Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Deriving Snow Cover Metrics for Alaska from MODIS

Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) daily snow cover products provide an opportunity for determining snow onset and melt dates across broad geographic regions; however, cloud cover and polar darkness are limiting factors at higher latitudes. This study presents snow onset and melt dates for Alaska, portions of western Canada and the Russian Far East derived from Terra MODIS snow cover daily 500 m grid data (MOD10A1) and evaluates our method for filling data gaps caused by clouds or polar darkness. Pixels classified as cloud or no data were reclassified by: spatial filtering using neighboring pixel values; temporal filtering using pixel values for days before/after cloud cover; and snow-cycle filtering based on a time series assessment of a pixel’s position within snow accumulation, cover or melt periods. During the 2012 snow year, these gap-filling methods reduced cloud pixels from 27.7% to 3.1%. A total of 12 metrics (e.g., date of first and last snow, date of persistent snow cover and periods of intermittence) for each pixel were calculated by snow year. A comparison of MODIS-derived snow onset and melt dates with in situ observations from 244 weather stations generally showed an early bias in MODIS-derived dates and an effect of increasing cloudiness exacerbating bias. Our results show that mean regional duration of seasonal snow cover is 179–311 days/year and that snow cover is often intermittent, with 41% of the area experiencing ≥2 snow-covered periods during a snow season. Other regional-scale patterns in the timing of snow onset and melt are evident in the yearly 500 m gridded products publically available at http://static.gina. alaska.edu/NPS_products/MODIS_snow/.
Non-Equilibrium Charge Transport in Disordered Organic Films

Charge transport in disordered organic layers has been intensively investigated in recent years both experimentally and theoretically. In these investigations, basic studies are needed for practical and technological developments in modern organic electronics and photonics. The concept of Gaussian disorder model (GDM) i. e. the temperatureand fieldassisted tunneling (hopping) of charge carriers between localized states (LSs), forms the background for understanding of the physical nature of transport (Bassler, 1993; Novikov et al., 1998). Energetic disorder is described by Gaussian distribution of energies of LSs. The ubiquitous experimental option for investigating charge transport is the timeofflight (TOF) experiment, the observable being the transient current in the organic layer. Excess charge carriers are generated in an organic film by light in course of TOF experiments. These carriers are not yet in quasiequilibrium shortly after their generation, notably if there is an excess energy during excitation (Bassler, 1993). This circumstance together with a strong variance of transition rate of carriers between LSs in disordered materials causes a decrease of the average mobility with time, while the spatial dispersion of carriers relative to their mean position is anomalously large, i.e. the transport occurs in nonequilibrium conditions. Usually this case is referred to dispersive transport (Bassler, 1993; Arkhipov & Bassler, 1993b), whereas at long time transport is characterized by timeindependent mobility and diffusion coefficients. The latter transport mode, referred to quasiequilibrium, or Gaussian transport, is the topic of recent works (Arkhipov et al., 2001a; Schmechel, 2002; Fishchuk et al., 2002; Pasveer et al., 2005). It is often realized in materials with moderate energetic disorder. Indeed, the TOF transients of 1 m   thick samples at room temperature bear out a well-developed plateau. This circumstance, however, does not always imply that transport is completely quasiequilibrium. An unambiguous signature of the deviation is the anomalously large dispersion of formally nondispersive TOF signals and the concomitant scaling of the tails of TOF signal as a function of sample thickness and electric field strength. Moreover, quasiequilibrium transport is questionable for the case of thin (<100 nm) organic films, suitable for organic lightemitting diodes (OLEDs), when the transit time is short enough (Blom & Vissenberg, 1998). 4
Using Light Sheet Fluorescence Microscopy to Image Zebrafish Eye Development

