Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MusicMiner : Visualizing timbre distances of music as topographical maps

Timbre distances and similarities are an expression of the phenomenon that some music appears similar while other songs sound very different to us. The notion of genre is often used to categorize music, but songs from a single genre do not necessarily sound similar and vice versa. Instead we aim at a visualization of timbre similarities of sound within a music collection. We analyzed and compared a large amount of different audio features and psychoacoustic variants thereof for the purpose of modelling timbre distance of sound. The sound of polyphonic music is commonly described by extracting audio features on short time windows during which the sound is assumed to be stationary. The resulting down sampled time series are aggregated to form a high level feature vector describing the music. We generated high level features by systematically applying static and temporal statistics for aggregation. Especially the temporal structure of features has previously been largely neglected. A novel supervised feature selection method is applied to the huge set of possible features. Distances between vectors of the selected features correspond to timbre differences in music. The features show few redundancies and have high potential for explaining possible clusters. They outperform seven other previously proposed feature sets on several datasets w.r. t. the separation of the known groups of timbrally different music. Clustering and visualization based on these feature vectors can discover emergent structures in collections of music. Visualization based on Emergent Self-Organizing Maps in particular enables the unsupervised discovery of timbrally consistent clusters that may or may not correspond to musical genres and artists. We demonstrate the visualizations capabilities of the U-Map and related methods based on the new audio features. An intuitive browsing of large music collections is offered based on the paradigm of topographic maps. The user can navigate the sound space and interact with the maps to play music or show the context of a song. Data Bionics Research Group, Philipps-University Marburg, 35032 Marburg, Germany
Negative Correlation Ensemble Learning for Ordinal Regression

In this paper, two neural network threshold ensemble models are proposed for ordinal regression problems. For the first ensemble method, the thresholds are fixed a priori and are not modified during training. The second one considers the thresholds of each member of the ensemble as free parameters, allowing their modification during the training process. This is achieved through a reformulation of these tunable thresholds, which avoids the constraints they must fulfill for the ordinal regression problem. During training, diversity exists in different projections generated by each member is taken into account for the parameter updating. This diversity is promoted in an explicit way using a diversity-encouraging error function, extending the well-known negative correlation learning framework to the area of ordinal regression, and inheriting many of its good properties. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms can achieve competitive generalization performance when considering four ordinal regression metrics.
CD40/CD40 LIGAND INTERACTIONS IN IMMUNE RESPONSES AND PULMONARY IMMUNITY

ABSTRACT The CD40 ligand/CD40 pathway is widely recognized for its prominent role in immune regulation and homeostasis. CD40, a member of the tumor necrosis factor receptor family, is expressed by antigen-presenting cells, as well as non-immune cells and tumors. The engagement of the CD40 and CD40 ligands, which are transiently expressed on T cells and other non-immune cells under inflammatory conditions, regulates a wide spectrum of molecular and cellular processes, including the initiation and progression of cellular and humoral adaptive immunity. Based on recent research findings, the engagement of the CD40 with a deregulated amount of CD40 ligand has been implicated in a number of inflammatory diseases. We will discuss the involvement of the CD40 ligand/CD40 interaction in the pathophysiology of inflammatory diseases, including autoimmune diseases, atherothrombosis, cancer, and respiratory diseases.
Living Donor Liver Transplantation for Advanced Hepatocellular Carcinoma with Portal Vein Tumor Thrombosis after Concurrent Chemoradiation Therapy

