Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cellular automata and Genetic Algorithms based urban growth visualization for appropriate land use policies

Many regional environmental problems are the consequence of anthropogenic activities involving land cover changes. Temporal land cover data with social aspects are critical in tracing relationships of cause and effect on variables of interest with the effects of context on behaviour or with the process of human environment interaction and are also useful for governance of urbanising cities. Many cities are now undergoing redevelopment for economic purposes with new roads, infrastructure improvements, etc. This phenomenona is very rapid in India with urban population growing at around 2.3 percent per annum. This dramatic increase in urbanisation has raised the necessity to understand the dynamics of urban growth process for planning of natural resources. Cellular automata, an artificial intelligence technique based on pixels, states, neighbourhood and transition rules, is being implemented to model the urban growth process due to its ability to fit such complex spatial nature using simple and effective rules. The possibility of using genetic algorithms for automatic calibration of the model through proper design of their parameters, including objective function, initial population, selection, crossover and mutation has also been explored. The techniques are tested for Bangalore city, India by modeling the urban growth using remote sensing data of various resolutions.
NONLINEAR SCALAR TWO-POINT BOUNDARY-VALUE PROBLEMS ON TIME SCALES

We establish sufficient conditions for the solvability of scalar nonlinear boundary-value problems on time scales. Our attention will be focused on problems where the solution space for the corresponding linear homogeneous boundary-value problem is nontrivial. As a consequence of our results we are able to provide easily verifiable conditions for the existence of periodic behavior for dynamic equations on time scales.
Regulating intensity using perceived exertion in spinal cord-injured participants.

PURPOSE To examine the validity of perception-based intensity regulation during handcycling exercise. METHODS Eight spinal cord-injured (T11 incomplete to T4 complete) participants completed an incremental exercise test followed by a (.)VO2peak test using a sports hand bike. Subsequently, two 20-min exercise tests were completed at an individualized power output (PO) at moderate and vigorous intensities (50% and 70% of (.)VO2peak, respectively). On a separate occasion, participants were instructed to produce and maintain a workload equivalent to the average RPE for the 20-min imposed condition in a counterbalanced order. The (.)VO2 and blood lactate concentration [BLa(-)] were measured every 10 min, and HR and PO were measured at 1-min intervals. RESULTS There were no differences in average (.)VO2, percent V O2peak, HR, PO, and [BLa(-)] between the imposed PO conditions and RPE-regulated trials of either exercise intensity. Although PO increased slightly during the moderate-intensity RPE-regulated trial (P < 0.04), it remained relatively constant in the vigorous RPE-regulated trial. However, there was a tendency for PO to be slightly higher (P = 0.07) in the vigorous RPE-regulated trial. CONCLUSIONS These data suggest that RPE is effective in controlling moderate and vigorous intensities throughout a 20-min handcycling exercise session for SCI participants.
Efficacy of high-intensity pulsed light for the microbiological decontamination of chicken, associated packaging, and contact surfaces.

The efficacy of high-intensity light pulse (HILP) technology (3 Hz, maximum of 505 J/pulse, and a pulse duration of 360 μs) for the decontamination of raw chicken and associated packaging and surface materials was investigated. Its ability to reduce microbial counts on raw chicken through plastic films was also examined. Complete inactivation of Campylobacter spp. , Escherichia coli, and Salmonella Enteritidis in liquid was achieved after 30 sec HILP treatment. Reductions of 3.56, 4.69, and 4.60 log₁₀ cfu/cm²) were observed after 5 sec HILP treatment of Campylobacter jejuni, E. coli, and Salmonella Enteritidis inoculated onto packaging materials and contact surfaces, respectively. The greatest reductions on inoculated chicken skin were 1.22, 1.69, and 1.27 log₁₀ cfu/g for C. jejuni, E. coli, and Salmonella Enteritidis, respectively. Corresponding reductions on inoculated skinless breast meat were 0.96, 1.13, and 1.35 log₁₀ cfu/g. The effectiveness of HILP treatment for reducing microbial levels on chicken increased as the film thickness decreased. HILP treatments of 2 sec did not significantly affect the color of raw chicken although treatments of 30 sec impacted color. This study has shown HILP to be an effective method for the decontamination of packaging and surface materials. Additionally, it has demonstrated the potential of HILP to be used as a decontamination method for packaged chicken.
Characterization of the channel properties of a neuronal acetylcholine receptor reconstituted into planar lipid bilayers