Light sheet fluorescence microscopy (LSFM) is gaining more and more popularity as a method to image embryonic development. The main advantages of LSFM compared to confocal systems are its low phototoxicity, gentle mounting strategies, fast acquisition with high signal to noise ratio and the possibility of imaging samples from various angles (views) for long periods of time. Imaging from multiple views unleashes the full potential of LSFM, but at the same time it can create terabyte-sized datasets. Processing such datasets is the biggest challenge of using LSFM. In this protocol we outline some solutions to this problem. Until recently, LSFM was mostly performed in laboratories that had the expertise to build and operate their own light sheet microscopes. However, in the last three years several commercial implementations of LSFM became available, which are multipurpose and easy to use for any developmental biologist. This article is primarily directed to those researchers, who are not LSFM technology developers, but want to employ LSFM as a tool to answer specific developmental biology questions. Here, we use imaging of zebrafish eye development as an example to introduce the reader to LSFM technology and we demonstrate applications of LSFM across multiple spatial and temporal scales. This article describes a complete experimental protocol starting with the mounting of zebrafish embryos for LSFM. We then outline the options for imaging using the commercially available light sheet microscope. Importantly, we also explain a pipeline for subsequent registration and fusion of multiview datasets using an open source solution implemented as a Fiji plugin. While this protocol focuses on imaging the developing zebrafish eye and processing data from a particular imaging setup, most of the insights and troubleshooting suggestions presented here are of general use and the protocol can be adapted to a variety of light sheet microscopy experiments.
The knowledge pyramid: a critique of the DIKW hierarchy

The paper evaluates the data—information—knowledge—wisdom (DIKW) hierarchy. This hierarchy, also known as the `knowledge hierarchy', is part of the canon of information science and management. Arguments are offered that the hierarchy is unsound and methodologically undesirable. The paper identifies a central logical error that DIKW makes. The paper also identifies the dated and unsatisfactory philosophical positions of operationalism and inductivism as the philosophical backdrop to the hierarchy. The paper concludes with a sketch of some positive theories, of value to information science, on the nature of the components of the hierarchy: that data is anything recordable in a semantically and pragmatically sound way, that information is what is known in other literature as `weak knowledge', that knowledge also is `weak knowledge' and that wisdom is the possession and use, if required, of wide practical knowledge, by an agent who appreciates the fallible nature of that knowledge.
Hardness and deformation microstructures of nano-polycrystalline diamonds synthesized from various carbons under high pressure and high temperature

Mechanical properties of high-purity nano-polycrystalline diamonds synthesized by direct conversion from graphite and various non-graphitic carbons under static high pressures and high temperatures were investigated by microindentation testing with a Knoop indenter and observation of microstructures around the indentations. Results of indentation hardness tests using a superhard synthetic diamond Knoop indenter showed that the polycrystalline diamond synthesized from graphite at ⩾15 GPa and 2300–2500 °C (consisting of fine grains 10–30 nm in size and layered crystals) has very high Knoop hardness (Hk ⩾ 110 GPa), whereas the hardness of polycrystalline diamonds synthesized from non-graphitic carbons at ⩾15 GPa and below 2000 °C (consisting only of single-nano grains 5–10 nm in size) are significantly lower (Hk = 70 to 90 GPa). Microstructure observations beneath the indentations of these nano-polycrystalline diamonds suggest that the existence of a lamellar structure and the bonding strength of the grain boundary play important roles in controlling the hardness of the polycrystalline diamond.
An architecture for recycling intermediates in a column-store

