Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The split and merge (SAM) protocol for interactive video-on-demand systems

A true video-on-demand (VOD) system provides the ultimate flexibility in video services by allowing users to select any video programs, at any time, and to perform any VCR-like user interactions. To allow true VOD, one approach is to have a dedicated video stream for each customer. This is expensive, especially when multiple identical video streams are sent to multiple customers accessing the same video. To be commercially viable, VOD service must be priced competitively with existing video rental services. Batching may be used to reduce this cost. It allows multiple users accessing the same video to share the same video stream. The batching approach, however, complicates the provision of user interactions. Existing batching schemes only allow near VOD services. This paper describes a new protocol, called split and merge (SAM), which offers true VOD services while allowing multiple users to share the same video stream. This sharing is transparent to the users and it appears as if each has a dedicated video stream. Our approach is to split an interactive user from the batch and to serve him with a dedicated video stream. We develop an innovative way to merge these individuals back to the batching streams when they resume normal play mode. The SAM protocol therefore significantly improves the system resource utilization and the number of simultaneous users, and more importantly, allows true VOD services.
Analysis of soil roughness measurements using a 25 m laser profiler and a 4 m wide meshboard

The currently available backscatter inversion models often do not yield satisfactory results when applied to natural surfaces due to an inaccurate characterization of the soil roughness properties. This is caused by inadequacy of the applied soil roughness measuring techniques and by the high variation on soil roughness parameters within one agricultural field. From a theoretical study it was found that long profiles are necessary to obtain an accurate estimation of the roughness parameters. Short profiles, which are generally measured, tend to underestimate the roughness parameters. Soil roughness data were collected over three different tillages with the ESA laser profiler, which allows measurements of profiles up to 25 m, and a 4 m wide meshboard. This research compares the two measuring techniques and studies the possibility of compensating for the underestimation of short profiles. Analysis of the 25 m laser profiles confirmed the theoretical study that the rms height and the correlation length increase as profile length increases. The rms height reached a constant value for all three tillages whereas the correlation length only reached a constant value for the roughest tillages. The dependency on profile length of both rms height and correlation length could be quite accurately modeled which allowed the extrapolation from short profile data to rms height and correlation length values at higher profile lengths. Additionally, it was found that it is possible to convert the less accurate meshboard derived rms values to those obtained from the laser profiler. This conversion greatly improves when the parameter values of at least six, 4 m profiles are averaged. For the correlation length this conversion is not possible due to the high variance on this parameter
Development of sit-to-stand and stand-to-sit training system for hemiplegie patients

As one of the several characteristics of hemiplegic patients after stroke, the patients conduct sit-to-stand and stand-to-sit (STS) motion using their unaffected leg. The purpose of this study is to develop a STS motion support system for helping the patients decrease the difference of the usage ratio between the affected side and the unaffected side, and increase the usage of the affected leg. The developed system supports the STS motions by moving the seat linearly. The system also provides the user visual motor information for each leg by measuring the floor reaction force (FRF) during STS motions. With the motion support and the visual feedback, the user can lean how to increase the usage ratio of the affected leg and equalize the usage ratio of the unaffected leg with the affected leg. The STS experiments were carried out in two hemiplegic patients and a quadriplegic patient to confirm the effectiveness of the system. All the participants increased the FRF of the affected leg and decreased that of the unaffected leg by using the system. Even if the system wasn't used, two participants decreased the difference of the usage ratio between the both sides and increase the FRF of the affected leg. We confirmed not only the immediate effect but also the longitudinal effect of the system. These results suggest that the developed system is effective in helping hemiplegic patients to improve STS motions.
Anxiety and depression symptoms in women with and without binge eating disorder enrolled in weight loss programs.

OBJECTIVES 1) To investigate the association between binge eating scores, anxiety and depression symptoms, and body mass index (BMI), and 2) to assess the presence of differences in severity of anxiety symptoms, severity of depression symptoms, and BMI in women with and without binge eating disorder. METHOD The sample comprised 113 women aged between 22 and 60 years (39.35±10.85) enrolled in weight loss programs in Porto Alegre, southern Brazil. The following instruments were used: structured interview, Brazilian Economic Classification Criteria, Beck Anxiety Inventory, Beck Depression Inventory, and Binge Eating Scale. Data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. RESULTS A positive association was found between binge eating scores and the severity of anxiety symptoms (p < 0.001) and depression symptoms (p < 0.001). No significant association was observed between BMI and binge eating scores (p = 0.341). There were significant differences between women with and without binge eating disorder with regard to severity of anxiety symptoms (p < 0.001) and severity of depression symptoms (p < 0.001). Conversely, no significant differences were observed between the groups concerning BMI (p = 0.103). CONCLUSION Our findings showed that binge eating is associated with symptoms of anxiety and depression, but not with BMI.
IT'S WHAT YOU SAY, NOT WHAT YOU PAY: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF MANAGER-EMPLOYEE RELATIONSHIPS IN OVERCOMING COORDINATION FAILURE

