Journal articles on the topic 'Classification de documents Inter-modaux'

This article introduces a new advanced tri-layered segmentation and bi-leveled-classifier-based Hindi printed document classification system, which categorizes imaged documents into pre-defined mutually exclusive categories by using SVM and Fuzzy matching at character and document classifications, respectively. During training, the improved and noise-free image is segmented into lines and words by profiling. Then it obtains Shirorekha Less (SL) isolated characters along with upper, left and right modifier components from the SL words. These components use their locations and inter character-modifier component distance to get associate with their corresponding characters only. Further, confidence values of all characters are calculated with SVM training and all characters are mapped into Romanized labels to generate the words. Finally, documents are classified by Fuzzy based matching of Romanized detected words and predefined classes. The average execution times of SL characters are 0.22675 sec. and 0.20375 sec. and classification accuracy are 74.61% and 80.73% for training and testing, respectively.

TREC text documents are complex to analyze the features its relevant similar documents using the traditional document similarity measures. As the size of the TREC repository is increasing, finding relevant clustered documents from a large collection of unstructured documents is a challenging task. Traditional document similarity and classification models are implemented on homogeneous TREC data to find essential features for document entities that are similar to the TREC documents. Also, most of the traditional models are applicable to limited text document sets for text analysis. The main issues in the traditional text mining models in TREC repository include :1) Each document is represented in vector form with many sparsity values 2) Failed to find the document semantic similarity between the intra and inter clusters 3) High mean squared error rate. In this paper, novel feature selection based clustered and classification model is proposed on large number of different TREC repositories. Traditional latent Semantic Indexing and document clustering models are failed to find the topic relevance on large number of TREC clinical text document sets due to computational memory and time. Proposed document feature selection and clustered based classification model is applied on TREC clinical benchmark datasets. From the experimental results, it is proved that the proposed model is efficient than the existing models in terms of computational memory, accuracy and error rate are concerned.

Nowadays, a large number of information can not be reached by the reader because of the misclassification of text-based documents. The misclassified data can also make the readers obtain the wrong information. The method which is proposed by this paper is aiming to classify the documents into the correct group. Each document will have a membership value in several different classes. The method will be used to find the degree of similarity between the two documents is the semantic similarity. In fact, there is no document that doesn’t have a relationship with the other but their relationship might be close to 0. This method calculates the similarity between two documents by taking into account the level of similarity of words and their synonyms. After all inter-document similarity values obtained, a matrix will be created. The matrix is then used as a semi-supervised factor. The output of this method is the value of the membership of each document, which must be one of the greatest membership value for each document which indicates where the documents are grouped. Classification result computed by the method shows a good value which is 90 %. Index Terms - Fuzzy co-clustering, Heuristic, Semantica Similiarity, Semi-supervised learning.

Clustering is one of the most significant research area in the field of data mining and considered as an important tool in the fast developing information explosion era.Clustering systems are used more and more often in text mining, especially in analyzing texts and to extracting knowledge they contain. Data are grouped into clusters in such a way that the data of the same group are similar and those in other groups are dissimilar. It aims to minimizing intra-class similarity and maximizing inter-class dissimilarity. Clustering is useful to obtain interesting patterns and structures from a large set of data. It can be applied in many areas, namely, DNA analysis, marketing studies, web documents, and classification. This paper aims to study and compare three text documents clustering, namely, k-means, k-medoids, and SOM through F-measure.

For the last two decades, various studies on determining the quality of online product reviews have been concerned with the classification of complete documents into helpful or unhelpful classes using supervised learning methods. As in any supervised machine-learning task, a manually annotated corpus is required to train a model. Corpora annotated for helpful product reviews are an important resource for the understanding of what makes online product reviews helpful and of how to rank them according to their quality. However, most corpora for helpfulness are annotated on the document level: the full review. Little attention has been paid to carrying out a deeper analysis of helpful comments in reviews. In this article, a new annotation scheme is proposed to identify helpful sentences from each product review in the dataset. The annotation scheme, guidelines and the inter-annotator agreement scores are presented and discussed. A high level of inter-annotator agreement is obtained, indicating that the annotated corpus is suitable to support subsequent research.

This article argues and documents that diasporic networking and guanxi relationships in North Sulawesi Province in East Indonesia are not essential for doing business within the Chinese business community. The main argument forwarded is that guanxi governed business networks are but one strategy among several other business strategies employed, when engaging in inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic business transactions. Furthermore, a discussion of the relationship between local Chinese and non-Chinese business environment as well as of the inter-ethnic environment in general constitutes a framework for how to position the Chinese in an overall societal context. Of special interest in this connection are questions of inter-ethnic integration versus assimilation together with questions of descent and ethnic classification in the relation to the surrounding non-Chinese community.

The article considers the experience of classification documents of the territorial planning and management of urban agglomerations in the Russian Federation. We have analyzed the documents of the federal level the main aim of which is regulating the processes of formation and development of agglomerations in the country. The documents developed in the regions over the past ten years, which regulate the functioning of all Russian urban agglomerations including laws, concepts, strategies, territorial planning schemes, inter-municipal agreements, and regulations on the activities of coordination councils are considered in detail. A comparative analysis of the documents allowed us to group agglomerations according to the degree of representation of the regulatory and documentary basis. There are five groups of agglomerations that differ in the number of documents and the degree of elaboration of agglomeration issues. The results revealed a significant gap between the selected groups. For agglomerations of the first and second groups we have prepared the complete sets of documentation, which reflect sufficiently the main parameters of agglomerations as integral system formations. For agglomerations included in the fourth group, there are no special documents, there are also some relevant materials in the regional documents of strategic and territorial planning which are characterized by poor elaboration. Agglomerations of the fifth group are not provided with regulatory documents at all, they are not considered as special formations. The analysis can contribute to improving the methodology of agglomeration development, understanding the need to expand and improve approaches to the management of urban agglomerations as integral objects. It is obvious that the urgent problem of sustainable development and functioning of urban agglomerations is the need to develop an innovative management model, its coordination with the regulatory framework of regional management structures, and a clear definition of conceptual and terminological and spatial-structural parameters.

Extractive text summarization selects the most important sentences from a document, preserves their original meaning, and produces an objective and fact-based summary. It is faster and less computationally intensive than abstract summarization techniques. Learning cross-sentence relationships is crucial for extractive text summarization. However, most of the language models currently in use process text data sequentially, which makes it difficult to capture such inter-sentence relations, especially in long documents. This paper proposes an extractive summarization model based on the graph neural network (GNN) to address this problem. The model effectively represents cross-sentence relationships using a graph-structured document representation. In addition to sentence nodes, we introduce two nodes with different granularity in the graph structure, words and topics, which bring different levels of semantic information. The node representations are updated by the graph attention network (GAT). The final summary is obtained using the binary classification of the sentence nodes. Our text summarization method was demonstrated to be highly effective, as supported by the results of our experiments on the CNN/DM and NYT datasets. To be specific, our approach outperformed baseline models of the same type in terms of ROUGE scores on both datasets, indicating the potential of our proposed model for enhancing text summarization tasks.

This article examines land privatization in late nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine through the extension of possession in miri lands, on the one hand, and its transformation into fee-simple property through change in land category classification (i.e., miri to mülk), on the other. Using primary sources, particularly Ottoman documents and correspondence of the German Consulate in Jerusalem, we analyze this process, as reflected in several cases involving foreign subjects and Ottoman authorities. We argue that privatization began as informal violations of the law, proceeded with the struggle of landholders against authorities who tried to reverse the process, and ended in victory for the landholders after the state ceded to their demands, inter alia, as a result of pressure from foreign nations and their consuls. Thus did de facto land privatization become de jure privatization.

Summary Objectives: Automatic de-identification to remove protected health information (PHI) from clinical text can use a “binary” model that replaces redacted text with a generic tag (e.g., “<PHI>”), or can use a “multiclass” model that retains more class information (e.g., “<Phone Number>”). Binary models are easier to develop, but result in text that is potentially less informative. We investigated whether building a multiclass de-identification is worth the extra effort. Methods: Using the 2014 i2b2 dataset, we compared the accuracy and impact on document readability of two models. In the first experiment, we generated one binary and two multiclass versions trained with the same machine-learning algorithm Conditional Random Field (CRF). Accuracy (recall, precision, f-score) and secondary metrics (e.g, training time, testing time, minimum memory required) were measured. In the second experiment, three reviewers accessed the readability of two redacted documents using the binary and multiclass methods. We estimated a pooled Kappa to estimate the inter-rater agreement. Results: The multiclass model did not demonstrate a clear accuracy advantage, with lower recall (−1.9%) and only slightly better precision (+0.6%), despite requiring additional computing resources. Three raters reached a very high agreement (Kappa = 0.975, 95% Confidence Interval (0.946, 1.00), p < 0.0001) that both binary and multiclass models have the same impact on document readability. Conclusions: This study suggests that the development of more sophisticated classification of PHI may not be worth the effort in terms of both system accuracy and the usefulness of the output.