Automatically recycling (intermediate) results is a grand challenge for state-of-the-art databases to improve both query response time and throughput. Tuples are loaded and streamed through a tuple-at-a-time processing pipeline avoiding materialization of intermediates as much as possible. This limits the opportunities for reuse of overlapping computations to DBA-defined materialized views and function/result cache tuning. In contrast, the operator-at-a-time execution paradigm produces fully materialized results in each step of the query plan. To avoid resource contention, these intermediates are evicted as soon as possible. In this paper we study an architecture that harvests the by-products of the operator-at-a-time paradigm in a column store system using a lightweight mechanism, the recycler. The key challenge then becomes selection of the policies to admit intermediates to the resource pool, their retention period, and the eviction strategy when facing resource limitations. The proposed recycling architecture has been implemented in an open-source system. An experimental analysis against the TPC-H ad-hoc decision support benchmark and a complex, real-world application (SkyServer) demonstrates its effectiveness in terms of self-organizing behavior and its significant performance gains. The results indicate the potentials of recycling intermediates and charters a route for further development of database kernels.
Models of Frequency-Dependent Selection with Mutation from Parental Alleles

Frequency-dependent selection (FDS) remains a common heuristic explanation for the maintenance of genetic variation in natural populations. The pairwise-interaction model (PIM) is a well-studied general model of frequency-dependent selection, which assumes that a genotype’s fitness is a function of within-population intergenotypic interactions. Previous theoretical work indicated that this type of model is able to sustain large numbers of alleles at a single locus when it incorporates recurrent mutation. These studies, however, have ignored the impact of the distribution of fitness effects of new mutations on the dynamics and end results of polymorphism construction. We suggest that a natural way to model mutation would be to assume mutant fitness is related to the fitness of the parental allele, i.e., the existing allele from which the mutant arose. Here we examine the numbers and distributions of fitnesses and alleles produced by construction under the PIM with mutation from parental alleles and the impacts on such measures due to different methods of generating mutant fitnesses. We find that, in comparison with previous results, generating mutants from existing alleles lowers the average number of alleles likely to be observed in a system subject to FDS, but produces polymorphisms that are highly stable and have realistic allele-frequency distributions.
Visual Tracking via Learning Dynamic Patch-based Graph Representation

Existing visual tracking methods usually localize a target object with a bounding box, in which the performance of the foreground object trackers or detectors is often affected by the inclusion of background clutter. To handle this problem, we learn a patch-based graph representation for visual tracking. The tracked object is modeled by with a graph by taking a set of non-overlapping image patches as nodes, in which the weight of each node indicates how likely it belongs to the foreground and edges are weighted for indicating the appearance compatibility of two neighboring nodes. This graph is dynamically learned and applied in object tracking and model updating. During the tracking process, the proposed algorithm performs three main steps in each frame. First, the graph is initialized by assigning binary weights of some image patches to indicate the object and background patches according to the predicted bounding box. Second, the graph is optimized to refine the patch weights by using a novel alternating direction method of multipliers. Third, the object feature representation is updated by imposing the weights of patches on the extracted image features. The object location is predicted by maximizing the classification score in the structured support vector machine. Extensive experiments show that the proposed tracking algorithm performs well against the state-of-the-art methods on large-scale benchmark datasets.
The Pattern of Variation between Diarrhea and Malaria Coexistence with Corresponding Risk Factors in, Chikhwawa, Malawi: A Bivariate Multilevel Analysis

Developing countries face a huge burden of infectious diseases, a number of which co-exist. This paper estimates the pattern and variation of malaria and diarrhea coexistence in Chikhwawa, a district in Southern Malawi using bivariate multilevel modelling with Bayesian estimation. A probit link was employed to examine hierarchically built data from a survey of individuals (n = 6,727) nested within households (n = 1,380) nested within communities (n = 33). Results show significant malaria [σu12=0.901 (95% CI:0.746,1.056)] and diarrhea [σu22=1.009 (95% CI:0.860,1.158)] variations with a strong correlation between them [ru(1,2)=0.565] at household level. There are significant malaria [σv12=0.053(95% CI:0.018,0.088)] and diarrhea [σv22=0.099(95% CI:0.030,0.168)] variations at community level but with a small correlation [rv(1,2)=0.124] between them. There is also significant correlation between malaria and diarrhea at individual level [re(1,2)=0.241]. These results suggest a close association between reported malaria-like illness and diarrheal illness especially at household and individual levels in Southern Malawi.
Differential Regulation of Circulating Levels of Molecular Chaperones in Patients Undergoing Treatment for Periodontal Disease

