Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Representing moving images with layers

We describe a system for representing moving images with sets of overlapping layers. Each layer contains an intensity map that defines the additive values of each pixel, along with an alpha map that serves as a mask indicating the transparency. The layers are ordered in depth and they occlude each other in accord with the rules of compositing. Velocity maps define how the layers are to be warped over time. The layered representation is more flexible than standard image transforms and can capture many important properties of natural image sequences. We describe some methods for decomposing image sequences into layers using motion analysis, and we discuss how the representation may be used for image coding and other applications.
Animal-assisted activity and emotional status of patients with Alzheimer's disease in day care

ABSTRACT Background: Preliminary studies suggest beneficial effects of animal-assisted activities (AAA) on behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD), but data are inconsistent. This study aimed to assess the effect of AAA with dogs on cognition, BPSD, emotional status and motor activity in severe Alzheimer's disease (AD). Methods: Ten patients attending an Alzheimer Day Care Center (ADCC) participated in a repeated measures study, which included: two weeks' pre-intervention, three weeks' control activity with plush dogs (CA), and three weeks' AAA. Cognitive function (Severe Impairment Battery), mood (Cornell Scale for Depression in Dementia; CSDD), BPSD (Neuropsychiatric Inventory; NPI) and agitation (Cohen-Mansfield Agitation Inventory; CMAI) were assessed at baseline and after each period. Observed Emotion Rating Scale (OERS) for emotional status, Agitated Behavior Mapping Instrument (ABMI) and a checklist for motor activity were completed across the study periods, both during intervention sessions and after three hours. Results: Cognition and NPI were unchanged across the study. Declines in the CMAI and CSDD scores after AAA were not significant, while the NPI anxiety item score decreased in comparison with CA (CA 3.1±2.3, AAA 1.5±2.7, p = 0.04). OERS “sadness” decreased (p = 0.002), while “pleasure” (p = 0.016) and “general alertness” (p = 0.003) increased during AAA compared with CA sessions, and observed sadness remained lower after three hours (p = 0.002). Motor activity increased significantly during AAA. Conclusion: In this sample of severe AD patients in ADCC, AAA was associated with a decrease in anxiety and sadness and an increase in positive emotions and motor activity in comparison with a control activity.
The temporal logic of actions

The temporal logic of actions (TLA) is a logic for specifying and reasoning about concurrent systems. Systems and their properties are represented in the same logic, so the assertion that a system meets its specification and the assertion that one system implements another are both expressed by logical implication. TLA is very simple; its syntax and complete formal semantics are summarized in about a page. Yet, TLA is not just a logician's toy; it is extremely powerful, both in principle and in practice. This report introduces TLA and describes how it is used to specify and verify concurrent algorithms. The use of TLA to specify and reason about open systems will be described elsewhere.
The challenge of translating ischemic conditioning from animal models to humans: the role of comorbidities

Following a period of ischemia (local restriction of blood supply to a tissue), the restoration of blood supply to the affected area causes significant tissue damage. This is known as ischemia-reperfusion injury (IRI) and is a central pathological mechanism contributing to many common disease states. The medical complications caused by IRI in individuals with cerebrovascular or heart disease are a leading cause of death in developed countries. IRI is also of crucial importance in fields as diverse as solid organ transplantation, acute kidney injury and following major surgery, where post-operative organ dysfunction is a major cause of morbidity and mortality. Given its clinical impact, novel interventions are urgently needed to minimize the effects of IRI, not least to save lives but also to reduce healthcare costs. In this Review, we examine the experimental technique of ischemic conditioning, which entails exposing organs or tissues to brief sub-lethal episodes of ischemia and reperfusion, before, during or after a lethal ischemic insult. This approach has been found to confer profound tissue protection against IRI. We discuss the translation of ischemic conditioning strategies from bench to bedside, and highlight where transition into human clinical studies has been less successful than in animal models, reviewing potential reasons for this. We explore the challenges that preclude more extensive clinical translation of these strategies and emphasize the role that underlying comorbidities have in altering the efficacy of these strategies in improving patient outcomes.
Changing the regioselectivity of the tryptophan 7-halogenase PrnA by site-directed mutagenesis.