Locally advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) with portal vein thrombosis carries a 1-year survival rate <10%. Localized concurrent chemoradiotherapy (CCRT), followed by hepatic arterial infusion chemotherapy (HAIC), was recently introduced in this setting. Here, we report our early experience with living donor liver transplantation (LDLT) in such patients after successful down-staging of HCC through CCRT and HAIC. Between December 2011 and September 2012, eight patients with locally advanced HCC at initial diagnosis were given CCRT, followed by HAIC, and underwent LDLT at the Severance Hospital, Seoul, Korea. CCRT [45 Gy over 5 weeks with 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) as HAIC] was followed by HAIC (5-FU/cisplatin combination every 4 weeks for 3–12 months), adjusted for tumor response. Down-staging succeeded in all eight patients, leaving no viable tumor thrombi in major vessels, although three patients first underwent hepatic resections. Due to deteriorating liver function, transplantation was the sole therapeutic option and offered a chance for cure. The 1-year disease-free survival rate was 87.5%. There were three instances of post-transplantation tumor recurrence during follow-up monitoring (median, 17 months; range, 10–22 months), but no deaths occurred. Median survival time from initial diagnosis was 33 months. Four postoperative complications recorded in three patients (anastomotic strictures: portal vein, 2; bile duct, 2) were resolved through radiologic interventions. Using an intensive tumor down-staging protocol of CCRT followed by HAIC, LDLT may be a therapeutic option for selected patients with locally advanced HCC and portal vein tumor thrombosis.
A Experience: Type alignment on DBpedia and Freebase

Linked Open Data exhibits growth in both volume and variety of published data. Due to this variety, instances of many different types (e.g. Person) can be found in published datasets. Type alignment is the problem of automatically matching types (in a possibly many-many fashion) between two such datasets. Type alignment is an important preprocessing step in instance matching. Instance matching concerns identifying pairs of instances referring to the same underlying entity. By performing type alignment a priori, only instances conforming to aligned types are processed together, leading to significant savings. This article describes a type alignment experience with two large-scale cross-domain RDF knowledge graphs, DBpedia and Freebase, that contain hundreds, or even thousands, of unique types. Specifically, we present a MapReducebased type alignment algorithm and show that there are at least three reasonable ways of evaluating type alignment within the larger context of instance matching. We comment on the consistency of those results, and note some general observations for researchers evaluating similar algorithms on cross-domain graphs.
Case study: Smart charging plug-in hybrid vehicle test environment with vehicle-to-grid ability

The aim of the paper is to describe and introduce smart charging test environment and plug-in hybrid vehicle capable of smart charging and vehicle to grid functionality. Furthermore, the paper aims at demonstrating simple smart charging strategy in operation on smart charging test bed. The demonstration utilizes commercially available components and open source programming solutions. Charging strategy demonstration is a combination of actual hardware operations and stochastic sampling to synthetize driving cycles of the electric vehicle. Driving behavior synthetizing is based on national travel survey data to ensure reasonable driving behavior in testing of the smart charging strategy. The main outcome of the paper is the description of an actual smart charging test environment. The results also suggest that the charging strategy targeting to minimization of the charging costs may not be feasible for a single customer or single end user. However it must borne in mind that the electricity retailer (or market aggregator) may see some feasible incentives in smart charging strategies based on market price control.
Activation in the right posterior temporal region of 7-months-olds to upright point-light walkers: a fNIRS study

Humans are particularly good in distinguishing the movements of living beings from another type of motions. Studies conducted with children showed that the preference for biological motion (BM) can be observed early in infancy. Recently, researchers are focusing on understanding the neurological basis associated to the processing of BM. One conclusion that has been consistent across the studies conducted with neuroimage and electrophysiological techniques is that the right Superior Temporal Sulcus (STS) seems to be associated to BM’s processing and with social cognition. However, the developmental path associated with this process is unclear. The present study, conducted with fNIRS, measured the haemodynamic response in right posterior temporal region – an area that includes the right posterior STSto a standard stimuli of BM study, Point-light walkers (PLW). Seven-months-olds infants (n = 11) were tested in a within-subjects blocked design with two experimental conditions: (1) an Upright PLW and (2) a Spatially Scrambled PLW, both approaching. The results demonstrated haemodynamic response for the Upright PLW, compared to the Spatially Scrambled PLW, in the right posterior temporal region. These results are in accordance with previous findings and that, at this age, BM is processed differently from other types of motion in this region. Key-Words: Biological Motion (BM); Right Temporal Posterior Region; functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS); Infant Development, Point-Light Walker (PLW).
Augmenting the Input–Output Framework for ‘Common Pool’ Resources: Operationalising the Full Leontief Environmental Model