Background Evidence is emerging that molecular chaperones, in addition to their intracellular protein folding actions, can act as intercellular signaling proteins with an ability to modulate leukocyte function. Recent evidence has also shown that these proteins can exist in the circulation and may be involved in disease pathogenesis. We have used periodontitis and its treatment as a model of inflammation in the human to determine its effects on levels of circulating HSP10, HSP60 and BiP. Methodology/Principal Findings A group of periodontal patients and matched controls were examined at the beginning of the study and then at 1 day and 6 months following periodontal or control therapy. Plasma levels of HSP10, HSP60 and BiP were measured by immunoassay and related to other plasma measures of inflammation. Periodontal patients had significantly less circulating levels of HSP10 or BiP compared with the controls. In contrast, more periodontal patients had intermediate levels of HSP60. Treatment of the periodontitis caused an increase in plasma levels of HSP10 although it had no effect on BiP. Treatment had no influence of HSP60 levels. Plasma HSP10 levels after therapy correlated with markers of periodontal clinical improvement. Conclusions/Significance Circulating levels of molecular chaperones are influenced by local inflammation. HSP10 is known to be an anti-inflammatory factor. The marked decrease of this circulating protein in active inflammation and its recovery post-treatment suggests that it may have a role in controlling periodontal inflammation.
Rapid Detection and Identification of Aspergillus from Lower Respiratory Tract Specimens by Use of a Combined Probe–High-Resolution Melting Analysis

ABSTRACT Diagnosis of invasive aspergillosis (IA) requires increasingly rapid molecular methods that enable sensitive detection and discrimination between species. We designed and evaluated a real-time PCR-based method that combined melting temperature (Tm ) calling analysis of a specific probe with high-resolution melting analysis of the full amplicon. The test correctly identified 78 isolates of Aspergillus section Fumigati and non-Fumigati sections of Aspergillus with a limit of detection of 102 conidia/ml (102 fg/ml). No cross-reactivity with other fungi was found. The assay was further validated on lower respiratory tract specimens containing Aspergillus or not. It successfully identified Aspergillus to section level in 56 of 59 specimens. With culture as the gold standard, our assay shows 100% sensitivity and specificity and constitutes an efficient alternative for identification of Aspergillus in lower respiratory tract samples.
Platelet-fibrin(ogen) interactions in flowing blood

Fibrinogen plays a major role in haemostatic plug formation, not only as the precursor of fibrin and as a mediator in platelet thrombus formation, but also as an adhesive molecule for platelets. Insight in the process underlying thrombosis and haemostasis is of importance in the development of therapeutic anti-thrombotic agents. In vivo, these processes are strongly dependent upon the presence of flowing blood. Therefore, in the present thesis the interactions between platelets and fibrinogen/fibrin during the formation and degradation of a platelet-fibrin(ogen) plug have been investigated under well-defined physiological flow conditions. In Chapter 2 the contribution of fibrinogen in the formation and packing of a platelet thrombus has been investigated under flow conditions. A perfusion model is developed to study thrombus growth and stability in real-time. For this study, blood was used from a patient suffering from congenital afibrinogenemia. Chapter 3 describes the genetic characterization of the fibrinogen disorder underlying the haemorrhagic condition of this patient. In Chapter 4 the role of ADP was examined in platelet adhesion to fibrinogen and in thrombus formation on collagen. Fibrinogen contains a fibrin-specific region (? 312-322), which becomes exposed upon polymerization to fibrin. The participation of this epitope in platelet adhesion to immobilized fibrinogen has been investigated under conditions of flow in Chapter 5. Adhesion of platelets to a fibrin network during fibrinolysis is compared to neutrophil adhesion in Chapter 6. In Chapter 7 a newly developed model is described to study the dynamics of fibrin formation and deposition of flow. Using this model the binding of fibrin was studied to proteins present in the extracellular matrix. In Chapter 8, the findings of the studies described in this thesis are integrated and discussed in broader context and future prospects are presented
Giant oesophageal gastrointestinal stromal tumour presenting with dyspnoea and clubbed fingers