PURPOSE The aim of this study was to develop an open-source natural language processing (NLP) pipeline for text mining of medical information from clinical reports. We also aimed to provide insight into why certain variables or reports are more suitable for clinical text mining than others. MATERIALS AND METHODS Various NLP models were developed to extract 15 radiologic characteristics from free-text radiology reports for patients with glioblastoma. Ten-fold cross-validation was used to optimize the hyperparameter settings and estimate model performance. We examined how model performance was associated with quantitative attributes of the radiologic characteristics and reports. RESULTS In total, 562 unique brain magnetic resonance imaging reports were retrieved. NLP extracted 15 radiologic characteristics with high to excellent discrimination (area under the curve, 0.82 to 0.98) and accuracy (78.6% to 96.6%). Model performance was correlated with the inter-rater agreement of the manually provided labels (ρ = 0.904; P < .001) but not with the frequency distribution of the variables of interest (ρ = 0.179; P = .52). All variables labeled with a near perfect inter-rater agreement were classified with excellent performance (area under the curve > 0.95). Excellent performance could be achieved for variables with only 50 to 100 observations in the minority group and class imbalances up to a 9:1 ratio. Report-level classification accuracy was not associated with the number of words or the vocabulary size in the distinct text documents. CONCLUSION This study provides an open-source NLP pipeline that allows for text mining of narratively written clinical reports. Small sample sizes and class imbalance should not be considered as absolute contraindications for text mining in clinical research. However, future studies should report measures of inter-rater agreement whenever ground truth is based on a consensus label and use this measure to identify clinical variables eligible for text mining.

The purpose of the article is to introduce new approach to explicate the term of «book». It implicates inter- and transdisciplinary study of accumulated knowledge on the book theory, combined basic schemes and terminological systems in the book theory, documentology and related areas, identification of conflicts and their elimination. The author suggests to use widely the documentoriented terms introduced by Yury N. Stolyarov and Galina N. Shvetsova-Vodka; differentiated modelling and typological classification of documents and other objects to deliver social information to the society; and convergence of their typological and ontological features. These would provide for the unity of theoretical and ontological knowledge but also of taxon and metrological and structural aspects of their theorization. The result of the study is that the «book» term is defined as an astadial unit of activities to provide social information to the society. The book is an information product, significant in its semiotic value and embodied in the form of scrolls, blocks of bound pages, laser, optical discs, records, digital devices for reading, etc.: intended for reading (listening or tactile sensing) and fulfills the function of transmitting knowledge and other semantic content to addressees.

The article deals with the methods used in the study of the phenomena that make up the subject of criminology. The main task is to analyze the content of the methodology, general scientific methods, private methods and techniques used in criminological studies. In the course of their work, the authors used metaphysics and dialectic as a methodology; showed the specifics of their application to crime, as well as legal background for the nature of criminality e.g. its public danger. The authors used such general scientific methods as general scientific approaches and mid-level theories. In the case of criminality, the use of a systematic approach and philosophical teaching about human activity is shown. This enabled them to present criminality as a system the structural trait of which is a crime, and a holistic quality is a public danger which synthesizes the public danger of crimes, perpetrators and criminal groups. As a theory of the middle level, the theory of psychological alienation of the person is applied, according to which the typological feature of the criminal's personality is its anxiety for its social or biological status since the crime is psychological protection for external circumstances that cause such anxiety. Among private methods, the emphasis is on the statis-tical method used to characterize quantitative-quality crime indicators and a sociological one (interviewing, conversation, interviews, expert evaluation, analysis of documents, observa-tion). The methods above have limited possibilities: criminal statistics operate with data only on the recorded crimes, reflected in the documents of primary records, the closed criminal environment does not allow to use the method of included surveillance; the method of inter-viewing the participants of criminal groups and their relatives often gives false information, or cannot be applied because the persons in question refuse to be involved in questioning at all; the experiment deals only with certain aspects of criminal justice. The authors conclude that the combination of methodology, general scientific and specific research methods, the specificity of their application to group crime form the methodology of its study. They point out the application in criminology of sociometric and stratometric methods, by which the mechanism of formation, the dynamics of the development of criminal groups is shown, their classification is given, the number of group members is revealed, their status in the group and the structure of the group is established.

Purpose Studies on cross-culture marketing often focus on either localization or globalization strategies. Based on data from pre-communist China (1912–1949), product hybridization – defined as a process or strategy that generates symbols, designs, behaviors and cultural identities that blend local and global elements – emerges as a popular intermediate strategy worthy of further inquiry. After examining the mechanisms and processes underlying this strategy, a schema for classifying product hybridization strategies is developed and illustrated. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach Critical historical research method is applied to historical data and historical “traces” from pre-communist China’s corporate documents, memoirs, posters, advertisements, newspapers and secondhand sources. Findings Strategic interactions between domestic and foreign companies in pre-communist China fostered products and a city (Shanghai) containing Chinese and non-Chinese elements. Informed by historical traces and data from pre-communist China (1912-1949), a 2 × 2 classification schema relating company type (i.e. foreign or domestic) to values spectrum endpoint (i.e. domestic vs foreign) was formulated. This schema reflects the value of communication, negotiation and cultural (inter)penetration that accompanies cross-culture product flows. Research limitations/implications Cross-culture marketing strategies meant to help companies satisfy diverse marketplace interests can induce a mélange of product design elements. Because product hybridization reflects reciprocity between domestic and foreign companies that embodies multiple interests and contrasting interpretations of product meanings, researchers should examine globalization and localization synergistically. Practical implications Strategies adopted by domestic and foreign companies in pre-communist China (1912–1949) can help contemporary companies design effective cross-culture marketing strategies in a global marketplace infused with competing meanings and interests. Originality/value Examining historical strategies adopted in pre-communist China (1912–1949) can inform contemporary marketers’ intuitions. Understanding product hybridization in global marketplaces can improve marketing efficiency.

Given that the situations of preliminary investigation and court proceedings have the same epistemological nature, it is possible to apply the classification grounds developed in the theory of investigative situations to systematise and streamline the trial. It is possible to distinguish judicial situations related to: preservation of evidence obtained during the preliminary investi-gation in court; filling gaps in the preliminary investigation materials; evaluation of evidence in court and, finally, making a decision on the merits of the case. These judicial situations need to be resolved and have a significant impact on the tactics of the judicial investigation. This is because each case raises questions such as whether to begin the examination of evidence with the interrogation of defendants, victims or witnesses and, if there are several defendants, in what order to interrogate them, in what order to inter-rogate witnesses, in what part of the judicial investigation it is better to conduct expert exami-nations, inspection of physical evidence, the scene of the incident and other investigative actions. Criminal procedural legislation does not regulate such issues, which allows us to refer them to the tactics of the judicial investigation. The judicial-investigative situation under consideration, related to the change of testimony in court, can be partially resolved by choosing the order and combination of different forms of judicial interrogation, summoning for questioning to court persons who, according to the defendant, used methods of illegal influence, using such idea of information interaction as the principle of maevtika, related to the enrichment of information. Its essence is that in addition to the information obtained in the course of the investigation and operational-search activities and fixed in the relevant documents, the court should be presented with related information. This may include, for example, a video recording of the information environment at the time of the interview or during the interrogation, especially when the potential perpetrator was confessing. Pursuant to article 240, paragraph 1, of the Code of Criminal Procedure, in addition to hearing the testimony of the defendant, the victim, witnesses and expert findings, examining material evidence, and disclosing protocols and other documents, the court carries out other judicial investigative activities to examine the evidence. This enables the court to identify in the course of the trial the reasons for a change in the evidence and to verify its consistency with reality. At the same time, it is often the investigator or operative who can provide an indication of the sources of information that can help verify statements about the coercion of interrogators to confess, when they are questioned during the judicial investigation.

Background: There has been a groundswell of national support for transparent tracking and dissemination of PhD career outcomes. In 2017, individuals from multiple institutions and professional organizations met to create the Unified Career Outcomes Taxonomy (UCOT 2017), a three-tiered taxonomy to help institutions uniformly classify career outcomes of PhD graduates. Early adopters of UCOT 2017, noted ambiguity in some categories of the career taxonomy, raising questions about its consistent application within and across institutions. Methods: To test and evaluate the consistency of UCOT 2017, we calculated inter-rater reliability across two rounds of iterative refinement of the career taxonomy, classifying over 800 PhD alumni records via nine coders. Results: We identified areas of discordance in the taxonomy, and progressively refined UCOT 2017 and an accompanying Guidance Document to improve inter-rater reliability across all three tiers of the career taxonomy. However, differing interpretations of the classifications, especially for faculty classifications in the third tier, resulted in continued discordance among the coders. We addressed this discordance with clarifying language in the Guidance Document, and proposed the addition of a flag system for identification of the title, rank, and prefix of faculty members. This labeling system provides the additional benefit of highlighting the granularity and the intersectionality of faculty job functions, while maintaining the ability to sort by - and report data on - faculty and postdoctoral trainee roles, as is required by some national and federal reporting guidelines. We provide specific crosswalk guidance for how a user may choose to incorporate our suggestions while maintaining the ability to report in accordance with UCOT 2017. Conclusions: Our findings underscore the importance of detailed guidance documents, coder training, and periodic collaborative review of career outcomes taxonomies as PhD careers evolve in the global workforce. Implications for coder-training and use of novice coders are also discussed.

