Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Decision tree development for land cover classification in the Eastern Cape

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The purpose of this study was to develop a cost-effective and practical method for producing land cover maps by assessing the efficacy of classifier extension in a highly heterogeneous area. Effective classifier extension would reduce the amount of training data required. The high costs and excessive time taken for the collection of such data would therefore also be reduced. The highly heterogeneous Eastern Cape Province in South Africa was selected as the area of interest. Landsat-8 imagery from both the spring and summer season was acquired, and two experiments were carried out. The first experiment analysed the spectral separability of four Landsat-8 scenes in the study area. By using training data for eight land cover classes, the spectral separability for each individual scene, and that of a two-, three- and four-scene mosaic, was calculated. Tests were successfully repeated for each season and for a two-season composite. The results indicated that, while the separability of certain land cover classes decreased with the addition of more scenes, the overall separability remained constant. Further results revealed a better spectral separability from the two seasons composite compared to that of each individual season. Most classes were sufficiently separable in all scenes. The aim of the second experiment was to develop a transferable decision tree (DT) ruleset. A randomised sampling allowed for the selection of various points from the polygon training samples. Information on the pixel values of the bands, various indices, textures and elevation data was extracted for each point. A DT was developed from the dataset using the classification and regression trees (CART) algorithm. The DT was pruned and the rules applied to the four Landsat-8 and the two adjacent scenes. The four Landsat-8 scenes achieved an accuracy of 80.6%, and the two adjacent scenes 83.7% and 64.1%. The poor results of the second adjacent scene were attributed to large discrepancies in vegetation between the wet and dry seasons, causing confusion for certain classes. The inclusion of a vegetation mask elevated the accuracy of the classification to 70.4%. This research has shown that it is possible to develop a DT to accurately classify land cover in a large heterogeneous area, but that the complexity of the area can have a detrimental effect on accuracy. Additionally, it is evident that despite sufficient spectral separability, classifier%%%%AFRIKAANS OPSOMMING: Die doel van hierdie studie was om 'n koste-effektiewe en praktiese metode vir die vervaardiging van grondbedekking kaarte te ontwikkel deur die effektiwiteit van klassifiseerder-uitbreiding in 'n hoogs heterogene area te bepaal. Effektiewe klassifiseerderuitbreiding sal die hoeveelheid opleidingdata wat benodig word verminder. Die hoe koste en oormatige tyd wat dit neem om sulke inligting in te samel sal dus ook verminder word. Die hoogs heterogene Oos-Kaap Provinsie in Suid-Afrika is gekies as die area van belang. Landsat-8 beelde van…
Tumor Penetrating Theranostic Nanoparticles for Enhancement of Targeted and Image-guided Drug Delivery into Peritoneal Tumors following Intraperitoneal Delivery

The major obstacles in intraperitoneal (i.p.) chemotherapy of peritoneal tumors are fast absorption of drugs into the blood circulation, local and systemic toxicities, inadequate drug penetration into large tumors, and drug resistance. Targeted theranostic nanoparticles offer an opportunity to enhance the efficacy of i.p. therapy by increasing intratumoral drug delivery to overcome resistance, mediating image-guided drug delivery, and reducing systemic toxicity. Herein we report that i.p. delivery of urokinase plasminogen activator receptor (uPAR) targeted magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (IONPs) led to intratumoral accumulation of 17% of total injected nanoparticles in an orthotopic mouse pancreatic cancer model, which was three-fold higher compared with intravenous delivery. Targeted delivery of near infrared dye labeled IONPs into orthotopic tumors could be detected by non-invasive optical and magnetic resonance imaging. Histological analysis revealed that a high level of uPAR targeted, PEGylated IONPs efficiently penetrated into both the peripheral and central tumor areas in the primary tumor as well as peritoneal metastatic tumor. Improved theranostic IONP delivery into the tumor center was not mediated by nonspecific macrophage uptake and was independent from tumor blood vessel locations. Importantly, i.p. delivery of uPAR targeted theranostic IONPs carrying chemotherapeutics, cisplatin or doxorubicin, significantly inhibited the growth of pancreatic tumors without apparent systemic toxicity. The levels of proliferating tumor cells and tumor vessels in tumors treated with the above theranostic IONPs were also markedly decreased. The detection of strong optical signals in residual tumors following i.p. therapy suggested the feasibility of image-guided surgery to remove drug-resistant tumors. Therefore, our results support the translational development of i.p. delivery of uPAR-targeted theranostic IONPs for image-guided treatment of peritoneal tumors.
High Doppler MIMO OFDM capacity maximizing spatial transceivers exploiting excess cyclic prefix

