal averages. Global maps of winds, temperature, stream function, and velocity potential are presented at 850 and 200 mb. In addition, global maps of the 300 mb height field (total and eddy), the 500 mb vertical velocity, the 850 mb moisture field, and sea level pressure are presented. The average seasonal cycle and anomalies during the 8 year period are presented for selected quantities

The effect of supernatural priming on cheating behaviour

Research has shown that the mental activation of concepts related to supernatural agents (e.g., God, ghost) is capable of altering one’s moral behaviours. Based on the supernatural monitoring hypothesis, two experiments were conducted to investigate the impact of priming on cheating behaviour using undergraduate participants from Singapore. The results of the first experiment showed that participants who were primed with the concepts of God and ghost via a word-scramble task cheated less in a mathematical task than participants exposed to neutral primes. The second experiment showed that the activation of God and ghost concepts via a supraliminal priming method reduced the participants’ cheating in a riddle game, even when the participants were informed that they would be rewarded monetarily for correctly answering the riddles. The results suggested that the mental activation of supernatural agents could reduce cheating behaviour regardless of the presence or absence of explicit belief in supernatural agents

Are there mappable genes for family resemblance for the magnitude of intra-individual variation in systolic blood pressure?

BACKGROUND: The genetic regulation of variation in intra-individual fluctuations in systolic blood pressure over time is poorly understood. Analysis of the magnitude of the average fluctuation of a person's systolic blood pressure around his or her age-adjusted trend line, however, shows moderate, albeit significant, family resemblance in Cohort 1 of the Framingham Heart Study. To determine whether genomic regions affecting this phenotype could be identified, we pursued a "model-free" multipoint quantitative linkage analysis. RESULTS: Two different linkage methods revealed multiple nominally significant signals, two to four of which are "replicated" in Cohort 2. When both cohorts are assembled into extended pedigrees, three linkage signals remain nominally significant by one or both methods. CONCLUSION: Any or all of the genomic regions in the vicinity of D5S1456, D11S2359, and D20S470 may contain elements that regulate systolic blood pressure homeostasis

Serial dependence in the perception of visual variance

The recent history of perceptual experience has been shown to influence subsequent perception. Classically, this dependence on perceptual history has been examined in sensory adaptation paradigms, wherein prolonged exposure to a particular stimulus (e.g. a vertically oriented grating) produces changes in perception of subsequently presented stimuli (e.g. the tilt aftereffect). More recently, several studies have investigated the influence of shorter perceptual exposure with effects, referred to as serial dependence, being described for a variety of low and high-level perceptual dimensions. In this study, we examined serial dependence in the processing of dispersion statistics, namely variance - a key descriptor of the environment and indicative of the precision and reliability of ensemble representations. We found two opposite serial dependencies operating at different timescales, and likely originating at different processing levels: A positive, Bayesian-like bias was driven by the most recent exposures, dependent on feature-specific decision-making and appearing only when high confidence was placed in that decision; and a longer-lasting negative bias - akin to an adaptation after-effect - becoming manifest as the positive bias declined. Both effects were independent of spatial presentation location and the similarity of other close traits, such as mean direction of the visual variance stimulus. These findings suggest that visual variance processing occurs in high-level areas, but is also subject to a combination of multi-level mechanisms balancing perceptual stability and sensitivity, as with many different perceptual dimensions

Delayed ipsilateral intestinal perforation after endoscopic gastrojejunostomy: A perspective on underlying mechanisms

The endoscopic management for malignant gastric outlet obstruction has expanded with the advent of endoscopic ultrasound-guided gastrojejunostomy. Delayed perforation after endoscopic ultrasound-guided gastrojejunostomy is an important yet rarely reported adverse event, and it is unclear why some patients may suffer this complication. We present a case of intestinal perforation occurring one month after endoscopic ultrasound-guided gastrojejunostomy and discuss potential mechanisms which may contribute to this outcome

Pilot Interprofessional Education Program for OT Student Pediatric Practice Readiness

This mixed methods pilot study investigated the impact of an interprofessional education program on OT student readiness for collaboration with SLP students in a pediatric teaching-clinic practice setting. OT students were randomly assigned to either the treatment group, which received the interprofessional education experience, or the control group, which received the typical educational experience. Students completed pre and post surveys and journaled about the experience. Results pointed to a ceiling effect in the measurement scales in both the treatment and control groups due to positive attitudes at baseline. This positivity was also reflected in journal entries for the treatment group students. Several insights were gained through data analysis about the feasibility of this type of program, the usefulness of available measuring tools for detecting change in small samples, and the developmental progression of interprofessional skills attainment