Gastrointestinal stromal tumours (GISTs) are mesenchymal neoplasms of the gastrointestinal tract originating from the interstitial cells of Cajal. Giant oesophageal GISTs are rare since the oesophagus is rarely the primary site of GISTs, and they are usually diagnosed early due to complaints such as dysphagia. We present the case of a giant oesophageal GIST presenting with prominent clubbing. The case underlined the diagnostic importance of clubbing and the careful consideration of chemotherapy. Although clubbed fingers associated with GISTs are rare, our experience demonstrates the importance of physicians’ recognition of clubbing as a paraneoplastic phenomenon for early diagnosis of malignancies since patients seldom notice their own clubbing by themselves. Chemotherapy using imatinib, an Bcr-Abl kinase inhibitor, is the standard option for unresectable giant GISTs. However, careful consideration must be made of the risk of complications associated with rapid mass reduction due to imatinib such as bleeding, oesophageal perforation and mediastinitis.
Variational Bayesian Model Selection for Mixture Distributions

Mixture models, in which a probability distribution is represented as a linear superposition of component distributions, are widely used in statistical modelling and pattern recognition. One of the key tasks in the application of mixture models is the determination of a suitable number of components. Conventional approaches based on cross-validation are computationally expensive, are wasteful of data, and give noisy estimates for the optimal number of components. A fully Bayesian treatment, based on Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for instance, will return a posterior distribution over the number of components. However, in practical applications it is generally convenient, or even computationally essential, to select a single, most appropriate model. Recently it has been shown, in the context of linear latent variable models, that the use of hierarchical priors governed by continuous hyper-parameters whose values are set by type-II maximum likelihood, can be used to optimize model complexity. In this paper we extend this framework to mixture distributions by considering the classical task of density estimation using mixtures of Gaussians. We show that, by setting the mixing coefficients to maximize the marginal log-likelihood, unwanted components can be suppressed, and the appropriate number of components for the mixture can be determined in a single training run without recourse to crossvalidation. Our approach uses a variational treatment based on a factorized approximation to the posterior distribution.
Users' perception of relevance of spoken documents

We present the results of a study of user's perception of relevance of documents. The aim is to study experimentally how users' perception varies depending on the form that retrieved documents are presented. Documents retrieved in response to a query are presented to users in a variety of ways, from full text to a machine spoken query-biased automatically-generated summary, and the difference in users' perception of relevance is studied. The experimental results suggest that the effectiveness of advanced multimedia Information Retrieval applications may be affected by the low level of users' perception of relevance of retrieved documents.
Unifying explicit and implicit feedback for top-N recommendation

In the era of big data, the data are diverse and complex. The issue that using multi-source data efficiently in recommender system is very essential. To solve this problem, we proposes a ranking model that integrates explicit feedback data with implicit feedback data together. We use weighting factors to measure the impact of different user behaviors on recommendation quality. We solved the data fusion problem and the Top-N items recommendation problem. We used matrix decomposition for collaborative filtering. Finally, a parallel optimization model based on distributed and parallel computing is proposed, and the implementation on Spark is provided. Through comparison with several models, our model greatly enhanced the items recommendation quality and improved the scalability and efficiency of personalized recommender systems.
Electrically tunable delay line using an optical single-side-band modulator

The authors propose a tunable delay line using an optical single-side-band modulator, a fiber Bragg grating and an optical fiber loop. The number of times light circulates in the loop can be controlled by the electric signal fed to the modulator. Packets of any lengths can go through the proposed delay line without any collisions, even if the length of the packet is larger than that of the delay loop.