Performance of OFDM systems is limited by inter carrier interference (ICI) under high Doppler scenarios such as that encountered in high speed trains such as TGV. Several publications have addressed the receiver design for SISO (single input single output) and SIMO (single input multiple output) to combat ICI. Notably, the use of multiple receive antennas is a known to be a very effective way to combat ICI. In a recent publication, the authors explored the use of transmit (Tx) antennas for ICI mitigation. It considered a MIMO (multiple input multiple output) scenario and iteratively designed a transmit beamformer to maximize the sum capacity across all the subcarriers in the presence of ICI. Another important tool in the mitigation of ICI is the exploitation of excess CP (cyclic prefix). With an appropriate window function, the excess CP at the receiver may be exploited to reduce the ICI. In this work, we extend the transmit beamformer design to include the excess CP exploitation at the receiver. We jointly optimize both the receive window coefficients and the transmit beamformer using alternating minimization. The optimal window is determined using gradient descent algorithm. The convergence of the iterative approach is proved and the theory is validated via numerical simulations.
Knowledge and awareness of diabetes in urban and rural India: The Indian Council of Medical Research India Diabetes Study (Phase I): Indian Council of Medical Research India Diabetes 4

Background: Representative data on knowledge and awareness about diabetes is scarce in India and is extremely important to plan public health policies aimed at preventing and controlling diabetes. Aim: The aim of the following study is to assess awareness and knowledge about diabetes in the general population, as well as in individuals with diabetes in four selected regions of India. Materials and Methods: The study subjects were drawn from a representative sample of four geographical regions of India, Chandigarh, Tamil Nadu, Jharkhand and Maharashtra representing North, South, East and West and covering a population of 213 million. A total of 16,607 individuals (5112 urban and 11,495 rural) aged ≥20 years were selected from 188 urban and 175 rural areas. Awareness of diabetes and knowledge of causative factors and complications of diabetes were assessed using an interviewer administered structured questionnaire in 14,274 individuals (response rate, 86.0%), which included 480 self-reported diabetic subjects. Results: Only 43.2% (6160/14,274) of the overall study population had heard about a condition called diabetes. Overall urban residents had higher awareness rates (58.4%) compared to rural residents (36.8%) (P < 0.001). About 46.7% of males and 39.6% of females reported that they knew about a condition called diabetes (P < 0.001). Of the general population, 41.5% (5726/13,794) knew about a condition called diabetes. Among them, 80.7% (4620/5726) knew that the prevalence of diabetes was increasing, whereas among diabetic subjects, it was 93.0% (448/480). Among the general and diabetic population, 56.3% and 63.4% respectively, were aware that diabetes could be prevented. Regarding complications, 51.5% of the general population and 72.7% diabetic population knew that diabetes could affect other organs. Based on a composite knowledge score to assess knowledge among the general population, Tamil Nadu had the highest (31.7) and Jharkhand the lowest score (16.3). However among self-reported diabetic subjects, Maharashtra had the highest (70.1) and Tamil Nadu, the lowest score (56.5). Conclusion: Knowledge and awareness about diabetes in India, particularly in rural areas, is poor. This underscores the need for conducting large scale diabetes awareness and education programs.
Real Time Recommendations from Connoisseurs