An alpha-toxin-binding membrane protein, isolated from the head and thoracic ganglia of the locus (Locusta migratoria), was reconstituted into planar lipid bilayers. Cholinergic agonists such as acetylcholine, carbamylcholine, and suberyldicholine induced fluctuations of single channels, which suggests that the protein represents a functional cholinergic receptor channel. The antagonist d-tubocurarine blocked the activation of the channels, whereas hexamethonium had only a weak effect; similar properties have been described for nicotinic insect receptors in situ. The channel was selectively permeable to monovalent cations but was impermeable to anions. The conductance of the channel (75 pS in 100 mM NaCl) was independent of the type of agonist used to activate the receptor. Kinetic analysis of the channel gating revealed that, at high agonist concentrations (50 microM carbamylcholine), more than one closed state exists and that multiple gating events, bursting as well as fast flickering, appeared. At very high agonist concentrations (500 microM carbamylcholine), desensitization was observed. Channel kinetics were dependent on the transmembrane potential. Comparing the conductance, the kinetics, and the pharmacology of nicotinic acetylcholine receptor from insect ganglia and fish electroplax reconstituted into bilayers revealed obvious similarities but also significant differences.
A Convex Formulation for Learning Scale-Free Networks via Submodular Relaxation

A key problem in statistics and machine learning is the determination of network structure from data. We consider the case where the structure of the graph to be reconstructed is known to be scale-free. We show that in such cases it is natural to formulate structured sparsity inducing priors using submodular functions, and we use their Lovasz extension to obtain a convex relaxation. For tractable classes such as Gaussian graphical models, this leads to a convex optimization problem that can be efficiently solved. We show that our method results in an improvement in the accuracy of reconstructed networks for synthetic data. We also show how our prior encourages scale-free reconstructions on a bioinfomatics dataset.
Intra‐rater reliability and diagnostic accuracy of a new vaginal dynamometer to measure pelvic floor muscle strength in women with urinary incontinence

The first choice treatment in urinary incontinence (UI) is rehabilitation of the pelvic floor in order to improve muscle strength. However, no entirely reliable instruments for quantifying pelvic floor muscle (PFM) strength are currently available. Our aim was to test the intra‐rater reliability and diagnostic accuracy of a new vaginal dynamometer for measuring PFM strength.
Fusion of iris and palmprint for multimodal biometric authentication

This paper presents a multimodal biometric system for authentication, based on the fusion of iris and palmprint. We propose an approach for feature extraction of each modality by using wavelet packet decomposition at four levels. This gives 256 packets which can generate a compact binary code. It is obtained from the first three highest energy peaks to compute an adapted threshold that enable to affect 0 or 1 to each wavelet packet. Different fusion strategies were tested at different levels: feature level, score level and error level. The first fusion is a simple concatenation of iris and palmprint codes. The second employs a weighted sum rule to matching scores. The third applies the Hamacher t-norm to the errors. The proposed approach and each fusion strategy were tested for their accuracy on the Casia iris database fused with the Casia palmprint database, and then with the PolyU database. The proposed approach for multimodal biometric system achieves a recognition improvement with each fusion method.
Don't kill my ads!: balancing privacy in an ad-supported mobile application market