Background: There has been a groundswell of national support for transparent tracking and dissemination of PhD career outcomes. In 2017, individuals from multiple institutions and professional organizations met to create the Unified Career Outcomes Taxonomy (UCOT 2017), a three-tiered taxonomy to help institutions uniformly classify career outcomes of PhD graduates. Early adopters of UCOT 2017, noted ambiguity in some categories of the career taxonomy, raising questions about its consistent application within and across institutions. Methods: To test and evaluate the consistency of UCOT 2017, we calculated inter-rater reliability across two rounds of iterative refinement of the career taxonomy, classifying over 800 PhD alumni records via nine coders. Results: We identified areas of discordance in the taxonomy, and progressively refined UCOT 2017 and an accompanying Guidance Document to improve inter-rater reliability across all three tiers of the career taxonomy. However, differing interpretations of the classifications, especially for faculty classifications in the third tier, resulted in continued discordance among the coders. We addressed this discordance with clarifying language in the Guidance Document, and proposed the addition of a flag system for identification of the title, rank, and prefix of faculty members. This labeling system provides the additional benefit of highlighting the granularity and the intersectionality of faculty job functions, while maintaining the ability to sort by - and report data on - faculty and postdoctoral trainee roles, as is required by some national and federal reporting guidelines. We provide specific crosswalk guidance for how a user may choose to incorporate our suggestions while maintaining the ability to report in accordance with UCOT 2017. Conclusions: Our findings underscore the importance of detailed guidance documents, coder training, and periodic collaborative review of career outcomes taxonomies as PhD careers evolve in the global workforce. Implications for coder-training and use of novice coders are also discussed.

In this study, children’s meeting with the classics through Mavisel Yener’s work named “Eternity Library” will be exemplified by discussing intertextual relations. The study is qualitative and descriptive. By using intensive sampling, which is one of the purposeful sampling types, the aforementioned children’s book was chosen because it refers to the classics in a diverse, rich and intense manner in the context of intertextuality. The data were collected through document analysis and analyzed with descriptive analysis. In order to ensure its validity and reliability, the features of the determined classification were clearly drawn, the appropriateness of the classifications and quotations was paid attention to, the determined quotations were analyzed and revised at different times, and the final form was given. In the analyzed book, inter-author, inter-work, inter-genre, explicit and implicit references were found in the context of intertextuality, and it was determined that these references were mostly structured through the classics. It was concluded that the work examined in the study directed children to the classics with its rich intertextual references. It can be said that the work examined is a good example in terms of both breaking the negative view of the classics and effectively adding these works to the reading process of children.

Background: This study aims to evaluate the inter-rater reliability and perceived usability of a newly developed drug-related problem (DRP) classification system for use by pharmacists in the intermediate and long-term care (ILTC) setting in Singapore. Methods: This was a cross-sectional survey study involving the use of a self-administered questionnaire. All 55 pharmacists affiliated to the Pharmaceutical Society of Singapore (PSS) ILTC Pharmacists Workgroup who were above 21 years old and not authors of the classification system were invited to participate. The inter-rater reliability of participants’ classification of 46 mock DRP cases using the new DRP classification system was determined using Fleiss’s kappa (κ). Participants’ perceived usability of the classification system was evaluated using six items with five-point Likert scales (1—“strongly disagree”, 5—“strongly agree”). Results: Thirty-three pharmacists responded to the survey. Overall inter-rater reliability was found to be substantial (κ = 0.614; 95% CI: 0.611–0.617). All usability items received positive ratings (“strongly agree” or “agree”) from at least 69% of participants. Conclusion: The new DRP classification system has substantial external validity and appears to be suitable for use by pharmacists to document and report DRPs in the ILTC setting in Singapore and facilitate evaluation of the impact of pharmaceutical care in the ILTC setting.

This study was focused on exploring the recontextualisation of knowledge in the 5090 Biology Syllabus in Zambia. Learners have not performed well in the 5090 Biology Syllabus. The performance poor performance in the 5090 Biology Syllabus has been attributed to a number of reasons. One of the many reasons is that teachers do not know what they are to teach and how they are to teach. The study will help to understanding the instructional and the regulative discourse in the syllabus. This will enable the Biology teachers to effectively teach biology in secondary schools. An analysis of the syllabus will inform the Biology teachers with the content in the syllabus and how the content is to be transmitted. Bernstein’s classification and framing concepts have been used as analytical tools. Indicators were developed to guide the analysis. The document was inductively coded using Atlas ti 8 software. The findings indicated a strong framing (F+) in the selection, sequencing, evaluation criteria and in the hierarchical rules. Pacing was not indicated in the document. The classification was weak in the inter-disciplinary, intra-disciplinary and in the inter –discursive relations.

Objective: The International Skin Tear Advisory Panel (ISTAP) created the ISTAP Skin Tear Classification System with the aim of promoting a common and universal language to describe, classify and document skin tears, and increase awareness of the high prevalence of these wounds. Although there is a Spanish version of the ISTAP Skin Tear Classification System, the authors considered it relevant to have a specific Chilean Spanish version. The aim was to achieve the cultural adaptation of the ISTAP Skin Tear Classification System to Chilean Spanish, and verify its content validity and inter-rater reliability. Method: The study consisted of two phases: cultural adaptation of the ISTAP Skin Tear Classification System into Chilean Spanish, and validation of the culturally adapted system. A convenience sample of 150 health professionals classified 30 photographs of skin tears, using the same photographs used in the original ISTAP skin tear classification and validation study. Additionally, the clinical application of the classification system was tested among 20 nurses, who assessed and classified the skin tears (n=24) of hospitalised patients. For analysis of the inter-rater reliability, Fleiss' kappa was used. Results: The differences found in the translation referred to a synonym of the terms ‘skin’ or ‘cutaneous’, and the terms ‘flap’ or ‘tear’. Once analysed and discussed, the term ‘desgarro’ was maintained, which is the translation of the English term ‘flap’. There is no equivalent term for ‘skin tears’ in Spanish, but consensus was reached by researchers and collaborators to use the phrase: ‘desgarro de piel’. Once a consensus was reached on the wording for the translation, back-translation was completed and compared with the original English version and reviewed by the original author of the classification for accuracy. The content validity of the translated version of the ISTAP Skin Tear Classification System into Chilean Spanish showed a moderate agreement for the non-specialised nurses' group (0.4804) and for the specialised nurses' group (0.5308). Inter-rater reliability was achieved by obtaining a moderate agreement (Fleiss' kappa=0.53) and an almost perfect level of agreement for clinical application (Fleiss' kappa=0.83). Conclusion: The reported content validity and inter-rater reliability support the applicability of the cultural adaptation of the ISTAP Skin Tear Classification System to Chilean Spanish into practice.

Objective - The objective of research was to determine the intergovernmental relation in public transport services. It also aims to identify the inter-governmental Relation in the service of Batik Solo Trans viewed from the cooperation type, the cooperation process and examined using three aspects: sharing of benefits, sharing of burden and sharing of experience. Methodology/Technique - The research method was qualitative descriptive one with interview and documentation as the technique of collecting data. The sampling technique used was purposive sampling on. Data validation was carried out using method triangulation and data analysis using an interactive data analysis. Findings – Considering the result of research, it could be found that the type of inter- Governmental Relation in BST Service was the collective agreement without certain pact document. The cooperation process was done in coordinative manner. The cooperation showed the existence of benefit sharing between the areas involved. Besides, cooperation was also used as the media of sharing experiences, but it didn't show the distribution of responsibility. Novelty - The study recommends that there should be an agreement document specifically governing the intergovernmental cooperation in BST service, enabling the sharing of burdens so that the cooperation can be proposed with the distribution of responsibility between the areas involved. Type of Paper - Empirical Keywords: Inter-Regional Relation; Cooperation; Public Transport Service, City Bus. JEL Classification: O18, O31.

Prior work has commonly defined argument retrieval from heterogeneous document collections as a sentence-level classification task. Consequently, argument retrieval suffers both from low recall and from sentence segmentation errors making it difficult for humans and machines to consume the arguments. In this work, we argue that the task should be performed on a more fine-grained level of sequence labeling. For this, we define the task as Argument Unit Recognition and Classification (AURC). We present a dataset of arguments from heterogeneous sources annotated as spans of tokens within a sentence, as well as with a corresponding stance. We show that and how such difficult argument annotations can be effectively collected through crowdsourcing with high inter-annotator agreement. The new benchmark, AURC-8, contains up to 15% more arguments per topic as compared to annotations on the sentence level. We identify a number of methods targeted at AURC sequence labeling, achieving close to human performance on known domains. Further analysis also reveals that, contrary to previous approaches, our methods are more robust against sentence segmentation errors. We publicly release our code and the AURC-8 dataset.1

PURPOSE This study demonstrates the functionality of semiautomated algorithms to classify cancer-specific grading from electronic pathology reports generated from military treatment facilities. Two Perl-based algorithms are validated to classify WHO grade for tumors of the CNS and Gleason grades for prostate cancer. METHODS Case-finding cohorts were developed using diagnostic codes and matched by unique identifiers to obtain pathology records generated in the Military Health System for active duty service members from 2013 to 2018. Perl-based algorithms were applied to classify document-based pathology reports to identify malignant CNS tumors and prostate cancer, followed by a hand-review process to determine accuracy of the algorithm classifications. Inter-rater reliability, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive values (PPVs), and negative predictive values were computed following abstractor adjudication. RESULTS The high PPV for the Perl-based algorithms to classify CNS tumors (PPV > 98%) and prostate cancer (PPV > 99%) supports this approach to classify malignancies for cancer surveillance operations, mediated by a hand-reviewed semiautomated process to increase sensitivity by capturing ungraded cancers. Early detection was pronounced where 33.6% and 50.7% of malignant records retained a CNS WHO grade of II or a Gleason score of 6, respectively. Sensitivity metrics met criteria (> 75%) for brain (79.9%, 95% CI, 73.0 to 85.7) and prostate (96.7%, 95% CI, 94.9 to 98.0) cancers. CONCLUSION Semiautomated, document-based text classification using Perl coding successfully leveraged identification of WHO and Gleason grades to classify pathology records for CNS tumors and prostate cancer. The process is recommended for data quality initiatives to support cancer reporting functions, epidemiology, and research.

