Running on Empty: The Problem with Politicians and Stealing (Music)

This Comment explores the legal issues arising from unauthorized use of musical compositions during political campaigns and rallies. Focusing on John McCain’s use of Jackson Brown’s song “Running on Empty” during his political campaign, the article examines why such uses are problematic and proposes remedies for preventing future unauthorized use

ADM-Loc: Actionness Distribution Modeling for Point-supervised Temporal Action Localization

This paper addresses the challenge of point-supervised temporal action detection, in which only one frame per action instance is annotated in the training set. Self-training aims to provide supplementary supervision for the training process by generating pseudo-labels (action proposals) from a base model. However, most current methods generate action proposals by applying manually designed thresholds to action classification probabilities and treating adjacent snippets as independent entities. As a result, these methods struggle to generate complete action proposals, exhibit sensitivity to fluctuations in action classification scores, and generate redundant and overlapping action proposals. This paper proposes a novel framework termed ADM-Loc, which stands for Actionness Distribution Modeling for point-supervised action Localization. ADM-Loc generates action proposals by fitting a composite distribution, comprising both Gaussian and uniform distributions, to the action classification signals. This fitting process is tailored to each action class present in the video and is applied separately for each action instance, ensuring the distinctiveness of their distributions. ADM-Loc significantly enhances the alignment between the generated action proposals and ground-truth action instances and offers high-quality pseudo-labels for self-training. Moreover, to model action boundary snippets, it enforces consistency in action classification scores during training by employing Gaussian kernels, supervised with the proposed loss functions. ADM-Loc outperforms the state-of-the-art point-supervised methods on THUMOS14 and ActivityNet-v1.2 datasets

The Impact of Non-Audit Services on Earning Response Coefficient

The present study aims to investigate the impact of non-audit services on earnings response coefficient. It is a library and analytical-scientific research and is based on panel data analysis. In this study, the financial data of 74 companies accepted in Tehran Stock Exchange during the period 2011-2016 have been reviewed.The results demonstrate that non-audit services have a significant negative relationship with earnings response coefficient.Although non-audit services will have benefits such as increased financial statements understandability, auditors’ knowledge-sharing, better relationships between managers and auditors and reduced agency costs, this type of services threatens auditor independence and subsequently, earnings quality will be affected. Thus,the findings of the present study confirm the view thatby providing non-audit services, auditor independence is affected, resulting in a negative reaction to earnings.

Seismic Soil Structure Interaction Analyses of an Office Building in Oakland, California

This paper discusses soil-structure interaction (SSI) analyses for a 10-story office building with three levels of basement (10 meters) located in downtown Oakland, California. The objectives of these analyses were to assess the effects of SSI on the response of the building and to develop ground-level input earthquake motions at the base of the building for use by the project structural engineer. The SSI analyses were conducted using the two-dimensional finite element program FLUSH. The results of these analyses indicate that SSI has a negligible effect on horizontal ground motions at and near the building’s predominant period (T ~ 1.8 seconds). Minor but unfavorable SSI effects were found at higher frequencies. The effects of SSI on the vertical motions in the building were for practical purposes, negligible. Parametric studies indicate that more favorable SSI effects may have been realized if the building was surrounded by softer soils

Application of frontal solution method in Dam-Reservoir problem

Solution of the total equations of the phenomenon in time domain is the main target in the current study. The advantages of the method are high accuracy comparing with iterative methods, and possibility of handling the nonlinear affects. Deficiencies are due to high system requirement, the use of same formulation either Lagrangian or Eulerian which are suitable for the structure or reservoir respectively, and solving the variables with very different orders. The proposed method is to take advantage of frontal solution scheme. In this solution method some of the variables are gathered in a front, and solution is performed each time for successive fronts. The size of the front is different for each problem, but it is much less than total variables. Therefore, computational requirement is limited without losing accuracy. The hydrodynamic pressure variables are chosen to be located in front. Therefore some notable changes had to be made in formal scheme. In common version the choosing the variables and placing them in the front is done automatically. While in proposed application the hydrodynamic pressure variables are forced to be located in front. Other advantages are also achieved. Having the hydrodynamic pressure variables, the structure and reservoir are solved separately using their suitable formulations. This paper studies two methods for analysis of the dam-reservoir system. The first method is based on using frontal method, while the other utilizes iterative schemes. A typical dam-reservoir system is performed by five different meshes. These analyses are compared from efficiency point of view. Frontal method requires less system requirement than iterative methods. CPU time are calculated for two approaches. All the execution times are calculated on the same hardware to achieve an appropriate criterion for comparison purposes. Compared to iterative scheme, CPU time is decrease in frontal method. As the number of the elements are 2 increase, execution time is saved more in frontal method even up to 90 percent