For many years, haloperoxidases were the only type of halogenating enzymes known. 2] Haloperoxidases (hemeand vanadium-containing) catalyze the formation of hypohalous acids, 4] which diffuse out of the active site and then react with substrate. Perhydrolases catalyze the formation of peracids, which react outside of the active site with halide ions to form hypohalous acids. In both cases the actual halogenation step initiated by haloperoxidases and perhydrolases is a nonenzymatic step consistent with the lack of substrate specificity and regioselectivity seen with these enzymes. The structures of many halogenated metabolites suggested that there are naturally occurring halogenating enzymes that have a high degree of substrate specificity and are capable of regioselective halogen incorporation. The halogenated indole (or tryptophan) derivatives serve as an elegant demonstration system since a series of derivatives can be isolated in which each individual position of the indole ring system has a halogen substituent. This clearly shows that halogenating enzymes with regioselectivity for each of the positions of the indole ring system must exist. The first halogenase found to catalyze the regioselective chlorination or bromination of tryptophan was the tryptophan 7-halogenase PrnA involved in pyrrolnitrin biosynthesis. PrnA was identified as a flavindependent halogenase requiring a flavin reductase as a second enzyme component. This flavin reductase produces FADH2 from flavin adenine dinucleotide (FAD) and reduced nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NADH; Scheme 1). FADH2 is bound by PrnA where it reacts with molecular oxygen to form a flavin hydroperoxide. A single chloride ion is bound close to the isoalloxazine ring of the FAD (Figure 1) and attacks the flavin hydroperoxide leading to the formation of hypochlorous acid. However, since the substrate tryptophan is bound about 10 away from the isoalloxazine ring, the hypochlorous acid is guided through a “tunnel” towards the substrate. In this process, a serine residue (S347), which is located halfway between the isoalloxazine ring and the substrate, seems to be involved. A lysine (K79) and a glutamate residue (E346) are located close to the substrate, and both are absolutely required for enzyme activity (Figure 2). 11] The lysine residue is suggested to react with the hypochlorous acid to form a chloramine as the halogenating intermediate. Flecks et al. suggested that a concerted interaction of hypochlorous acid with the lysine and the glutamate residue should increase the electrophilicity of the chlorine species and in addition ensure the correct positioning of the chlorine species for the regioselective incorporation of chlorine into the indole ring of tryptophan. Scheme 1. Reaction catalyzed by the two-component system of the flavin-dependent halogenases.
Trauma memories, mental health, and resilience: a prospective study of Afghan youth.

BACKGROUND Studies of war-affected youth have not yet examined how trauma memories relate to prospective changes in mental health and to subjective or social experiences. METHODS We interviewed a gender-balanced, randomly selected sample of Afghan child-caregiver dyads (n = 331, two waves, 1 year apart). We assessed lifetime trauma with a Traumatic Event Checklist, past-year events with a checklist of risk and protective events, and several child mental health outcomes including posttraumatic distress (Child Revised Impact of Events Scale, CRIES) and depression. We examined the consistency of trauma recall over time, identified mental health trajectories with latent transition modeling, and assessed the predictors of posttraumatic distress and depression trajectories with multinomial logistic regressions. RESULTS From baseline to follow-up, reports of lifetime trauma significantly changed (p ≤ 0.01). A third of the cohort reported no trauma exposure; only 10% identified the same event as their most distressing experience. We identified four CRIES trajectories: low or no distress (52%), rising distress (15%), declining distress (21%), and sustained high distress (12%). Youth with chronic posttraumatic distress were more likely to be girls (OR = 5.78, p ≤ 0.01), report more trauma exposure at baseline (OR = 1.55, p ≤ 0.05) and follow-up (OR = 5.96, p ≤ 0.01), and experience ongoing domestic violence (OR = 4.84, p ≤ 0.01). The risks of rising distress and sustained distress showed a steady increase for youth recalling up to four traumatic experiences. Depression and CRIES trajectories showed weak comorbidity. CONCLUSIONS Memories of violent events are malleable, embedded in social experiences, and present heterogeneous associations with posttraumatic distress. Our study provides insights on resilience and vulnerability to multiple adverse childhood experiences, highlighting research and clinical implications for understanding trauma in conflict-affected youth.
Distance Realization Problems with Applications to Internet Tomography