We study manager-employee interactions in experiments set in a corporate environment where payoffs depend on employees coordinating at high effort levels; the underlying game being played repeatedly by employees is a weak-link game. In the absence of managerial intervention subjects invariably slip into coordination failure. To overcome a history of coordination failure, managers have two instruments at their disposal, increasing employees' financial incentives to coordinate and communication with employees. We find that communication is a more effective tool than incentive changes for leading organizations out of performance traps. Examining the content of managers' communication, the most effective messages specifically request a high effort, point out the mutual benefits of high effort, and imply that employees are being paid well.
Evolution of Emotional Communication: From Sounds in Nonhuman Mammals to Speech and Music in Man

PART A: INTRODUCTORY SECTION 1. The evolutionary origin of multimodal synchronisation and emotional expression 2. Primate precursors to human language: Beyond discontinuity 3. Brain networks for the encoding of emotions in communication sounds of human and nonhuman primates PART B: DIFFERENT MAMMALIAN TAXA 4. Sound communication in house mice: Emotions in their voices and ears? 5. Vocalizations as indicators of emotional states in rats and cats 6. Beyond echolocation: Emotional acoustic communication in bats 7. Emotional communication in African Elephants 8. Toward the evolutionary roots of affective prosody in human acoustic communication: A comparative approach to mammalian voices 9. Emotional communication in monkeys: Music to their ears? PART C: NON-SPEECH HUMAN VOCALIZATIONS 10. Infant crying and the synchrony of arousal 11. Understanding spontaneous human laughter: The role of voicing in inducing positive emotion 12. Vocal expression of emotions in laughter PART D: HUMAN PROSODY 13. An integrative model of brain processes for the decoding of emotional prosody 14. On the orbito-striatal interface in (acoustic) emotional processing 15. The role of dopamine in perception and expression of emotional communication in Parkinson's disease 16. Vocal affect expression: Problems and promises PART E: MUSIC 17. Towards a neurobiology of musical emotions 18. Acoustically mediated emotional contagion as an across-species homology underlying music processing 19. A contribution to the evolutionary basis of music: Lessons from the chill-response PART F: SUMMARY: WHERE TO GO? 20. A cross-taxa concept of emotion in acoustic communication: An ethological perspective
Baseline serum low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels predict response to hepatitis C virus therapy in HIV/hepatitis C virus coinfected patients

Background:High levels of serum low-density lipoprotein cholesterol are associated with better response to pegylated interferon and ribavirin in hepatitis C virus monoinfected patients. There are no data concerning this topic in HIV/hepatitis C virus coinfected patients in whom lipid disorders are particularly common. Objective:To assess the association between baseline lipid levels and sustained virologic response to pegylated interferon and ribavirin in coinfected patients. Methods:A total of 260 HIV/hepatitis C virus coinfected patients under treatment with pegylated interferon and ribavirin and who had a baseline serum lipid profile were included in this retrospective study. Results:Thirty-eight (24%) patients with genotypes 1–4 and 64 (63%) with genotypes 2–3 achieved sustained virologic response. Forty-nine (44%) patients with serum low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels 100 mg/dl or more showed sustained virologic response compared with 53 (36%) with lower values [adjusted odds ratio: 2.51; 95% confidence interval: 1.40–4.87; P = 0.003]. This association was independent of the remaining predictors of sustained virologic response which were genotypes 2–3, plasma hepatitis C virus RNA 600 000 IU/ml or less, exposure to at least 80% of the planned therapy and lack of concomitant antiretroviral therapy. The rate of sustained virologic response in patients with genotype 1 and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol at least 100 mg/ml was 31% compared with 17% in those with lower values (adjusted odds ratio: 2.19; 95% confidence interval: 1.04–4.66; P = 0.040). The corresponding figures in subjects with genotypes 2–3 were 73 and 58% [2.71 (0.99–7.46); P = 0.054]. No other lipid was associated with response. Conclusion:Higher low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels predict sustained virologic response to pegylated interferon and ribavirin in HIV/hepatitis C virus coinfected patients. This might be used to improve the rate of sustained virologic response in this setting.
Modifications in the SIFT operator for effective SAR image matching