Abstract In its initial formulation, the full Leontief (1970) environmental model augments the conventional Input–Output (IO) table by introducing pollution generation and separately identified pollution elimination sectors. Essentially it extends IO analysis to incorporate the use of a ‘common pool’ resource. Subsequent literature has either been analytical in nature or has concentrated on pollution generation but not cleaning activity. In this paper we generate an empirical full Leontief environmental IO system, based on augmenting the existing Scottish IO tables through endogenising waste generation and waste disposal activity. Due to weaknesses in data, our empirical results need to be treated with some caution. However, the construction of the extended IO system and the interpretation of the output and price multiplier results raise a number of interesting practical and conceptual issues. The analysis undertaken here can be extended to other ‘common pool’ resources such as the use of highways and irrigation systems.
An attempt to pedestrian detection in depth images

We investigate pedestrian detection in depth images. Unlike pedestrian detection in intensity images, pedestrian detection in depth images can reduce the effect of complex background and illumination variation. We propose a new feature descriptor, Histogram of Depth Difference(HDD), for this task. The proposed HDD feature descriptor can describe the depth variance in a local region as Histogram of Oriented Gradients(HOG) describes local texture cues. To evaluate pedestrian detection in depth images, we also collected a large dataset, which contains not only depth images but also the synchronized intensity images. There are 4673 pedestrian samples in it. Our experimental results show that detecting pedestrians in depth images is feasible. We also fuse the HDD feature from depth images and HOG from intensity images. The fused feature gives an encouraging detection rate of 99.12% at FPPW=10−4.
G-Protein-Gated Potassium (GIRK) Channels Containing the GIRK2 Subunit Are Control Hubs for Pharmacologically Induced Hypothermic Responses

Hypothermic responses of rodents to the peripheral or intraventricular injection of many individual neurotransmitter receptor agonists have been well documented. Because many hypothermia-inducing agonists are also known to activate G-protein-gated potassium (GIRK) channels, we investigated the hypothermic response to several of these agents on Girk2 null mutant mice. Core body temperatures were measured through radiotelemetry, and animals were maintained in special temperature-regulated chambers to ensure the accuracy of the measurements. The resulting data indicate that the activation of GIRK2-containing potassium channels plays a significant role in hypothermia induced by the activation of serotonergic (5-HT1A), GABAergic (GABAB), muscarinic (m2), adenosine (A1), and μ, δ, and κ opioid receptors. These channels also are involved in the alcohol-induced hypothermic response. These results have implications for the understanding of pharmacologically induced hypothermia and thermoregulatory mechanisms.
Pedestrian Detection Based on Hybrid Features

In this paper, we propose a new approach for pedestrian detection in crowded scene from static images.The method is based on hybrid features, one type of middle-level features, which include Haar-like features and gradient features, two low-level feature sets. The haar-like features focus on the local edges information of the image and the gradient features focus on the local regions information. We use two stages of Adaboost to train the final classifier. In the first stage, the whole image is divided into many small windows which all include numerous low-level features. Adaboost is used in each window to get one mid-level feature which composes of some best features including Haar-like features and gradient features in this window. Secondly, from all midlevel features, Adaboost is used again to get the final classifier. Experiment results on common datasets and comparisons with some previous methods are given.
High Prevalence of Human T-Lymphotropic Virus Infection in Indigenous Women from the Peruvian Amazon