In recent years, a variety of graph optimization problems have arisen in which the graphs involved are much too large for the usual algorithms to be effective. In these cases, even though we are not able to examine the entire graph (which may be changing dynamically), we would still like to deduce various properties of it, such as the size of a connected component, the set of neighbors of a subset of vertices, etc. In this paper, we study a class of problems, called distance realization problems, which arise in the study of Internet data traffic models. Suppose we are given a set S of terminal nodes, taken from some (unknown) weighted graph. A basic problem is to reconstruct a weighted graph G including S, with possibly additional vertices, that realizes the given distance matrix for S. We will first show that this problem is not only difficult bu the solution is often unstable in the sense that even if all distances between nodes in S decrease, the solution can increase by a factor proportional to the size of S in the worst case. We then proceed to consider a weaker version of the realization problem that only requires the distances in G to upper bound the given distances. We will show that this weak realization problem is NP-complete and that its optimum solutions can be approximated to within a factor of 2. We also consider several variants of these problems and a number of heuristics are presented. These problems are of interest for monitoring large-scale networks and for supplementing network management techniques.
A Production System Model of First Language Acquisition

AMBER is a model of first language acquisition that improves its performance through a process of error recovery. The model is implemented in ACTG, an adaptive production system language. AMBER starts with the ability to say only one word at a time, but adds rules for inserting additional words in the correct order, based on comparisons between predicted and observed sentences. These insertion rules may be overly general and lead to errors of commission; in turn, these lead to more conservative rules with additional conditions. AMBER's learning mechanisms account for many of the developments observed in children's speech.
Diagnosability Analysis of Distributed Discrete Event Systems

This paper addresses the diagnosability problem of distributed discrete event systems. Until now, the problem of diagnosability has always been solved by considering centralised approaches, monolithic systems. These approaches do not use the fact that real monitored systems are generally modelled in a distributed manner. In this paper, we propose a framework for the diagnosability analysis of such systems: we study the diagnosability of the system using the fact that it is based on a set of communicating components. In the case where the system is not diagnosable, we also want to provide more accurate information in order to better understand the causes.
Bilingual distributed phrase representations for statistical machin translation

Phrase–based machine translation (PBMT) relies upon the phrase-table as the main resource for bilingual knowledge at decoding time. A phrase table in its basic form includes aligned phrases along with four probabilities indicating aspects of the co-occurrence statistics for each phrase pair. In this paper we add a new semantic similarity score as a statistical feature to enrich the phrase table. The new feature is inferred from a bilingual corpus by a neural network (NN), and estimates the semantic similarity of each source and target phrase pair. We observe a signiﬁcant increase in system performance with the addition of the new feature. We evaluated our model on the English–French (En–Fr) and English–Farsi (En–Fa) language pairs. Experimental results show improvements for all translation directions of En ↔ Fr and En ↔ Fa.
Healthcare waste management: the current issues in developing countries