The information overload problem remains serious for both consumers and service/content providers, leading to heightened demands for personalized recommendations. For recommender systems, updating user models is one of the most important tasks to keep up with their changing preferences and trends. Especially since new consumers and items emerge every day, which are promptly rated or reviewed, updating lists of items and rankings is crucial. In this paper, we set the goal of real time recommendation, to present these items instantly. Unlike standard collaborative filtering algorithms, our offline approach focuses only innovative consumers for these predictions, and then uses as few consumers as possible while keeping the same precision. Since innovators exist in many communities, and their opinions will spread and then stimulate their followers to adopt the same behavior, our approach is based on the hypothesis that a set of innova- tive consumers is sufficient to represent the most representative opinions in each community. Following this hypothesis, we derive a scalable method to detect both communities and innovative consumers in each community from a web- scale data from a behavior log. Our evaluation shows that our proposed weighting method can accurately sample given logs, and be compatible only with previous algorithms for real time recommendations.
Motion Correction in Dual Gated Cardiac PET Using Mass-Preserving Image Registration

Respiratory and cardiac motion leads to image degradation in positron emission tomography (PET) studies of the human heart. In this paper we present a novel approach to motion correction based on dual gating and mass-preserving hyperelastic image registration. Thereby, we account for intensity modulations caused by the highly nonrigid cardiac motion. This leads to accurate and realistic motion estimates which are quantitatively validated on software phantom data and carried over to clinically relevant data using a hardware phantom. For patient data, the proposed method is first evaluated in a high statistic (20 min scans) dual gating study of 21 patients. It is shown that the proposed approach properly corrects PET images for dual-cardiac as well as respiratory-motion. In a second study the list mode data of the same patients is cropped to a scan time reasonable for clinical practice (3 min). This low statistic study not only shows the clinical applicability of our method but also demonstrates its robustness against noise obtained by hyperelastic regularization.
A RAS Renaissance: Emerging Targeted Therapies for KRAS-Mutated Non–Small Cell Lung Cancer

Of the numerous oncogenes implicated in human cancer, the most common and perhaps the most elusive to target pharmacologically is RAS. Since the discovery of RAS in the 1960s, numerous studies have elucidated the mechanism of activity, regulation, and intracellular trafficking of the RAS gene products, and of its regulatory pathways. These pathways yielded druggable targets, such as farnesyltransferase, during the 1980s to 1990s. Unfortunately, early clinical trials investigating farnesyltransferase inhibitors yielded disappointing results, and subsequent interest by pharmaceutical companies in targeting RAS waned. However, recent advances including the identification of novel regulatory enzymes (e.g., Rce1, Icmt, Pdeδ), siRNA-based synthetic lethality screens, and fragment-based small-molecule screens, have resulted in a “Ras renaissance,” signified by new Ras and Ras pathway–targeted therapies that have led to new clinical trials of patients with Ras-driven cancers. This review gives an overview of KRas signaling pathways with an emphasis on novel targets and targeted therapies, using non–small cell lung cancer as a case example. Clin Cancer Res; 20(15); 3921–30. ©2014 AACR.
Salient, Irrelevant Sounds Reflexively Induce Alpha Rhythm Desynchronization in Parallel with Slow Potential Shifts in Visual Cortex

Recent findings suggest that a salient, irrelevant sound attracts attention to its location involuntarily and facilitates processing of a colocalized visual event [McDonald, J. J., Störmer, V. S. , Martinez, A. , Feng, W. F. , & Hillyard, S. A. Salient sounds activate human visual cortex automatically. Journal of Neuroscience, 33, 9194–9201, 2013]. Associated with this cross-modal facilitation is a sound-evoked slow potential over the contralateral visual cortex termed the auditory-evoked contralateral occipital positivity (ACOP). Here, we further tested the hypothesis that a salient sound captures visual attention involuntarily by examining sound-evoked modulations of the occipital alpha rhythm, which has been strongly associated with visual attention. In two purely auditory experiments, lateralized irrelevant sounds triggered a bilateral desynchronization of occipital alpha-band activity (10–14 Hz) that was more pronounced in the hemisphere contralateral to the sound's location. The timing of the contralateral alpha-band desynchronization overlapped with that of the ACOP (∼240–400 msec), and both measures of neural activity were estimated to arise from neural generators in the ventral-occipital cortex. The magnitude of the lateralized alpha desynchronization was correlated with ACOP amplitude on a trial-by-trial basis and between participants, suggesting that they arise from or are dependent on a common neural mechanism. These results support the hypothesis that the sound-induced alpha desynchronization and ACOP both reflect the involuntary cross-modal orienting of spatial attention to the sound's location.
Is Bank Debt Special for the Transmission of Monetary Policy? Evidence from the Stock Market