Application markets have revolutionized the software download model of mobile phones: third-party application developers offer software on the market that users can effortlessly install on their phones. This great step forward, however, also imposes some threats to user privacy: applications often ask for permissions that reveal private information such as the user's location, contacts and messages. While some mechanisms to prevent leaks of user privacy to applications have been proposed by the research community, these solutions fail to consider that application markets are primarily driven by advertisements that rely on accurately profiling the user. In this paper we take into account that there are two parties with conflicting interests: the user, interested in maintaining their privacy and the developer who would like to maximize their advertisement revenue through user profiling. We have conducted an extensive analysis of more than 250,000 applications in the Android market. Our results indicate that the current privacy protection mechanisms are not effective as developers and advert companies are not deterred. Therefore, we designed and implemented a market-aware privacy protection framework that aims to achieve an equilibrium between the developer's revenue and the user's privacy. The proposed framework is based on the establishment of a feedback control loop that adjusts the level of privacy protection on mobile phones, in response to advertisement generated revenue.
Detrimental and Protective Bystander Effects: A Model Approach

Abstract Schöllnberger, H. , Mitchel, R. E. J., Redpath, J. L. , Crawford-Brown, D. J. and Hofmann, W. Detrimental and Protective Bystander Effects: A Model Approach. Radiat. Res. 168, 614–626 (2007). This work integrates two important cellular responses to low doses, detrimental bystander effects and apoptosis-mediated protective bystander effects, into a multistage model for chromosome aberrations and in vitro neoplastic transformation: the State-Vector Model. The new models were tested on representative data sets that show supralinear or U-shaped dose responses. The original model without the new low-dose features was also tested for consistency with LNT-shaped dose responses. Reductions of in vitro neoplastic transformation frequencies below the spontaneous level have been reported after exposure of cells to low doses of low-LET radiation. In the current study, this protective effect is explained with bystander-induced apoptosis. An important data set that shows a low-dose detrimental bystander effect for chromosome aberrations was successfully fitted by additional terms within the cell initiation stage. It was found that this approach is equivalent to bystander-induced clonal expansion of initiated cells. This study is an important step toward a comprehensive model that contains all essential biological mechanisms that can influence dose–response curves at low doses.
Aphasia in hyperacute stroke: Language follows brain penumbra dynamics

During the first few hours after onset, stroke symptoms may evolve rapidly. We studied the correlation between brain perfusion and aphasia changes during the hyperacute phase of stroke using a new technique of perfusion computed tomography (P‐CT). Using an aphasia score developed for each language modality, language was evaluated within 6 hours after onset, then sequentially during the first week. Maps of the penumbra and infarct obtained from P‐CT images and definite infarct size evaluated using T2 and diffusion‐weighted MRI (DWI) on day 3 were rated by a neuroradiologist, blinded to the clinical deficit. Within 6 hours, deficits in all language modalities were present in 13 out of 24 consecutive patients, corresponding to large anterior‐posterior perfusion deficits of the left middle cerebral artery (MCA) territory. The aphasia score correlated with a corresponding perfusion deficit in specific areas of the MCA territory, and showed significantly less improvement when the penumbra evolved toward infarction than when at least part of the penumbra was rescued. Our findings suggest a particularly good correlation between the evolution of aphasic symptoms and penumbra dynamics. Further studies on the relevance of penumbra dynamics in function‐specific brain areas to decision taking in hyperacute stroke management are required.
Belinostat for Relapsed or Refractory Peripheral T-Cell Lymphoma

The PTCLs represent a rare and aggressive subgroup of NHLs that do not respond favorably to traditional chemotherapies. Since the majority of patients with PTCL experience disease relapse or disease that is refractory to previous agents, the continued development of novel targeted therapies is critical and necessary to improve outcomes in this aggressive, difficult-to-treat, heterogeneous group of malignant disorders. The FDA approval of belinostat provides clinicians with an additional option to offer heavily pretreated patients with relapsed or refractory PTCL who did not achieve a desirable response to traditional chemotherapy agents. Belinostat may be a worthwhile treatment option for these patients because of its manageable toxicity profile and its ability to be used in patients with baseline thrombocytopenia (platelet count 50–100 × 109/L). The safety and efficacy of belinostat are currently being evaluated for use in combination with traditional front-line therapies for the treatment of PTCL. The results of these trials have the potential to expand belinostat’s place in therapy and challenge the traditional treatment approach for PTCL.
Mean-Payoff Pushdown Games