Sequential Text Classification (STC) aims to classify a sequence of text fragments (e.g., words in a sentence or sentences in a document) into a sequence of labels. In addition to the intra-fragment text contents, considering the inter-fragment context dependencies is also important for STC. Previous sequence labeling approaches largely generate a sequence of labels in left-to-right reading order. However, the need for context information in making decisions varies across different fragments and is not strictly organized in a left-to-right order. Therefore, it is appealing to label the fragments that need less consideration of context information first before labeling the fragments that need more. In this paper, we propose a novel model that labels a sequence of fragments in jumping order. Specifically, we devise a dedicated board-game to develop a correspondence between solving STC and board-game playing. By defining proper game rules and devising a game state evaluator in which context clues are injected, at each round, each player is effectively pushed to find the optimal move without position restrictions via considering the current game state, which corresponds to producing a label for an unlabeled fragment jumpily with the consideration of the contexts clues. The final game-end state is viewed as the optimal label sequence. Extensive results on three representative datasets show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with statistical significance.

Controversy surrounding the classification of thoracolumbar injuries has given rise to various classification systems over the years, including the most recent AOSpine Thoracolumbar Injury Classification System (ATLICS). This systematic review aims to provide an up-to-date evaluation of the literature, including assessment of a further three studies not analysed in previous reviews. In doing so, this is the first systematic review to include the reliability among non-spine subspecialty professionals and to document the wide variety between reliability across studies, particularly with regard to sub-type classification. Relevant studies were found via a systematic search of PubMed, EBESCO, Cochrane and Web of Science. Data extraction and quality assessment were conducted in line with Cochrane Collaboration guidelines. Twelve articles assessing the reliability of ATLICS were included in this review. The overall inter-observer reliability varied from fair to substantial, but the three additional studies in this review, compared to previous reviews, presented on average only fair reliability. The greatest variation of results was seen in A1 and B3 subtypes. Least reliably classified on average was A4 subtype. This systematic review concludes that ATLICS is reliable for the majority of injuries, but the variability within subtypes suggests the need for further research in assessing the needs of users in order to increase familiarity with ATLICS or perhaps the necessity to include more subtype-specific criteria into the system. Further research is also recommended on the reliability of modifiers, neurological classification and the application of ATLICS in a paediatric context.

De acuerdo con el “argumento metropolitano” la fragmentación político-administrativa genera una estructura de incentivos que motiva tanto a los funcionarios electos como a los designados a no cooperar ni coordinarse con las autoridades de otras jurisdicciones. En México algunos municipios han respondido a este problema con la formación de ciertas estructuras de toma de decisiones regionales o intermunicipales. Asimismo, el gobierno federal y los de algunos estados han promovido ciertas soluciones a este problema. Los arreglos institucionales y las organizaciones que han generado estos esfuerzos son muy diversos, difíciles de clasificar y poco explorados. En el presente documento se refieren algunos de estos esfuerzos y se destacan cuatro dimensiones para ayudar a su clasificación y estudio. Estas dimensiones buscan contribuir a identificar aspectos relevantes de dichas estructuras e instituciones, que faciliten el desarrollo de una agenda de investigación que estudie sistemáticamente su surgimiento, evolución y resultados. AbstractAccording to the “metropolitan argument,” political-administrative fragmentation creates an incentive structure that encourages both elected and designated officials not to cooperate or coordinate with authorities from other jurisdictions. In Mexico, certain municipalities have responded to this problem by forming certain regional or inter-municipal decision-making structures. The federal government and the governments of certain states have promoted certain solutions to this problem. The institutional arrangements and organizations that have created these efforts are extremely diverse, difficult to classify and have scarcely been explored. This document mentions some of these efforts and highlights four dimensions in order to contribute to their classification and study. These dimensions seek to contribute to identifying key aspects of these structures and institutions that facilitate the development of a research agenda that systematically studies their emergence, evolution and results.

Abstract Objective To automatically recognize self-acknowledged limitations in clinical research publications to support efforts in improving research transparency. Methods To develop our recognition methods, we used a set of 8431 sentences from 1197 PubMed Central articles. A subset of these sentences was manually annotated for training/testing, and inter-annotator agreement was calculated. We cast the recognition problem as a binary classification task, in which we determine whether a given sentence from a publication discusses self-acknowledged limitations or not. We experimented with three methods: a rule-based approach based on document structure, supervised machine learning, and a semi-supervised method that uses self-training to expand the training set in order to improve classification performance. The machine learning algorithms used were logistic regression (LR) and support vector machines (SVM). Results Annotators had good agreement in labeling limitation sentences (Krippendorff’s α = 0.781). Of the three methods used, the rule-based method yielded the best performance with 91.5% accuracy (95% CI [90.1-92.9]), while self-training with SVM led to a small improvement over fully supervised learning (89.9%, 95% CI [88.4-91.4] vs 89.6%, 95% CI [88.1-91.1]). Conclusions The approach presented can be incorporated into the workflows of stakeholders focusing on research transparency to improve reporting of limitations in clinical studies.

Background Physical therapy for youth with cerebral palsy (CP) who are ambulatory includes interventions to increase functional mobility and participation in physical activity (PA). Thus, reliable and valid measures are needed to document PA in youth with CP. Objective The purpose of this study was to evaluate the inter-instrument reliability and concurrent validity of 3 accelerometer-based motion sensors with indirect calorimetry as the criterion for measuring PA intensity in youth with CP. Methods Fifty-seven youth with CP (mean age=12.5 years, SD=3.3; 51% female; 49.1% with spastic hemiplegia) participated. Inclusion criteria were: aged 6 to 20 years, ambulatory, Gross Motor Function Classification System (GMFCS) levels I through III, able to follow directions, and able to complete the full PA protocol. Protocol activities included standardized activity trials with increasing PA intensity (resting, writing, household chores, active video games, and walking at 3 self-selected speeds), as measured by weight-relative oxygen uptake (in mL/kg/min). During each trial, participants wore bilateral accelerometers on the upper arms, waist/hip, and ankle and a portable indirect calorimeter. Intraclass coefficient correlations (ICCs) were calculated to evaluate inter-instrument reliability (left-to-right accelerometer placement). Spearman correlations were used to examine concurrent validity between accelerometer output (activity and step counts) and indirect calorimetry. Friedman analyses of variance with post hoc pair-wise analyses were conducted to examine the validity of accelerometers to discriminate PA intensity across activity trials. Results All accelerometers exhibited excellent inter-instrument reliability (ICC=.94–.99) and good concurrent validity (rho=.70–.85). All accelerometers discriminated PA intensity across most activity trials. Limitations This PA protocol consisted of controlled activity trials. Conclusions Accelerometers provide valid and reliable measures of PA intensity among youth with CP.

Rising spatial disparities in socioeconomic development is a major concern in developing economies. Regional inequality is a dimension of overall inequality, but it has added significance when spatial and regional divisions align with political and ethnic tensions to undermine social and political stability. This paper is an attempt to document the extent and nature of regional inequality in the level of socioeconomic development. Seventeen indicators related to human resources and standards of living are developed from the district representative household data of Pakistan Social and Living-Standard Measurement (PSLM) survey for the year 2012-13. Development Indicators, for the first time in Pakistan are also aggregated at sub-district level to incorporate the intra-district inequalities in the analysis of spatial disparities. The study provides provincial multidimensional Gini coefficients and district development ranking to evaluate inter and intra provincial disparities respectively in the selected dimensions of socioeconomic development with the help of Inequality-adjusted Socioeconomic Development Index (ISDI). JEL Classification: D63, I31 Keywords: Multidimensional Inequality, Inequality Adjusted Socioeconomic Development Index, Development Ranking, Pakistan

Documenting the inter-annual variability and the long-term trend of the glacier snow line altitude is highly relevant to document the evolution of glacier mass changes. Automatically identifying the snow line on glaciers is challenging; recent developments in machine learning approaches show promise to tackle this issue. This manuscript presents a proof of concept of machine learning approaches applied to multi-spectral images to detect the snow line and quantify its average altitude. The tested approaches include the combination of different image processing and classification methods, and takes into account cast shadows. The efficiency of these approaches is evaluated on mountain glaciers in the European Alps by comparing the results with manually annotated data. Solutions provided by the different approaches are robust when compared to the ground truth’s snow lines, with a Pearson’s correlation ranging from 79% to 96% depending on the method. However, the tested approaches may fail when snow lines are not continuous or exhibit a strong change of elevation. The major advantage over the state of the art is that the proposed approach does not require one calibration per glacier.