Investigating the Nature of Interaction at Elementary and Intermediate EFL Classes

Classroom research mainly concentrates on what happens in classrooms and tries to explore these events. One aspect that has been under investigation in this area is 'classroom interaction'. The current work was inspired by Kumaravadivelu's (2006) classification of interaction types: textual, interpersonal and ideational interaction. The main objective of the present study was to investigate the nature of interaction types proposed by Kumaravadivelu, the extent of their occurrence and their contribution to L2 development regarding two levels of Elementary and Intermediate. During data collection process, 20 sessions of EFL classes in a Language Institute were observed and the main events regarding the types of interaction under investigation were written in the form of field notes and audio-recorded for later reflection. The results were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The quantitative data from the observation were analyzed through inferential statistics. Qualitative analysis of data was carried out through transcription of important events. The quantitative results indicated that the difference between means of time spent on three types of interaction regarding two levels was not significant. For the qualitative analysis, the nature of these three types of interaction was compared based on two levels and some similarities and differences were found

Randomness Recoverable Secret Sharing Schemes

It is well-known that randomness is essential for secure cryptography. The randomness used in cryptographic primitives is not necessarily recoverable even by the party who can, e.g., decrypt or recover the underlying secret/message. Several cryptographic primitives that support randomness recovery have turned out useful in various applications. In this paper, we study randomness recoverable secret sharing schemes (RR-SSS), in both information-theoretic and computational settings and provide two results. First, we show that while every access structure admits a perfect RR-SSS, there are very simple access structures (e.g., in monotone AC?) that do not admit efficient perfect (or even statistical) RR-SSS. Second, we show that the existence of efficient computational RR-SSS for certain access structures in monotone AC? implies the existence of one-way functions. This stands in sharp contrast to (non-RR) SSS schemes for which no such results are known. RR-SSS plays a key role in making advanced attributed-based encryption schemes randomness recoverable, which in turn have applications in the context of designated-verifier non-interactive zero knowledge

Scientific Documents clustering based on Text Summarization

In this paper a novel method is proposed for scientific document clustering. The proposed method is a summarization-based hybrid algorithm which comprises a preprocessing phase. In the preprocessing phase unimportant words which are frequently used in the text are removed. This process reduces the amount of data for the clustering purpose. Furthermore frequent items cause overlapping between the clusters which leads to inefficiency of the cluster separation. After the preprocessing phase, Term Frequency/Inverse Document Frequency (TFIDF) is calculated for all words and stems over the document to score them in the document. Text summarization is performed then in the sentence level. Document clustering is finally done according to the scores of calculated TFIDF. The hybrid progress of the proposed scheme, from preprocessing phase to document clustering, gains a rapid and efficient clustering method which is evaluated by 400 English texts extracted from scientific databases of 11 different topics. The proposed method is compared with CSSA, SMTC and Max-Capture methods. The results demonstrate the proficiency of the proposed scheme in terms of computation time and efficiency using F-measure criterion

Prevalence of mandibular accessory foramina using CBCT in a selected iranian population

Introduction: The aim of the current study was to evaluate the frequency of accessory foramina in human mandible. Material & Methods: In this cross-sectional study, 400 cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) images of mandibles of 273 patients (120 males and 153 females), divided into four groups ≤30, 30–39, 40–49, and ≥50 years) with the mean age of 38.05±13.71 years (40.71±12.83 for males and 35.39±12.05 for females) were evaluated. The number and diameter of accessory foramina from midline to anterior border of ramus with 0.1 mm intervals were investigated. Data were analyzed with SPSS 17 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, I1, USA) using T-Test, Pearson's correlation coefficient and Fisher exact test. Results: Totally, 568 accessory foramina with mean diameter of 0.35±0.15 mm were seen. The frequency of accessory foramina in the studied patients was 83% with mean frequency of 88% in males and 80% in females. These results showed a significant difference between the genders in frequency of accessory foramen (P<0.001) although no difference was observed among different age groups. The highest frequency belonged to anterior lingual of mandible. The frequency of accessory foramina in posterior mandible was higher in females, while males indicated higher frequency in anterior mandible. No significant difference was found in the frequency of accessory foramina between the right and left sides of the mandible. Conclusion: The results suggested, the survey of accessory foramina is recommended in CBCT images of mandible for therapeutic reasons due to higher frequency of accessory foramina in mandible