The International Solid Waste Association (ISWA) has been involved together with the World Health Organization (WHO) in raising awareness of and seeking solutions to the problems associated with healthcare waste management for many years. After several years work the WHO in 1999 published the first comprehensive handbook on the subject, Safe Management of Wastes from Healthcare Activities. Following on from that publication with the assistance of ISWA a Teachers Guide was produced for training purposes and this was found to be most useful in training staff by low and middle income countries. The Training Guide was first tested at a three-day conference in Buenos Aires Argentina and was found to be comprehensive and beneficial to the delegates. Since that time ISWA has held many conferences and training courses throughout the world and in addition has always included at least one session on healthcare waste management in its annual congresses. In July 2007 the process began to revise and bring up to date the Handbook (or the ‘Blue Book’, as it is better known). The revision is now completed and ISWA has agreed to fund part of the costs of its printing. The final production has been delayed by the untimely death of Yves Chartier, the WHO project manager. We are all looking forward to the launch of the revised Blue Book possibly in the autumn of 2012. In developing countries there is general trend for growth to occur in the total quantity of wastes that are generated by healthcare activities (known as healthcare wastes). This growth is due to a significant increase in the delivery of healthcare services, as well as an increase in packaging and in the utilization of single use items in the medical field. Another factor is that for public health reasons all wastes that have come into contact with infectious materials are treated as infectious wastes. Since most healthcare facilities in developing countries do not adequately segregate infectious or hazardous waste from ordinary domestictype waste, the total quantity of waste classified as infectious and thus needing special treatment is greater than would be expected from the increase in healthcare waste alone. It is recognized internationally that there is an urgent need to prevent the spread of blood-borne pathogens associated with either a lack of, or very poor waste management methods. However, the concerns of the healthcare sector of the costs and quality of service that is involved in providing the service must also be given proper consideration and also the effects on infection control must be given proper attention. Special attention should also be paid to the fate of healthcare wastes after they leave the facility where they can be exposed to the community as a whole and to those workers facing heightened risks such as:
Water resources, climate change and human vulnerability

It is well recognised today that climate change is affecting the Earth’s physical and biological systems, and is expected to do so on forthcoming decadal to century timescales. A need exists for useable predictions of the impacts associated with such climate change, and the likely societal responses to these. This must also be seen in the context of other drivers of global change, and be presented at suitable spatial and temporal scales, to enable prioritisation of adaptation measures which are feasible in the most vulnerable communities, countries and regions. Climate modelling is advancing, with much better simulations able to explain observed changes believed to be a consequence of raised atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Generated from ‘ensembles’ of climate model outputs, these are expected to have more robust predictive capability. Ideally, to link the biophysical and social scales, it will be necessary to characterize climate behaviour at spatial scales smaller than those of the current climate model outputs, and to include predictions of surface meteorological extremes which incorporate rainfall as well as temperature change. The challenge of this is ongoing. To gain fully from the improved climate change predictions now available, and to develop associated mitigation and adaptation strategies, well-founded socio-ecological-economic
[The child and society].

Feel lonely? What about reading books? Book is one of the greatest friends to accompany while in your lonely time. When you have no friends and activities somewhere and sometimes, reading book can be a great choice. This is not only for spending the time, it will increase the knowledge. Of course the b=benefits to take will relate to what kind of book that you are reading. And now, we will concern you to try reading child and society as one of the reading material to finish quickly.
Bis-Halogen-Anthraniloyl-Substituted Nucleoside 5′-Triphosphates as Potent and Selective Inhibitors of Bordetella pertussis Adenylyl Cyclase Toxin