Currently, direct re-vascularization for the management of critical limb ischemia (CLI) is effectuated through open and hybrid surgical treatments. At the same time, therapeutic recommendations for one of the methods appear as a subject of lasting discussions. Today TASC II (TransAtlantic Inter-Society Consensus for the Management of Peripheral Arterial Disease) adopted in 2007 is the most popular document that provides justifications for endovascular and surgical treatment of peripheral arterial disease. Clinical practice provides evidence that there is a significant number of patients having critical limb ischemia who suffer from vascular bed disorders and are classified as C or D-type according to TASC classification. Meanwhile, there also are cases when these patients have no other alternative than re-vascularization by means of open surgery, which is why endovascular invasion appears as the only method of re-vascularization for them. The article presents some results of comparative studies within endovascular and surgical tools aimed at revascularization in the area of femoral-popliteal segment, including cases where patients are classified as C and D-type. The results of shunting operations are compared to angioplasty and remote endarterectomy, whereas technical methods for re-entry during subintimal angioplasty are regarded apart. Despite the fact that there are medical recommendations for the use of endovascular and surgical methods depending on TASC II classification, today there is no evidence that these tools can be efficient in revascularization of femoral-popliteal segment. In order to identify the efficiency of distinct methods in revascularization of femoral-popliteal segment there a need in a number of extended randomized studies designed to evaluate the role of such factors, as anatomic location of the vascular bed disorder, the extent of a disease, the location of purolo-necrotic areas as well as other pathologies on the results of the study.

Breast cancer is the leading cause of mortality in women. It is a heterogeneous disease with a high degree of inter-subject variability even in patients with the same type of tumor, with individualized medicine having acquired significant relevance in this field. The clinical and morphological heterogeneity of the different types of breast tumors has led to a diversity of staging and classification systems. Thus, these tumors show wide variability in genetic expression and prognostic biomarkers. Surgical treatment is essential in the management of these patients. However, the perioperative period has been found to significantly influence survival and cancer recurrence. There is growing interest in the pro-tumoral effect of different anaesthetic and analgesic agents used intraoperatively and their relationship with metastatic progression. There is cumulative evidence of the influence of anaesthetic techniques on the physiopathological mechanisms of survival and growth of the residual neoplastic cells released during surgery. Prospective randomized clinical trials are needed to obtain quality evidence on the relationship between cancer and anaesthesia. This document summarizes the evidence currently available about the effects of the anaesthetic agents and techniques used in primary cancer surgery and long-term oncologic outcomes, and the biomolecular mechanisms involved in their interaction.

This study draws on the findings of a survey conducted by the Interstate Statistical Committee of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS-Stat) in the framework of a joint project with the UNFPA – CISPop «Better Data for Better Policies».The paper aims to present the author’s assessment of the level of harmonization between the national census programs across the CIS and the inter-comparability of their results in terms of total population size and its composition. The study is based on the analysis of methodological documents, which include census forms, manuals for census enumerators (census takers) and technical materials for census personal, that describes the concepts, definitions, and classifications used in national censuses. For countries where no censuses were taken, the authors used materials from pilot censuses and drafts of census documents.The study established that among countries there is a high degree of coherence of national census programs in terms of the key topics, concepts, and classifications used, as well as the wordings of the questions and their prompts. Simultaneously, the analysis allowed us to determine that national statistical services of the region focus on the expectations of their respective populations and take into account national legislation, local conditions, and traditions. First of all, nation-specific features manifested themselves in the formulation of questions concerning the economic, educational, and ethno-cultural characteristics of the population.Analysis of the materials of the works performed on the implementation of the 2020 round of population census programs across the CIS indicates that, based on the data of population censuses conducted in the past few years, it is possible to obtain harmonized data on the size and main characteristics of the population of countries, to provide international comparisons both within the CIS region, and between countries of the region and other countries of the world. International statistical community should be well informed about national practices of the CIS countries so that region-specific features can be accounted for in the international recommendations for future censuses.

There are many studies which implement and assess existing measurement manners and document the progress of entities towards the circular economy (CE) at various levels, or present or propose new possibilities of measurement. The majority of them refer to the micro level. The aim of this paper is to conduct a multidimensional comparative analysis of the implementation of circular economy by EU countries. After an in-depth critical analysis of the literature, CE indicators which were proposed by the European Commission were adopted as a basis. Owing to the research population-Member States of the European Union (EU-28), focusing on the said indicators was declared reasonable in all aspects. The classification of EU countries according to the level of their advancement in the concept of CE was adopted as a main research task. In order to do so, a relevant index of development of circular economy was created (IDCE). This will allow us, inter alia, to trace changes in the spatial differentiation of advancement of the EU countries in implementing CE over the years, to identify CE implementation leaders as well as countries particularly delayed in this regard. The comparative analysis was conducted by means of statistical methods. On the basis of the analyses, it was concluded that among all EU countries, those of the old EU are the most advanced in terms of CE. The analysis confirmed significant rising trends for IDCE only in the case of Belgium and The Netherlands.

The paper analyzes if the devices in Brazilian quota law are sufficient to guarantee the aims of the affirmative action, in order to promote democratic access to higher education through a fair redistribution of reserved spots. Firstly, we consider the racial self-declaration as a criterion to decide access to the quota; secondly, the technical difficulties and the possibility of competition inter and intragroup; thirdly, the difference between the percentages of blacks, pardos, indigenes (PPI) and low income students in general population, and the percentages of blacks, pardos, indigenes (PPI) and low income students in the socioeconomic strata used by quota law to define the reserved spots. The criteria for reserved spot distribution comprehend not only the obligation of study all the high school in a public institution, but also devices for calculus of the groups with access with reserved spots, according to four classifications: I-a: students from public middle schools, with per capita family income equal or less than 1,5 minimum wage, and PPI; I-b: students from public middle schools with per capita family income equal to or less than 1,5 minimum wage, no PPI; and II-a: students from public middle schools with per capita family income above 1,5 minimum wage, PPI; II-b: students from public middle schools with per capita family income above 1,5 minimum wage, no PPI. Metodologically, we analyzed documents related to the quota law process, and comparative quantitative analisys of the educational and demographical census is made. We conclude that despite its importance as a landmark to affirmative actions in higher education, quota law doesn’t have the necessary conditions to guarantee a fair distribution of the reserved spots.

The article analyzes the scientific and legislative provisions related to the legal status of the State Service of Geology and Subsoil of Ukraine as a subject of geological control. The external and internal structural peculiarities and normative bases of exercising the control and supervisory functions of the State Geonadra are investigated. The external aspect is the subordination of the organization to the Ministry of the Environment, which determines the priority areas of work of the State Geonadra, approves its work plans and harmonizes the structure of the apparatus. The internal aspect is that it exercises its powers directly both through established territorial bodies (Department of State Geological Control, inter-regional territorial departments and through territorial inspectorates, which are within the sphere of management of the State Geonadra) created within the established order. The normative grounds for exercising control and supervisory functions by the State Geonadra at the present stage are analyzed: the law on state surveillance; government regulations; orders of the State Regulatory Service of Ukraine, the Ministry of Environment and the State Geonadra; annual and monthly inspection plans; document forms and reporting forms. The authors propose a classification of subjects of geological control rights, which includes the following types: general, generic and direct (primary and secondary). The classification of scheduled and unscheduled inspections as measures of state supervision (control) was made according to the following criteria: patrimonial subject of control; the object of control over the use of mineral resources; the subject of the initiation and the reason for unscheduled inspections; the object of control over the destination of minerals; the object of control over the type of natural mineral substance. The beginning of the reform of the state supervision (control) system in the field of environmental protection is characterized. Its purpose is to create an effective state system for the prevention of environmental offences and for environmental monitoring, reduce the pressure on the business environment, encourage broad involvement of the public in the supervision (control), formation of a single integrated state body of environmental monitoring and control (D) – State Environmental Protection Service.

Summary Background: The cause-of-death register at the Southern Urals Biophysics Institute (SUBI), Ozyorsk, Russia, was established to document the number and causes of deaths in the Mayak workers cohort, which includes all persons (N = 22,377) employed at Mayak nuclear facility between 1948 and 1982. Most workers were occupationally exposed to high doses of ionizing radiation and have been shown to have increased risks of various chronic diseases including cancer. Objectives: To investigate the quality of cause of death coding in the SUBI register. Methods: A random sample of 246 deaths (~1% of the total) was coded independently at the SUBI and the Danish Cancer Society using the International Classification of Diseases 9 (ICD-9). Proportions of matching codes were calculated. Results: Overall, 233 deaths (95%) were identically classified using the ICD-9 main category matching. Excluding mismatches that were considered to be incorrectly coded during validation, the validity of the register increased to 98%. Using the specific ICD-9 first three-digit matching, 182 deaths were identically coded (74%) and the respective validity of the register was 85%. There were also some non-resolvable discrepancies demonstrating limitations of assigning one code for each death or using language-adapted ICD-9 version. Conclusions: This validation study was an important quality check of a register used for mortality follow-up in a highly influential epidemiological study on radiation-related health effects. The results of the inter-institutional comparison were generally favourable; however, since the comparison revealed individual mismatches and some systematically differing coding practices, it is essential to repeat it on a regular basis in order to maintain a high quality.