With the increasing availability and rapidly improving the spatial resolution of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images from the latest and future satellites like TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X, their applicability in remote sensing applications is set to be paramount. Considering challenges in the field of point feature-based multisensor/multimodal SAR image matching/registration and advancements in the field of computer vision, we extend the applicability of the scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) operator for SAR images. In this article, we have analysed the feature detection, identification and matching steps of the original SIFT processing chain. We implement steps to counter the speckle influence, which deteriorates the SIFT operator performance for SAR images. In feature identification, we evaluate different local gradient estimating techniques and highlight the fact that giving up the SIFT's rotation invariance characteristic increases the potential number of matches when the multiple SAR images from different sensors have been acquired with the same geometrical acquisition parameters. In the feature matching stage, we propose to assist the standard SIFT matching scheme to utilise the SIFT operator capability for effective results in challenging SAR image matching scenarios. The results obtained for SAR images acquired by different sensors using different incidence angles and orbiting directions over both rural and semi urban land cover, highlight the SIFT operator's capability for point feature matching in SAR imagery.
Effect of Hypotension due to Spinal Anesthesia on Coronary Blood Flow and Myocardial Metabolism in Man

The induction of spinal anesthesia resulted in hypotension and decreased coronary blood flow and myocardial oxygen consumption. At the same time the myocardial extraction coefficient of oxygen was not increased, indicating myocardial oxygenation to be adequate for the lower work load. This does not imply that local ischemia might not occur in the presence of coronary artery sclerosis. The coronary arteriovenous differences of glucose, lactate and pyruvate were not changed during the period of hypotension.
Bayesian Time-Varying Quantile Forecasting for Value-at-Risk in Financial Markets

Recently, advances in time-varying quantile modeling have proven effective in financial Value-at-Risk forecasting. Some well-known dynamic conditional autoregressive quantile models are generalized to a fully nonlinear family. The Bayesian solution to the general quantile regression problem, via the Skewed-Laplace distribution, is adapted and designed for parameter estimation in this model family via an adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling scheme. A simulation study illustrates favorable precision in estimation, compared to the standard numerical optimization method. The proposed model family is clearly favored in an empirical study of 10 major stock markets. The results that show the proposed model is more accurate at Value-at-Risk forecasting over a two-year period, when compared to a range of existing alternative models and methods.
Direct activation of human and mouse Oct4 genes using engineered TALE and Cas9 transcription factors

The newly developed transcription activator-like effector protein (TALE) and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/Cas9 transcription factors (TF) offered a powerful and precise approach for modulating gene expression. In this article, we systematically investigated the potential of these new tools in activating the stringently silenced pluripotency gene Oct4 (Pou5f1) in mouse and human somatic cells. First, with a number of TALEs and sgRNAs targeting various regions in the mouse and human Oct4 promoters, we found that the most efficient TALE-VP64s bound around −120 to −80 bp, while highly effective sgRNAs targeted from −147 to −89-bp upstream of the transcription start sites to induce high activity of luciferase reporters. In addition, we observed significant transcriptional synergy when multiple TFs were applied simultaneously. Although individual TFs exhibited marginal activity to up-regulate endogenous gene expression, optimized combinations of TALE-VP64s could enhance endogenous Oct4 transcription up to 30-fold in mouse NIH3T3 cells and 20-fold in human HEK293T cells. More importantly, the enhancement of OCT4 transcription ultimately generated OCT4 proteins. Furthermore, examination of different epigenetic modifiers showed that histone acetyltransferase p300 could enhance both TALE-VP64 and sgRNA/dCas9-VP64 induced transcription of endogenous OCT4. Taken together, our study suggested that engineered TALE-TF and dCas9-TF are useful tools for modulating gene expression in mammalian cells.
Mining message sequence graphs

Dynamic specification mining involves discovering software behavior from traces for the purpose of program comprehension and bug detection. However, mining program behavior from execution traces is difficult for concurrent/distributed programs. Specifically, the inherent partial order relationships among events occurring across processes pose a big challenge to specification mining. In this paper, we propose a framework for mining partial orders so as to understand concurrent program behavior. Our miner takes in a set of concurrent program traces, and produces a message sequence graph (MSG) to represent the concurrent program behavior. An MSG represents a graph where the nodes of the graph are partial orders, represented as Message Sequence Charts. Mining an MSG allows us to understand concurrent program behaviors since the nodes of the MSG depict important "phases" or "interaction snippets" involving several concurrently executing processes. To demonstrate the power of this technique, we conducted experiments on mining behaviors of several fairly complex distributed systems. We show that our miner can produce the corresponding MSGs with both high precision and recall.
Pretibial Full Thickness Skin Burn following Indirect Contact from Bone-Cement Use in a Giant Cell Tumour

Bone cement reaches significant temperatures and is known to cause thermal and chemical damage to various tissues. All the reports of such damage occurred following a direct contact of the tissue or structure with cement. We report the case of a patient with a giant cell tumour of the proximal tibia who underwent curettage and bone cement application through a posterior approach and subsequently developed full thickness pretibial skin damage despite showing no evidence of any direct contact of the involved skin with bone cement. This is the first report of its kind and though anecdotal is a serious complication that surgeons should be aware of.
Maternal and fetal heart rate extraction from abdominal recordings using multi-scale principal components analysis