We combine existing balance sheet and stock market data with two new datasets to study whether, how much, and why bank lending to …rms matters for the transmission of monetary policy. The …rst new dataset enables us to quantify the bank dependence of …rms precisely, as the ratio of bank debt to total assets. We show that a two standard deviation increase in the bank dependence of a …rm makes its stock price about 25% more responsive to monetary
Abnormal parietal cortex activation during working memory in schizophrenia: verbal phonological coding disturbances versus domain-general executive dysfunction.

OBJECTIVE The goal of this study was to determine whether the regions of the prefrontal and parietal cortices showing abnormal activation among individuals with schizophrenia during working memory tasks are associated with either 1) phonological coding processes that may be specific to verbal tasks (i.e., ventral prefrontal and parietal cortices) or 2) domain-general executive processes engaged by verbal and nonverbal tasks (i.e., dorsal prefrontal and parietal cortices). METHOD The participants were 57 medicated individuals with schizophrenia and 120 healthy subjects. Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to scan all participants during performance of verbal and nonverbal 2-back working memory tasks. RESULTS In the healthy subjects there was similar bilateral dorsal prefrontal and inferior parietal cortex activation for both the verbal and nonverbal working memory tasks, but greater left ventral prefrontal and parietal cortex activation during verbal compared to nonverbal working memory. Individuals with schizophrenia showed bilateral deficits in dorsal frontal and parietal activation during both verbal and nonverbal working memory tasks. They also demonstrated the typical pattern of greater activity for verbal, as compared to nonverbal, working memory in ventral prefrontal and parietal regions, although they showed less verbal superiority in a left ventral prefrontal region. CONCLUSIONS These results support the hypothesis that working memory deficits in individuals with schizophrenia reflect deficits in activation of brain regions associated with the central executive components of working memory rather than domain-specific storage buffers.
Cardiac arrest in infants after congenital heart surgery.

BACKGROUND The survival rate to discharge after a cardiac arrest in a patient in the pediatric intensive care unit is reported to be as low as 7%. The survival rates and markers for survival strictly regarding infants with cardiac arrest after congenital heart surgery are unknown. METHODS AND RESULTS Infants in our pediatric cardiac intensive care unit database were identified who had a postoperative cardiac arrest between January 1994 and June 1998. Parameters from the perioperative, prearrest, and resuscitation periods were analyzed for these patients. Comparisons were made between survivors and nonsurvivors. Of 575 infants who underwent congenital heart surgery, 34 (6%) sustained a documented cardiac arrest; of these, 14 (41%) survived to discharge. Perioperative parameters, ventricular physiology, and primary rhythm at the time of arrest did not influence outcome. Prearrest blood pressure was lower in nonsurvivors than in survivors (P<0.001). A high level of inotropic support prearrest was associated with death (P=0.06). Survivors had a shorter duration of resuscitation (P<0.001) and higher minimal arterial pH (P<0.02) and received a smaller total dose of medication during the resuscitation. Although survivors had an overall shorter duration of resuscitation, 5 of 22 patients (23%) survived to discharge despite resuscitation of >30 minutes. CONCLUSIONS The outcome of cardiac arrest in infants after congenital heart surgery was better than that for pediatric intensive care unit populations as a whole. Univentricular physiology did not increase the risk of death after cardiac arrest. Infants with more hemodynamic compromise before the arrest as demonstrated with lower mean arterial blood pressure and higher inotropic support were less likely to survive. The use of predetermined resuscitation end points in this subpopulation may not be justified.
Pharmacologic Considerations in the Treatment of Repetitive or Prolonged Seizures