Information Technology (IT) training is undergoing rapid changes around the world, creating inter-institutional partnerships between IT training centers as well as software and hardware vendors to promote new products and training to users. Online training has resulted in an increasing enrolment of a wider spectrum of learners with more diverse technical skills and needs that must be served. Enterprise content management (ECM) enables IT training centers to deliver education beyond company walls, supporting a range of tools to improve information dissemination, communication, and creating collaborative virtual classrooms. In this article, the authors propose a learning platform with both Web 2.0 and mobile interfaces that supports IT training for nourishing busy workers with the latest IT technology knowledge and skills. Alerts are used as a mechanism to facilitate communications among students, instructors, and administrators. It also reminds students to keep track on their learning progress. The content flow management (such as content editing, content approval, use of content, perform training exercise, practical tests, and examination) as well as external access control for the Web portal can be easily controlled through the e-platform. Besides, the authors also demonstrated how to systematically specify document classifications and tagging of training materials by using the modular design of an integrated IT Training Enterprise Content Management System (ITTECMS) together with ontologies from the Semantic Web. Watermarking technology will be deployed for further protection of the training materials, both online and offline. It also allows the flexibility to create match-making of training content according to user interests. Not only users can retrieve matched contents effectively, vendors can also obtain multi-dimensional analysis of user problems and comments to form a comprehensive knowledgebase and achieve cross-sale of education products to target customers.

En este documento se presenta un conjunto de reflexiones sobre la importancia de atender a los múltiples y complejos vínculos que se tejen entre la dinámica poblacional y los problemas de salud mental. Acompaña a estas reflexiones un ejercicio exploratorio de las variaciones de la mortalidad por suicidio en México de 1990 a 2008, como una modalidad de defunción que ha sido vinculada con cierto tipo de trastornos mentales. El ejercicio, precedido por una revisión de algunos de los principales aportes de las investigaciones en torno a la mortalidad por suicidio realizadas en México en las últimas décadas, se plantea como un primer paso para orientar la formulación de hipótesis en estudios sucesivos sobre los posibles vínculos entre la evolución de los niveles de suicidio y algunos indicadores de los procesos poblacionales. En él se revisa la evolución, durante el periodo considerado, de la distribución proporcional y algunas tasas para las principales características demográficas de los fallecidos por esta causa, la lesión que ocasionó el deceso, el acceso a la atención médica, y las variaciones geográficas de la mortalidad por suicidio analizada desde tres ángulos: su participación proporcional dentro del subconjunto de las muertes violentas, la razón de masculinidad, y las tasas de mortalidad observadas en cada entidad federativa. Con base en esta última información se propone, mediante un análisis de cúmulos, una clasificación preliminar de las entidades en tres grandes conjuntos. El trabajo apunta a varias de las interrogantes que se abren para ser abordadas en aproximaciones ulteriores, y concluye con el señalamiento de los fuertes desafíos implicados en la indagación de estas interrelaciones.AbstractThis document presents a set of reflections on the importance of dealing with the many complex links between population dynamics and mental health problems. These reflections are accompanied by an exploratory exercise regarding the variations in mortality due to suicide in Mexico from 1990 and 2008 as a form of death that has been linked to a certain type of mental disorders. The exercise, preceded by a review of some of the main contributions of the research regarding mortality due to suicide undertaken in Mexico in recent decades, is initially intended to guide the formulation of hypotheses in successive studies on the possible links between the evolution of suicide levels and certain indicators of population processes. It reviews the evolution, during the period considered, of the proportional distribution and certain rates for the main demographic characteristics of those that have died from this cause, the injury that caused death, access to medical care and the geographical variations of mortality due to suicide analyzed from three angles: its proportional share of the sub-set of violent deaths, the ratio of masculinity and the mortality rates observed in each state. On the basis of the most recent information, a preliminary classification of the states into three main sets is proposed. The study points to several of the questions that should be dealt with in subsequent approaches and ends with an indication of the challenges involved in the exploration of these inter-relationships.

Abstract. Changes in the flood regime of ponds in the Gourma region from 1950 to present are studied by remote sensing, in the general context of the current multi-decennial Sahel drought. The seasonal and interannual variations of the areas covered by surface water are assessed using multi-date and multi-sensor satellite images (SPOT, FORMOSAT, LANDSAT-MSS, -TM, and -ETM, CORONA, and MODIS) and aerial photographs (IGN). Water body classification is adapted to each type of spectral resolution, with or without a middle-infrared band, and each spatial resolution, using linear unmixing for mixed pixels of MODIS data. The high-frequency MODIS data document the seasonal cycle, with an abrupt rise early in wet season and a progressive decrease in the dry season. They also provide a base to study the inter-annual variability of the flood regime, with sharp contrasts between dry years such as 2004 (low and early maximal area) and wetter years such as 2001 and 2002 (respectively high and late maximal area). The highest water level reached annually greatly depends on the volume, intensity and timing of rain events. However, the overall reduction by 20% of annual rains of the current period, compared to the 50' and 60', is concomitant with an apparently paradoxical large increase in the area of surface water, starting from the late 1980's. Spectacular for the two study cases of Agoufou and Ebang Mallam, for which time series covering the 1954-present period exist, this increase also reaches 98% between 1975 and 2002 for 92 ponds identified in central Gourma. Ponds with turbid waters and no aquatic vegetation are responsible for this increase, more pronounced to the north of the study zone. Possible causes of this change in surface water volume and regime are discussed based on differential changes in ponds dynamics related to the specifics in topography, soil texture and vegetation cover over the watershed. Changes in rain pattern and in ponds sedimentation are ruled out, and the impact of changes in land use, limited in the area, is found secondary, as opposed to what has often been advocated for in cultivated Sahel. Instead, major responsibility is attributed to increased runoff triggered by the lasting impact of the 1970–1980's droughts on the vegetation and on the hydric system over shallow soils.

Abstract. Changes in the flooded area of ponds in the Gourma region from 1950 to present are studied by remote sensing, in the general context of the current multi-decennial Sahel drought. The seasonal and interannual variations of the areas covered by surface water are assessed using multi-date and multi-sensor satellite images (SPOT, FORMOSAT, LANDSAT-MSS, –TM, and -ETM, CORONA, and MODIS) and aerial photographs (IGN). Water body classification is adapted to each type of spectral resolution, with or without a middle-infrared band, and each spatial resolution, using linear unmixing for mixed pixels of MODIS data. The high-frequency MODIS data document the seasonal cycle of flooded areas, with an abrupt rise early in wet season and a progressive decrease in the dry season. They also provide a base to study the inter-annual variability of the flooded areas, with sharp contrasts between dry years such as 2004 (low and early maximal area) and wetter years such as 2001 and 2002 (respectively high and late maximal area).The highest flooded area reached annually greatly depends on the volume, intensity and timing of rain events. However, the overall reduction by 20% of annual rains during the last 40 years is concomitant with an apparently paradoxical large increase in the area of surface water, starting from the 1970's and accelerating in the mid 1980's. Spectacular for the two study cases of Agoufou and Ebang Mallam, for which time series covering the 1954 to present period exist, this increase is also diagnosed at the regional scale from LANDSAT data spanning 1972–2007. It reaches 108% between September 1975 and 2002 for 91 ponds identified in central Gourma. Ponds with turbid waters and no aquatic vegetation are mostly responsible for this increase, more pronounced in the centre and north of the study zone. Possible causes of the differential changes in flooded areas are discussed in relation with the specifics in topography, soil texture and vegetation cover over the watersheds that feed each of the ponds. Changes in rain pattern and in ponds sedimentation are ruled out, and the impact of changes in land use, limited in the area, is found secondary, as opposed to what has often been advocated for in southern Sahel. Instead, major responsibility is attributed to increased runoff triggered by the lasting impact of the 1970–1980's droughts on the vegetation and on the runoff system over the shallow soils prevailing over a third of the landscape.

Purpose Data mining is the process of detecting knowledge from a given huge data set. Among the data set, multimedia is the data which contains diverse data such as audio, video, image, text and motion. In this growing field of video data, mining the video data plays vital role in the field of video data mining. In video data mining, video data are grouped into frames. In this vast amount of video frames, the fast retrieval of needed information is important one. This paper aims to propose a Birch-based clustering method for content-based image retrieval. Design/methodology/approach In image retrieval system, image segmentation plays a very important role. A text file, normally, is divided into sections, that is, piece, sentences, word and character for this information which are organized and indexed effectively like in a video, the information is dynamic in nature and this information is converted to static for easy retrieval. For this, video files are divided into a number of frames or segments. After the segmentation process, images are trained for retrieval process, and from these, unwanted images are removed from the data set. The noise or unwanted image removal pseudo-code is shown below. In the code image, pixel value represents the value of the difference between the two adjacent image pixel values. By assuming a threshold for the image value, the duplicate images are found. After finding the duplicate image, it is removed from the data set. Clustering is used in many applications as a stand-alone tool to get insight into data distribution and as a pre-processing step for other algorithms (Ester et al., 1996). Specifically, it is used in pattern recognition, spatial data analysis, image processing, economic science document classification, etc. Hierarchical clustering algorithms are classified as agglomerative or divisive. BRICH uses clustering attribute (CA) and clustering feature hierarchy (CA_Hierarchy) for the formation of clusters. It perform multidimensional data objects. Every BRICH algorithm based on the memory-oriented information, that is, memory constrains, is involved in the processing of the data sets. This information is represented in Figures 6-10. For forming clusters, they use the amount of object in the cluster (A), the sum of all points in the data set (S) and need the square value of the all objects (P). Findings The proposed technique brings an effective result for cluster formation. Originality/value BRICH uses a novel approach to model the degree of inter-connectivity and closeness between each pair of clusters that takes into account the internal characteristics of the clusters themselves.