A three-stage methodology for the extraction of maternal and fetal heart rate using abdominal ECG leads, is presented. In the first stage, the maternal R-peaks and fiducial points (maternal QRS onset and offset) are detected, using multiscale principal components analysis (MSPCA) and the smoothed nonlinear energy operator (SNEO). Maternal fiducial points are used to eliminate the maternal QRS complexes from the abdominal ECG recordings. In the second stage, again MSPCA and SNEO are employed in order to detect the fetal heart beats that do not overlap with the maternal QRSs (eliminated from the first stage). The extraction of the fetal heart rate is accomplished in the last stage, using a histogram based technique in order to identify the positions of the fetal heart beats that overlap with the maternal QRSs. Real signals, recorded from different pregnant women and different weeks of gestation, are used for the evaluation of the proposed methodology and the obtained results indicate high performance (accuracy 95%).
(Re)Constructing Home and School: Immigrant Parents, Agency, and the (Un)Desirability of Bridging Multiple Worlds

Background/Context This study examines the tactics that Haitian immigrant parents used to negotiate the boundaries around home and school, presenting the possibility that families play an active and deliberate role in creating distance between the worlds of home and school. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study The following research questions were explored: (1) Why do Haitian immigrant parents resist bridges between the worlds of home and school? (2) How might this resistance be seen as a show of agency? (3) How do the resistance and agency of Haitian immigrants complicate the in-school/out-of-school dichotomy and push theories that too easily bring in-school and out-of-school worlds together? Setting Greater Boston, Massachusetts. Population/Participants/Subjects Participants were 54 parents of Haiti-born (1.5 generation) and U.S.-born (second generation) Haitian American adolescents. Research Design The study draws from a subset of data collected with Haitian families in a large longitudinal study of newly arrived immigrants from five different countries and from data collected in a supplemental study of second-generation Haitian families. Data sources include structured interviews and field notes. Data Collection and Analysis Data were collected by bilingual, bicultural research assistants. Interviews were recorded whenever possible, transcribed, and, if necessary, translated to English. Data were analyzed for this article using classic qualitative thematic analysis techniques. Findings/Results The findings suggest that parents actively constructed and reconstructed distinct boundaries for home and school rather than being passive victims of these boundaries. Three metathemes and seven related themes emerged related to the research questions: protecting the home terrain (displayed as a concern with family privacy; parental strictness; and discouraging friendships); equating schools with Americanization (shown through criticisms of U.S. schools/schooling; and parents’ limited contact with school), and negotiating a seat at the table (through parental advocacy; and reciprocal partnership-seeking) Conclusions/Recommendations These findings question the pervasive notion in educational literature and practice that close links between home and school should be the goal of both teachers and families.
Hydrophilic protein associated with desiccation tolerance exhibits broad protein stabilization function

The ability of certain plants, invertebrates, and microorganisms to survive almost complete loss of water has long been recognized, but the molecular mechanisms of this phenomenon remain to be defined. One phylogenetically widespread adaptation is the presence of abundant, highly hydrophilic proteins in desiccation-tolerant organisms. The best characterized of these polypeptides are the late embryogenesis abundant (LEA) proteins, first described in plant seeds >20 years ago but recently identified in invertebrates and bacteria. The function of these largely unstructured proteins has been unclear, but we now show that a group 3 LEA protein from the desiccation-tolerant nematode Aphelenchus avenae is able to prevent aggregation of a wide range of other proteins both in vitro and in vivo. The presence of water is essential for maintenance of the structure of many proteins, and therefore desiccation stress induces unfolding and aggregation. The nematode LEA protein is able to abrogate desiccation-induced aggregation of the water-soluble proteomes from nematodes and mammalian cells and affords protection during both dehydration and rehydration. Furthermore, when coexpressed in a human cell line, the LEA protein reduces the propensity of polyglutamine and polyalanine expansion proteins associated with neurodegenerative diseases to form aggregates, demonstrating in vivo function of an LEA protein as an antiaggregant. Finally, human cells expressing LEA protein exhibit increased survival of dehydration imposed by osmotic upshift, consistent with a broad protein stabilization function of LEA proteins under conditions of water stress.
Challenge and Promise

SUMMARY The friendships of women and sexual minorities are widely recognized as principal relationships that provide significant social and psychological benefits, yet the friendships of bisexual women have garnered little scholarly attention to date. This article articulates some of the unique conceptual and methodological challenges associated with the study of bisexual women's friendships, many of which can be located in the sociocultural constructs which circumscribe the topic (i.e., “bisexual,” “women,” and “friendship”). The article also highlights some ways in which current research has attempted to navigate these challenges, as well as promising directions for future theoretical and empirical work in this domain.