Seizure emergencies are relatively common; however, in-hospital emergency care often is delayed by a variety of factors. Home-based treatment is effective at interrupting prolonged or repetitive seizures, but this option is underused despite its wide availability. The choice of agent used to treat seizure emergencies will depend chiefly on differences among the properties of the available drugs, particularly with regard to route of administration, lipid solubility, formulation characteristics, and the relative size of the absorptive surface area. These factors also can play a part in the decision to use one route of administration over another. Intravenous administration is the fastest and most reliable method of drug delivery, but alternative methods of drug delivery include oral, intramuscular, buccal, nasal, and rectal routes.
Escherichia coli mrsC Is an Allele ofhflB, Encoding a Membrane-Associated ATPase and Protease That Is Required for mRNA Decay

ABSTRACT The mrsC gene of Escherichia coli is required for mRNA turnover and cell growth, and strains containing the temperature-sensitive mrsC505 allele have longer half-lives than wild-type controls for total pulse-labeled and individual mRNAs (L. L. Granger et al., J. Bacteriol. 180:1920–1928, 1998). The cloned mrsC gene contains a long open reading frame beginning at an initiator UUG codon, confirmed by N-terminal amino acid sequencing, encoding a 70,996-Da protein with a consensus ATP-binding domain. mrsC is identical to the independently identifiedftsH gene except for three additional amino acids at the N terminus (T. Tomoyasu et al., J. Bacteriol. 175:1344–1351, 1993). The purified protein had a Km of 28 μM for ATP and a Vmax of 21.2 nmol/μg/min. An amino-terminal glutathione S-transferase–MrsC fusion protein retained ATPase activity but was not biologically active. A glutamic acid replacement of the highly conserved lysine within the ATP-binding motif (mrsC201) abolished the complementation of the mrsC505 mutation, confirming that the ATPase activity is required for MrsC function in vivo. In addition, themrsC505 allele conferred a temperature-sensitive HflB phenotype, while the hflB29 mutation promoted mRNA stability at both 30 and 44°C, suggesting that the inviability associated with the mrsC505 allele is not related to the defect in mRNA decay. The data presented provide the first direct evidence for the involvement of a membrane-bound protein in mRNA decay in E. coli.
Psychometric Properties of the Chinese Version of the Workaholism Battery

ABSTRACT The authors designed the current study to examine the psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the workaholism battery (J. T. Spence & A. S. Robbins, 1992). Using the back-translation strategy recommended by R. Brislin (1980), the authors translated the original scale developed by Spence and Robbins. Factor analyses of responses from 1,235 full-time workers in Taiwan revealed a 5-factor solution. The reliability coefficients of the factors ranged from . 58 to . 88. Significant correlations between the 5 factors, the work-addiction risk test, career commitment, and job involvement provided evidence for convergent validity. Significant correlations between the 5 factors and criterion variables (emotional exhaustion, job satisfaction, and hours worked per week) provided evidence of concurrent criterion validity. Overall, the findings suggest that the Taiwanese workers conceptualize workaholism as 5 dimensions rather than the 2 or 3 dimensions that previous empirical studies (A. Kanai, M. Wakabayashi, & S. Fling, 1996; L. H. W. McMillan, E. C. Brady, M. P. Driscoll, & N. V. Marsh, 2002; J. T. Spence & A. S. Robbins, 1992) have suggested. The authors discussed implications and limitations of their findings.
Testes asymmetry, condition and sexual selection in birds: an experimental test

The functional significance of the marked directional asymmetry in testes size observed in many bird species is obscure. Møller suggested that (i) the smaller of the two testes serves a compensatory role and increases in size (and hence reduces asymmetry) when the larger one is defective in some way, and (ii) as a consequence, the degree of directional asymmetry in testes size reflects male quality and covaries positively with the expression of secondary sexual traits. We conducted an experimental test of these two hypotheses in the zebra finch, Taeniopygia guttata. Neither hypothesis was supported. First, there was no significant relationship between the size of the left testis and relative testes asymmetry. Second, we obtained no support for the hypothesis that the degree of directional asymmetry in testes mass covaried with condition. On the contrary, directional asymmetry in testes mass was significantly greater in birds whose condition was experimentally reduced, compared with control birds. Moreover, we found no significant relationships between testes asymmetry and secondary sexual traits. We conclude that directional asymmetry in testes size does not reflect male condition in the zebra finch.