Introdução: A infância, como categoria social, precisa ser estudada, especialmente, as infâncias negligenciadas, como a da criança com deficiência intelectual em contexto educativo, chamada de excepcional no recorte temporal utilizado. Objetivo: Objetiva-se analisar as ações terapêutico ocupacionais como parte da cultura escolar da Fundação Pestalozzi do Pará, desenvolvida no período de 1953-1975 junto às crianças excepcionais. Métodos: Trata-se de uma pesquisa histórica, que se utilizou de matérias de jornais, imagens da cultura escolar da instituição e o livro intitulado “Fundação Pestalozzi do Pará: a educação especial no processo de integração educacional”, publicado em 1988, como fontes documentais que foram analisadas com base na análise do discurso. Resultados: Elegeu-se como resultado duas categorias: O ingresso e classificação das crianças excepcionais e ações terapêutico ocupacionais. Analisa-se que as crianças eram classificadas a partir dos ideários eugenistas e da escola nova da década de 1930. Tal classificação interferia na participação social da criança, inclusive no acesso à educação. Na Fundação Pestalozzi, as crianças excepcionais eram acompanhadas por um programa assistencial e educativo. Na frente educativa, as ações terapêutico ocupacionais envolviam o lúdico, arte, atividades e eventos culturais, esportivos, religiosos e cívicos e se baseavam na política da integração educacional, pautada na habilitação e reabilitação. Conclusão: Conclui-se que o estudo possibilitou compreender quais práticas terapêutico ocupacionais e porque categorias profissionais às referidas práticas eram desenvolvidas na instituição e como elas se incluíam na cultura escolar, bem como se evidencia a inter-relação entre a história da educação especial nacional e local, reforçando a necessidade de estudos históricos no campo da Terapia Ocupacional. Palavras-chave: Deficiência intelectual. Educação Especial. História. Terapia Ocupacional. Abstract Introduction: Childhood as a social category needs to be studied, especially the neglected childhoods in an educational context, such as the child with intellectual disability, called exceptional in the time frame used. Objective: The objective of this research is to analyze the actions of occupational therapheutic as part of the school culture of the Pestalozzi Foundation of Pará developed between 1953-1975 with exceptional children. Methods: This is a historical research, which used newspaper articles, images of the institution's school culture and the book entitled “Foundation Pestalozzi of Pará: special education in the process of educational integration”, published in 1988, as documentary sources, which were analyzed based on discourse analysis. Results: Two categories were elected as a result: 1. The entry and classification of exceptional children and 2. Occupational therapeutic actions. It is analyzed that the children were classified from the eugenicist ideas and the new school moviment of the 1930s. This classification interfered in the child's social and occupational participation, including access to education. At the Pestalozzi Foundation, exceptional children were accompanied by a care and educational program. On the educational front, occupational therapeutic actions involved the playful, art, activities and cultural, sports, religious and civic events and were based on the policy of educational integration, based on habilitation and rehabilitation. Conclusion: It was concluded that the study made it possible to understand which occupational therapeutic practices and by which professional categories the said practices were developed in this institution and how they were included in the school culture, as well as the interrelationship between the history of national and local special education, reinforcing the need for historical studies in the field of Occupational Therapy.Keywords: Intellectual Disability. Special Education. History. Occupational Therapy. ResumenIntroducción: Es necesario estudiar la infancia como categoría social, con gran manera la infancia descuidada, como los niños con discapacidad intelectual en un contexto educativo, llamados excepcionales en el plazo utilizado. Objetivo: El objetivo es analizar el “terapéutico ocupacional” como parte de la cultura escolar de la Fundación Pestalozzi de Pará desarrollada en el periodo 1953-1975 con niños excepcionales. Métodos: Se trata de una investigación histórica, que utilizó artículos periodísticos, imágenes de la cultura escolar de la institución y el libro titulado “Fundação Pestalozzi do Pará: educación especial en el proceso de integración educativa”, publicado en 1988,como fuentes documentales, que fueron analizadas sobre la base del análisis del discurso. Resultados: Dos categorías fueron elegidas como resultado: 1. La entrada y clasificación de niños excepcionales y 2. Acciones terapéutico ocupacionales. Se analiza que los niños fueron clasificados a partir de las ideas eugenistas y la nueva escuela de la década de 1930. Esta clasificación interfirió en la participación social y ocupacional del niño, incluido el acceso a la educación. En la Fundación Pestalozzi, niños excepcionales fueron acompañados por un programa de cuidado y educación. En el ámbito educativo, las acciones terapéuticas ocupacionales involucraron los eventos lúdicos, artísticos, de actividades y culturales, deportivos, religiosos y cívicos y se basaron en la política de integración educativa, basada en la habilitación y rehabilitación. Conclusión: Se concluyó que el estudio permite entender qué prácticas terapéuticas ocupacionales y por qué categorías profesionales se desarrollaron en esta institución y cómo se incluyeron en la cultura escolar, así como la interrelación entre la Historia de la Educación Especial Nacional y Local, reforzando la necesidad de estudios históricos en el campo de la Terapia Ocupacional.Palabras-clave: Discapacidad Intelectual. Educación Especial. Historie. Terapia Ocupacional.