Background In an earlier study, we detected an association between human T-cell lymphotropic virus (HTLV) infection and cervical human papillomavirus (HPV) in indigenous Amazonian Peruvian women of the Shipibo-Konibo ethnic group. As both HTLV and HPV can be transmitted sexually, we now report a population-based study examining the prevalence and risk factors for HTLV-1 and HTLV-2 infection in this population. Methods Between July and December 2010, we conducted a comprehensive screening for HTLV among Shipibo-Konibo women 15 to 39 years of age living in two communities located in Lima and in 17 communities located within four hours by car or boat from the Amazonian city of Pucallpa in Peru. Results We screened 1,253 Shipibo-Konibo women for HTLV infection 74 (5.9%) tested positive for HTLV-1, 47 (3.8%) for HTLV-2 infection, and 4 (0.3%) had indeterminate results. In the multivariate analysis, factors associated with HTLV-1 infection included: older age (Prevalence Ratio (PR): 1.04, 95% CI 1.00–1.08), primary education or less (PR: 2.01, 95% CI: 1.25–3.24), younger or same age most recent sex partner (PR: 1.66, 95% CI: 1.00–2.74), and having a most recent sex partner who worked at a logging camp (PR: 1.73, 95% CI: 1.09–2.75). The only factor associated with HTLV-2 infection was older age (PR: 1.08, 95% CI: 1.03–1.12). Conclusion HTLV infection is endemic among Shipibo-Konibo women. Two characteristics of the sexual partner (younger age and labor history) were associated with infection in women. These results suggest the need for implementation of both HTLV screening during the antenatal healthcare visits of Shipibo-Konibo women, and counseling about the risk of HTLV transmission through prolonged breastfeeding in infected women. We also recommend the implementation of prevention programs to reduce sexual transmission of these viruses.
The Impact of Information and Communication Technology ( ICT ) as a Key Factor of Tourism Development on the Role of Croatian Travel Agencies

This paper seeks to understand the mission and the usage of ICT through its influence on the development of tourism subjects supply, especially intermediaries on tourism market. The occurrence of the phenomenon of tourism is the result of socio economic conditions related to the development of technology and innovations. The first part of the paper gives an overview of the theoretical insights that complements the thesis on the role of technology in tourism, including its associated subjects that tech methods used in context of transformational change in their internal and external environment. The second part of this paper, based on the results of a survey that was conducted in the Croatian travel agencies, explores the role of technology in the business of travel agencies through the reviews of managers. Results of the research indicate the new trends in activities of travel agencies that influence the development tendencies of intermediaries.
Comparative study of fentanyl and morphine in addition to hyperbaric or isobaric bupivacaine in combined spinal anaesthesia for caesarean section

Introduction The aim of our study was to compare the effects of isobaric and hyperbaric bupivacaine combined with morphine or fentanyl in patients undergoing caesarean section. We assessed quality and spread of analgesia and anaesthesia, postoperative analgesic requirement and side effects. Material and methods Hundred patients with American Society of Anesthesiologists physical status (ASA) I-II, age 18 to 40 years, were randomized to 4 groups. The intrathecal solutions were isobaric bupivacaine + morphine (group A), isobaric bupivacaine + fentanyl (group B), heavy bupivacaine + + morphine (group C) and heavy bupivacaine + fentanyl (group D). Mean arterial pressure, heart rate, oxygen saturation, ephedrine consumption, analgesic requirement time and additional analgesic needs were recorded. Results The 1st min value of mean arterial pressure was the lowest one in all groups. Heart rate decreased significantly in group A at the 10th min but not in the other groups. The decrease of visual analogue scale (VAS) pain scores began in the groups after the 4th postoperative h (p < 0.05) and the VAS value of group B at the 8th h was significantly higher than the other groups. The first analgesic requirement time in the postoperative period was longer in patients who had intrathecal morphine than those who had fentanyl. The duration of analgesia with isobaric bupivacaine and morphine was the longest one. Conclusions We concluded that intrathecal morphine provides a long duration of postoperative analgesia but the duration gets longer when it is combined with plain bupivacaine instead of heavy bupivacaine.
Using developmental trajectories to understand developmental disorders.