Two-player games on graphs are central in many problems in formal verification and program analysis such as synthesis and verification of open systems. In this work we consider solving recursive game graphs (or pushdown game graphs) that can model the control flow of sequential programs with recursion. While pushdown games have been studied before with qualitative objectives, such as reachability and parity objectives, in this work we study for the first time such games with the most well-studied quantitative objective, namely, mean payoff objectives. In pushdown games two types of strategies are relevant: (1) global strategies, that depend on the entire global history; and (2) modular strategies, that have only local memory and thus do not depend on the context of invocation, but only on the history of the current invocation of the module. Our main results are as follows: (1) One-player pushdown games with mean-payoff objectives under global strategies are decidable in polynomial time. (2) Two-player pushdown games with mean-payoff objectives under global strategies are undecidable. (3) One-player pushdown games with mean-payoff objectives under modular strategies are NP-hard. (4) Two-player pushdown games with mean-payoff objectives under modular strategies can be solved in NP (i.e., both one-player and two-player pushdown games with mean-payoff objectives under modular strategies are NP-complete). We also establish the optimal strategy complexity showing that global strategies for mean-payoff objectives require infinite memory even in one-player pushdown games; and memoryless modular strategies are sufficient in two-player pushdown games. Finally we also show that all the problems have the same computational complexity if the stack boundedness condition is added, where along with the mean-payoff objective the player must also ensure that the stack height is bounded.
Modeling of bubble nucleation of an air–water mixture near hydrophobic walls

In this work, a density functional approach is applied to calculate the interfacial thermodynamic properties of an air–water mixture in the presence of a hydrophobic wall. Without any mixing parameter, the theoretical model can correctly reproduce the measured interfacial tensions of a nitrogen–water binary mixture. The density profiles of the dissolved air and water near the hydrophobic walls are predicted using the validated model. It is shown clearly that a hydrophobic wall leads to air enrichment and water depletion. According to the extent of air enrichment, the free energy barriers and critical radii of bubble nucleation at different hydrophobic interfaces are calculated to evaluate the possibility of spontaneous bubble nucleation.
Isozyme evidence of lack of speciation between wild and domestic Triatoma infestans (Heteroptera: Reduviidae) in Bolivia.

Wild and domestic Triatoma infestans from the Cochabamba region of Bolivia were virtually identical at 19 gene loci coding for enzymes. No allele was distinctive of either the wild or the domestic populations. Hence, there is no evidence that the 2 populations are different species. Domestic populations separated by 20 km showed statistically significant differences in allelic frequencies; this is compatible with the hypothesis of other authors that migrations of T. infestans are limited when feeding conditions are satisfactory. Fifteen trypanosomatid stocks isolated from wild T. infestans were shown by isozyme analysis to be Trypanosoma cruzi. This provides evidence that wild T. infestans are involved in the Chagas' disease cycle. The T. cruzi isozymic strains from wild T. infestans were genetically similar to those isolated from domestic T. infestans in the same region. This supports the hypothesis that there is no speciation between wild and domestic T. infestans, and that wild and domestic T. cruzi cycles may overlap in this region.
MicroRNA-143 regulates collagen type III expression in stromal fibroblasts of scirrhous type gastric cancer