Recent Trends and Future of Fog and Edge Computing, Services, and Enabling Technologies Cloud computing has been established as the most popular as well as suitable computing infrastructure providing on-demand, scalable and pay-as-you-go computing resources and services for the state-of-the-art ICT applications which generate a massive amount of data. Though Cloud is certainly the most fitting solution for most of the applications with respect to processing capability and storage, it may not be so for the real-time applications. The main problem with Cloud is the latency as the Cloud data centres typically are very far from the data sources as well as the data consumers. This latency is ok with the application domains such as enterprise or web applications, but not for the modern Internet of Things (IoT)-based pervasive and ubiquitous application domains such as autonomous vehicle, smart and pervasive healthcare, real-time traffic monitoring, unmanned aerial vehicles, smart building, smart city, smart manufacturing, cognitive IoT, and so on. The prerequisite for these types of application is that the latency between the data generation and consumption should be minimal. For that, the generated data need to be processed locally, instead of sending to the Cloud. This approach is known as Edge computing where the data processing is done at the network edge in the edge devices such as set-top boxes, access points, routers, switches, base stations etc. which are typically located at the edge of the network. These devices are increasingly being incorporated with significant computing and storage capacity to cater to the need for local Big Data processing. The enabling of Edge computing can be attributed to the Emerging network technologies, such as 4G and cognitive radios, high-speed wireless networks, and energy-efficient sophisticated sensors. Different Edge computing architectures are proposed (e.g., Fog computing, mobile edge computing (MEC), cloudlets, etc.). All of these enable the IoT and sensor data to be processed closer to the data sources. But, among them, Fog computing, a Cisco initiative, has attracted the most attention of people from both academia and corporate and has been emerged as a new computing-infrastructural paradigm in recent years. Though Fog computing has been proposed as a different computing architecture than Cloud, it is not meant to replace the Cloud. Rather, Fog computing extends the Cloud services to network edges for providing computation, networking, and storage services between end devices and data centres. Ideally, Fog nodes (edge devices) are supposed to pre-process the data, serve the need of the associated applications preliminarily, and forward the data to the Cloud if the data are needed to be stored and analysed further. Fog computing enhances the benefits from smart devices operational not only in network perimeter but also under cloud servers. Fog-enabled services can be deployed anywhere in the network, and with these services provisioning and management, huge potential can be visualized to enhance intelligence within computing networks to realize context-awareness, high response time, and network traffic offloading. Several possibilities of Fog computing are already established. For example, sustainable smart cities, smart grid, smart logistics, environment monitoring, video surveillance, etc. To design and implementation of Fog computing systems, various challenges concerning system design and implementation, computing and communication, system architecture and integration, application-based implementations, fault tolerance, designing efficient algorithms and protocols, availability and reliability, security and privacy, energy-efficiency and sustainability, etc. are needed to be addressed. Also, to make Fog compatible with Cloud several factors such as Fog and Cloud system integration, service collaboration between Fog and Cloud, workload balance between Fog and Cloud, and so on need to be taken care of. It is our great privilege to present before you Volume 20, Issue 2 of the Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience. We had received 20 Research Papers and out of which 14 Papers are selected for Publication. The aim of this special issue is to highlight Recent Trends and Future of Fog and Edge Computing, Services and Enabling technologies. The special issue will present new dimensions of research to researchers and industry professionals with regard to Fog Computing, Cloud Computing and Edge Computing. Sujata Dash et al. contributed a paper titled “Edge and Fog Computing in Healthcare- A Review” in which an in-depth review of fog and mist computing in the area of health care informatics is analysed, classified and discussed. The review presented in this paper is primarily focussed on three main aspects: The requirements of IoT based healthcare model and the description of services provided by fog computing to address then. The architecture of an IoT based health care system embedding fog computing layer and implementation of fog computing layer services along with performance and advantages. In addition to this, the researchers have highlighted the trade-off when allocating computational task to the level of network and also elaborated various challenges and security issues of fog and edge computing related to healthcare applications. Parminder Singh et al. in the paper titled “Triangulation Resource Provisioning for Web Applications in Cloud Computing: A Profit-Aware” proposed a novel triangulation resource provisioning (TRP) technique with a profit-aware surplus VM selection policy to ensure fair resource utilization in hourly billing cycle while giving the quality of service to end-users. The proposed technique use time series workload forecasting, CPU utilization and response time in the analysis phase. The proposed technique is tested using CloudSim simulator and R language is used to implement prediction model on ClarkNet weblog. The proposed approach is compared with two baseline approaches i.e. Cost-aware (LRM) and (ARMA). The response time, CPU utilization and predicted request are applied in the analysis and planning phase for scaling decisions. The profit-aware surplus VM selection policy used in the execution phase for select the appropriate VM for scale-down. The result shows that the proposed model for web applications provides fair utilization of resources with minimum cost, thus provides maximum profit to application provider and QoE to the end users. Akshi kumar and Abhilasha Sharma in the paper titled “Ontology driven Social Big Data Analytics for Fog enabled Sentic-Social Governance” utilized a semantic knowledge model for investigating public opinion towards adaption of fog enabled services for governance and comprehending the significance of two s-components (sentic and social) in aforesaid structure that specifically visualize fog enabled Sentic-Social Governance. The results using conventional TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency) feature extraction are empirically compared with ontology driven TF-IDF feature extraction to find the best opinion mining model with optimal accuracy. The results concluded that implementation of ontology driven opinion mining for feature extraction in polarity classification outperforms the traditional TF-IDF method validated over baseline supervised learning algorithms with an average of 7.3% improvement in accuracy and approximately 38% reduction in features has been reported. Avinash Kaur and Pooja Gupta in the paper titled “Hybrid Balanced Task Clustering Algorithm for Scientific workflows in Cloud Computing” proposed novel hybrid balanced task clustering algorithm using the parameter of impact factor of workflows along with the structure of workflow and using this technique, tasks can be considered for clustering either vertically or horizontally based on value of impact factor. The testing of the algorithm proposed is done on Workflowsim- an extension of CloudSim and DAG model of workflow was executed. The Algorithm was tested on variables- Execution time of workflow and Performance Gain and compared with four clustering methods: Horizontal Runtime Balancing (HRB), Horizontal Clustering (HC), Horizontal Distance Balancing (HDB) and Horizontal Impact Factor Balancing (HIFB) and results stated that proposed algorithm is almost 5-10% better in makespan time of workflow depending on the workflow used. Pijush Kanti Dutta Pramanik et al. in the paper titled “Green and Sustainable High-Performance Computing with Smartphone Crowd Computing: Benefits, Enablers and Challenges” presented a comprehensive statistical survey of the various commercial CPUs, GPUs, SoCs for smartphones confirming the capability of the SCC as an alternative to HPC. An exhaustive survey is presented on the present and optimistic future of the continuous improvement and research on different aspects of smartphone battery and other alternative power sources which will allow users to use their smartphones for SCC without worrying about the battery running out. Dhanapal and P. Nithyanandam in the paper titled “The Slow HTTP Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Attack Detection in Cloud” proposed a novel method to detect slow HTTP DDoS attacks in cloud to overcome the issue of consuming all available server resources and making it unavailable to the real users. The proposed method is implemented using OpenStack cloud platform with slowHTTPTest tool. The results stated that proposed technique detects the attack in efficient manner. Mandeep Kaur and Rajni Mohana in the paper titled “Static Load Balancing Technique for Geographically partitioned Public Cloud” proposed a novel approach focused upon load balancing in the partitioned public cloud by combining centralized and decentralized approaches, assuming the presence of fog layer. A load balancer entity is used for decentralized load balancing at partitions and a controller entity is used for centralized level to balance the overall load at various partitions. Results are compared with First Come First Serve (FCFS) and Shortest Job First (SJF) algorithms. In this work, the researchers compared the Waiting Time, Finish Time and Actual Run Time of tasks using these algorithms. To reduce the number of unhandled jobs, a new load state is introduced which checks load beyond conventional load states. Major objective of this approach is to reduce the need of runtime virtual machine migration and to reduce the wastage of resources, which may be occurring due to predefined values of threshold. Mukta and Neeraj Gupta in the paper titled “Analytical Available Bandwidth Estimation in Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks considering Mobility in 3-Dimensional Space” proposes an analytical approach named Analytical Available Bandwidth Estimation Including Mobility (AABWM) to estimate ABW on a link. The major contributions of the proposed work are: i) it uses mathematical models based on renewal theory to calculate the collision probability of data packets which makes the process simple and accurate, ii) consideration of mobility under 3-D space to predict the link failure and provides an accurate admission control. To test the proposed technique, the researcher used NS-2 simulator to compare the proposed technique i.e. AABWM with AODV, ABE, IAB and IBEM on throughput, Packet loss ratio and Data delivery. Results stated that AABWM performs better as compared to other approaches. R.Sridharan and S. Domnic in the paper titled “Placement Strategy for Intercommunicating Tasks of an Elastic Request in Fog-Cloud Environment” proposed a novel heuristic IcAPER,(Inter-communication Aware Placement for Elastic Requests) algorithm. The proposed algorithm uses the network neighborhood machine for placement, once current resource is fully utilized by the application. The performance IcAPER algorithm is compared with First Come First Serve (FCFS), Random and First Fit Decreasing (FFD) algorithms for the parameters (a) resource utilization (b) resource fragmentation and (c) Number of requests having intercommunicating tasks placed on to same PM using CloudSim simulator. Simulation results shows IcAPER maps 34% more tasks on to the same PM and also increase the resource utilization by 13% while decreasing the resource fragmentation by 37.8% when compared to other algorithms. Velliangiri S. et al. in the paper titled “Trust factor based key distribution protocol in Hybrid Cloud Environment” proposed a novel security protocol comprising of two stages: first stage, Group Creation using the trust factor and develop key distribution security protocol. It performs the communication process among the virtual machine communication nodes. Creating several groups based on the cluster and trust factors methods. The second stage, the ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography) based distribution security protocol is developed. The performance of the Trust Factor Based Key Distribution protocol is compared with the existing ECC and Diffie Hellman key exchange technique. The results state that the proposed security protocol has more secure communication and better resource utilization than the ECC and Diffie Hellman key exchange technique in the Hybrid cloud. Vivek kumar prasad et al. in the paper titled “Influence of Monitoring: Fog and Edge Computing” discussed various techniques involved for monitoring for edge and fog computing and its advantages in addition to a case study based on Healthcare monitoring system. Avinash Kaur et al. elaborated a comprehensive view of existing data placement schemes proposed in literature for cloud computing. Further, it classified data placement schemes based on their assess capabilities and objectives and in addition to this comparison of data placement schemes. Parminder Singh et al. presented a comprehensive review of Auto-Scaling techniques of web applications in cloud computing. The complete taxonomy of the reviewed articles is done on varied parameters like auto-scaling, approach, resources, monitoring tool, experiment, workload and metric, etc. Simar Preet Singh et al. in the paper titled “Dynamic Task Scheduling using Balanced VM Allocation Policy for Fog Computing Platform” proposed a novel scheme to improve the user contentment by improving the cost to operation length ratio, reducing the customer churn, and boosting the operational revenue. The proposed scheme is learnt to reduce the queue size by effectively allocating the resources, which resulted in the form of quicker completion of user workflows. The proposed method results are evaluated against the state-of-the-art scene with non-power aware based task scheduling mechanism. The results were analyzed using parameters-- energy, SLA infringement and workflow execution delay. The performance of the proposed schema was analyzed in various experiments particularly designed to analyze various aspects for workflow processing on given fog resources. The LRR (35.85 kWh) model has been found most efficient on the basis of average energy consumption in comparison to the LR (34.86 kWh), THR (41.97 kWh), MAD (45.73 kWh) and IQR (47.87 kWh). The LRR model has been also observed as the leader when compared on the basis of number of VM migrations. The LRR (2520 VMs) has been observed as best contender on the basis of mean of number of VM migrations in comparison with LR (2555 VMs), THR (4769 VMs), MAD (5138 VMs) and IQR (5352 VMs).

AbstractThe Italian Public Administration (PA) relies on costly manual analyses to ensure the GDPR compliance of public documents and secure personal data. Despite recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have benefited many legal fields, the automation of workflows for data protection of public documents is still only marginally affected. The main aim of this work is to design a framework that can be effectively adopted to check whether PA documents written in Italian meet the GDPR requirements. The main outcome of our interdisciplinary research is INTREPID (art ficial i elligence for gdp complianc of ublic adm nistration ocuments), an AI-based framework that can help the Italian PA to ensure GDPR compliance of public documents. INTREPID is realized by tuning some linguistic resources for Italian language processing (i.e. SpaCy and Tint) to the GDPR intelligence. In addition, we set the foundations for a text classification methodology to recognise the public documents published by the Italian PA, which perform data breaches. We show the effectiveness of the framework over a text corpus of public documents that were published online by the Italian PA. We also perform an inter-annotator study and analyse the agreement of the annotation predictions of the proposed methodology with the annotations by domain experts. Finally, we evaluate the accuracy of the proposed text classification model in detecting breaches of security.