Whooping cough is caused by Bordetella pertussis and still constitutes one of the top five causes of death in young children, particularly in developing countries. The calmodulin-activated adenylyl cyclase (AC) toxin CyaA substantially contributes to disease development. Thus, potent and selective CyaA inhibitors would be valuable drugs for the treatment of whooping cough. However, it has been difficult to obtain potent CyaA inhibitors with selectivity relative to mammalian ACs. Selectivity is important for reducing potential toxic effects. In a previous study we serendipitously found that bis-methylanthraniloyl (bis-MANT)-IMP is a more potent CyaA inhibitor than MANT-IMP (Mol Pharmacol 72:526–535, 2007). These data prompted us to study the effects of a series of 32 bulky mono- and bis-anthraniloyl (ANT)-substituted nucleotides on CyaA and mammalian ACs. The novel nucleotides differentially inhibited CyaA and ACs 1, 2, and 5. Bis-ANT nucleotides inhibited CyaA competitively. Most strikingly, bis-Cl-ANT-ATP inhibited CyaA with a potency ≥100-fold higher than ACs 1, 2, and 5. In contrast to MANT-ATP, bis-MANT-ATP exhibited low intrinsic fluorescence, thereby substantially enhancing the signal-to noise ratio for the analysis of nucleotide binding to CyaA. The high sensitivity of the fluorescence assay revealed that bis-MANT-ATP binds to CyaA already in the absence of calmodulin. Molecular modeling showed that the catalytic site of CyaA is sufficiently spacious to accommodate both MANT substituents. Collectively, we have identified the first potent CyaA inhibitor with high selectivity relative to mammalian ACs. The fluorescence properties of bis-ANT nucleotides facilitate development of a high-throughput screening assay.
RhoA‐Mediated Functions in C3H10T1/2 Osteoprogenitors Are Substrate Topography Dependent

Surface topography broadly influences cellular responses. Adherent cell activities are regulated, in part, by RhoA, a member of the Rho‐family of GTPases. In this study, we evaluated the influence of surface topography on RhoA activity and associated cellular functions. The murine mesenchymal stem cell line C3H10T1/2 cells (osteoprogenitor cells) were cultured on titanium substrates with smooth topography (S), microtopography (M), and nanotopography (N) to evaluate the effect of surface topography on RhoA‐mediated functions (cell spreading, adhesion, migration, and osteogenic differentiation). The influence of RhoA activity in the context of surface topography was also elucidated using RhoA pharmacologic inhibitor. Following adhesion, M and N adherent cells developed multiple projections, while S adherent cells had flattened and widespread morphology. RhoA inhibitor induced remarkable longer and thinner cytoplasmic projections on all surfaces. Cell adhesion and osteogenic differentiation was topography dependent with S < M and N surfaces. RhoA inhibition increased adhesion on S and M surfaces, but not N surfaces. Cell migration in a wound healing assay was greater on S versus M versus N surfaces and RhoA inhibitor increased S adherent cell migration, but not N adherent cell migration. RhoA inhibitor enhanced osteogenic differentiation in S adherent cells, but not M or N adherent cells. RhoA activity was surface topography roughness dependent (S < M, N). RhoA activity and ‐mediated functions are influenced by surface topography. Smooth surface adherent cells appear highly sensitive to RhoA function, while nano‐scale topography adherent cell may utilize alternative cellular signaling pathway(s) to influence adherent cellular functions regardless of RhoA activity. J. Cell. Physiol. 231: 568–575, 2016. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
HER2 expression in ovarian carcinoma: caution and complexity in biomarker analysis

We read with interest the recent article by Yan et al ,1 in which a small cohort ( n =85) of ovarian tumours were assessed for HER2 amplification by immunohistochemistry (IHC), fluorescence in situ hybridisation (FISH) and chromogenic in situ hybridisation. HER2 amplification and protein overexpression were identified in 35.3% (6/17) and 29.4% (5/17) of primary mucinous carcinomas, respectively, with none of the other histological subtypes demonstrating HER2 amplification or overexpression. In another recent study, Tan et al. 2 used array-based comparative genomic hybridisation to establish the genomic profiles and regions of recurrent copy number change in 50 pure ovarian clear cell carcinomas (OCCCs). In that study, 7/50 (14%) OCCCs were found to harbour HER2 gene amplification and protein overexpression, representing <2% of the ovarian cancer population as a whole. The authors in both studies quite rightly conclude that HER2 may therefore be a potential therapeutic target in non-serous ovarian tumours. However, since there is documented evidence of HER2 overexpression in other histological subtypes of ovarian cancer, including serous carcinomas3–5 and some HER2-directed therapies (such as pertuzumab), may be effective against tumours which express non-amplified levels of the receptor,6 we sought to better define the frequency, quantity and distribution of HER2 expression …