Gastric cancer (GC) is one of the most common malignancies worldwide. In particular, scirrhous type GC is highly metastatic and is characterized clinically by rapid disease progression and poor prognosis. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play crucial roles in cancer development and progression. In the present study, we identified several miRNAs that are expressed at higher levels in scirrhous type GC than in non‐scirrhous type GC by miRNA microarray analysis. Among these, microRNA‐143 (miR‐143) expression was higher in scirrhous type GC than in non‐scirrhous types of GC. In situ hybridization and quantitative RT‐PCR analysis showed that miR‐143 is expressed by stromal fibroblasts but not by cancer cells. In stromal cells, miR‐143 enhanced collagen type III expression in normal gastric fibroblasts and cancer‐associated fibroblasts through activation of transforming growth factor‐β)/SMAD signaling. Furthermore, high miR‐143 expression in GC was associated with worse cancer‐specific mortality (P = 0.0141). Multivariate analysis revealed that miR‐143 was an independent prognostic factor. Treatment of GC cell lines with 5‐aza‐2′‐deoxycytidine restored the expression of miR‐143, and precursor miR‐143 caused the inhibition of cancer cell invasion. These data suggest that miR‐143 regulates fibrosis of scirrhous type GC through induction of collagen expression in stromal fibroblasts and that miR‐143 expression serves as a prognostic marker of GC.
Penile corporoplasty with Yachia's technique for Peyronie's disease: Single center experience with 117 patients

Introduction: Peyronie's disease is an acquired penile deformity with a variety of presentations, caused by the formation of fibrous plaques within the tunica albuginea, leading to bio-mechanical and vascular abnormalities. The objective is to investigate the 18 years outcome of patients with Peyronie's disease treated with penile corporoplasty (Yachia technique) in our department. Materials and Methods: One hundred and seventeen patients underwent surgical treatment for PD between 1991 and 2009 and were retrospectively evaluated. We used the Levine and Lenting's algorithm for surgical treatment. Data was obtained from medical records, clinical evaluation, and telephone interview. Post-operative follow-up was at 6 weeks and 12 months. The mean time of follow-up was 14 months (12-19 months). Main Outcome Measures: Patient demographic, co-morbidities, erectile function, penile curvature, and surgical intervention were documented. The main outcome measures of this study are postoperative complications, surgical purpose, and patients and partner's satisfaction rates. Results: Surgical aim was obtained in 106 patients (success rate of 94.6%). Complications occurred in 4.5% of patients, but most of these were mild. At 6 weeks, complete straightening of the penis was achieved in 57 patients (50.9%), and partial straightening which allow sexual intercourse in 49 patients (43.7%). Nine patients report gland hypoesthesia and almost all report subjective perception of penis shortening (0.5 cm to 5 cm). Twenty-two patients developed recurrent deformity at 12 months follow-up, with compromise of sexual intercourse in 7 patients. Patients’ responses to our questionnaire showed that overall 88.4% of the patients and partners were satisfied with the surgical results. Conclusion: According to the results of this long-term, retrospective study, surgical correction, using the Yachia technique, is an excellent option for patients with functional impairment from their Peyronie's disease, especially.
Improving capacitor voltage ripples and power losses of modular multilevel converters through discontinuous modulation

The voltage ripple of the capacitors of the modular multilevel converter (MMC) increases when the converter output frequency decreases. This occurs in motor drive applications at low motor speeds, where the output frequency is reduced proportionally to the converter modulation index. In this paper, a discontinuous modulation technique for reducing the amplitude of the capacitor voltage ripples and the switching losses, especially at low modulation indices, is presented. The technique is based on adding a zero-sequence to the original modulation signals, clamping the MMC arms to the upper or lower rails of the fictitious dc-link bus. A current control strategy suitable for this modulation strategy is also proposed. Simulation results under various operating points are reported along with evaluation and comparison results against the conventional carrier-based pulse-width space-vector modulation.
Using Gamification to Motivate Students with Dyslexia

The concept of gamification is receiving increasing attention, particularly for its potential to motivate students. However, to date the majority of studies in the context of education have predominantly focused on University students. This paper explores how gamification could potentially benefit a specific student population, children with dyslexia who are transitioning from primary to secondary school. Two teachers from specialist dyslexia teaching centres used classDojo, a gamification platform, during their teaching sessions for one term. We detail how the teachers appropriated the platform in different ways and how the students discussed classDojo in terms of motivation. These findings have subsequently informed a set of provisional implications for gamification distilling opportunities for future pedagogical uses, gamification design for special education and methodological approaches to how gamification is studied.