PURPOSE In this article, the authors present a tutorial on the use of developmental trajectories for studying language and cognitive impairments in developmental disorders and compare this method with the use of matching. METHOD The authors assess the strengths, limitations, and practical implications of each method. The contrast between the methodologies is highlighted using the example of developmental delay and the criteria used to distinguish delay from atypical development. RESULTS The authors argue for the utility of the trajectory approach, using illustrations from studies investigating language and cognitive impairments in individuals with Williams syndrome, Down syndrome, and autism spectrum disorder. CONCLUSION Two conclusions were reached: (a) An understanding of the underlying mechanism will be furthered by the richer descriptive vocabulary provided by the trajectories approach (e.g., in distinguishing different types of delay) and (b) an optimal design for studying developmental disorders is to combine initial cross-sectional designs with longitudinal follow-up.
Effects of LDL, cholesterol, and their oxidized forms on the precipitation kinetics of calcium phosphates.

BACKGROUND LDL, cholesterol, and their oxidized forms are known cardiovascular risk factors and are often found in atherosclerotic lesions of various stages. Little is known, however, about whether they are directly involved in the formation of calcium phosphate compounds. METHODS We used the pH-stat technique to follow the kinetics of calcium phosphate precipitation at pH 7.4, 37 degrees C, and ionic strength 0.150 mol/L, in the presence or absence of LDL, oxidized LDL, cholesterol, cholestane-3beta,5alpha,6beta-triol, and cholesteryl linoleate. The precipitates were characterized by x-ray diffraction, scanning and transmission electronic microscopy coupled with energy-dispersion x-ray analysis, and inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectroscopy. RESULTS Under the experimental conditions, LDL (14.8 and 43.1 mg/L protein) had no significant effect on the precipitation kinetics. Oxidized LDL (14.8 and 43.1 mg/L protein) prolonged the nucleation phase and diminished the amount of total precipitate, and both the extent of oxidation and the concentration of the protein affected the kinetics. Cholesterol microcrystals (71.4 and 143 mg/L) made the nucleation phase shorter (300 min vs 390 min for the control), and the precipitated particles had an organic core and a shell composed of calcium phosphates. L-alpha-Phosphatidylcholine vesicles (143 mg/L), cholesterol (71.4 mg/L)/phospholipid (143 mg/L) mixed vesicles, cholesteryl linoleate (143 mg/L), and cholestane-3beta,5alpha,6beta-triol (71.4 mg/L) prolonged the nucleation phase. CONCLUSIONS LDL is not involved directly in the precipitation of calcium phosphates. Oxidized LDL inhibits both nucleation and crystal growth, possibly by attracting calcium ions in the solution and thus reducing supersaturation. Cholesterol microcrystals serve as seeds for the precipitation of hydroxyapatite, whereas L-alpha-phosphatidylcholine, cholesteryl linoleate, and cholestane-3beta,5alpha,6beta-triol exhibit inhibitive effects on the nucleation of calcium phosphates.
Implementing Domino-Parity Inequalities for the Traveling Salesman Problem

We describe an implementation of Letchford’s domino-parity inequalities for the (symmetric) traveling salesman problem. The implementation includes pruning meth-ods to restrict the search for dominoes, a parallelization of the main domino-building step, heuristics to obtain planar-support graphs, a set of safe-shrinking routines, a random-walk heuristic to extract additional violated constraints, and a tightening routine to allows us to modify existing domino-parity inequalities as the LP solution changes. We report computational results showing that combining the new separation algorithms with the Concorde TSP code allow us to substantially raise the linear programming bounds that are obtained.
The Impact of Perceived Scientific and Social Consensus on Scientific Beliefs

Two studies examined perceptions of scientific and social (social network and public) consensus on scientific issues and their impact on scientific beliefs, using samples of Japanese people. In Study 1 (N = 434), participants’ estimates of scientific and social consensus predicted their scientific beliefs independently of each other. In Study 2 (N = 694), the presentation of scientific and public consensus information as an anchor for consensus estimation influenced participants’ scientific beliefs through their perceptions of scientific and public consensus. The perceived credibility of scientists had little if any effect on the relationship between perceived scientific consensus and scientific beliefs.