Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Conversations on making

of electronics is that they are reprogrammable, and that the software for them is much simpler than the software produced for personal computers. It was just a matter of time until people started making that code open, which would also extend to the electronics. Arduino is a manifestation of that. Our system is based on the fact that the software we build upon is open, so opening the hardware design is only natural. This is the very basic aspect behind the maker culture: sharing. The possibility of others reusing what some did to apply it in a different field. I see this a bit as a mix between the U.S. " show and tell " culture and the tech-nerd naivete and willingness to basically " show off. " I think you got blinded by the fact that Maker Media is a company dedicated to the production of printed materials and promotion of events. I also think you forgot they could only build that small media empire if there was a group of people interested in not only the content but also the production of the content. Maker Media is a vehicle for a lot of voices that have something to say and couldn't find room anywhere else. Having your project shown in Make magazine is a validation that your work is relevant to this community. It is not peer-reviewed; there is no academic review panel; there is only a de facto expert committee ensuring the content is new and unique for this community. Other experiments like this one have failed—even, as you mentioned, other magazines within the same company. There are plenty of reasons for this. I believe there is a better vehicle for the content previously addressed by Craft magazine. The blogosphere has been representing I n a column last year (" Making: Movement or Brand? " January – February 2014), we argued that the maker " revolution " may be best understood as a brand rather than a social movement. While proponents view makers as part of a new creative class that circumvents conventional mass consumption, we noted that many makers become good capitalists, too—selling books, tickets, and magazines as well as seeding new businesses. By adopting and enacting maker discourse, makers additionally become proponents of an ideological stance wherein small-scale design gets portrayed as a catalyst for social change. Finally, we pointed out that surprisingly few women …
The use of theranostic gadolinium-based nanoprobes to improve radiotherapy efficacy

A new efficient type of gadolinium-based theranostic agent (AGuIX®) has recently been developed for MRI-guided radiotherapy (RT). These new particles consist of a polysiloxane network surrounded by a number of gadolinium chelates, usually 10. Owing to their small size (<5 nm), AGuIX typically exhibit biodistributions that are almost ideal for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. For example, although a significant proportion of these particles accumulate in tumours, the remainder is rapidly eliminated by the renal route. In addition, in the absence of irradiation, the nanoparticles are well tolerated even at very high dose (10 times more than the dose used for mouse treatment). AGuIX particles have been proven to act as efficient radiosensitizers in a large variety of experimental in vitro scenarios, including different radioresistant cell lines, irradiation energies and radiation sources (sensitizing enhancement ratio ranging from 1.1 to 2.5). Pre-clinical studies have also demonstrated the impact of these particles on different heterotopic and orthotopic tumours, with both intratumoural or intravenous injection routes. A significant therapeutical effect has been observed in all contexts. Furthermore, MRI monitoring was proven to efficiently aid in determining a RT protocol and assessing tumour evolution following treatment. The usual theoretical models, based on energy attenuation and macroscopic dose enhancement, cannot account for all the results that have been obtained. Only theoretical models, which take into account the Auger electron cascades that occur between the different atoms constituting the particle and the related high radical concentrations in the vicinity of the particle, provide an explanation for the complex cell damage and death observed.
An evaluation of required element testing strategies

In this paper we discuss required element testing strategies and present some experimental evaluations of their effectiveness. These strategies use data flow analysis as a basis for developing test cases. The basic strategy (required pairs) is compared with random and branch testing using mutation analysis as a measure of test set effectiveness. Extensions of the basic strategy are also studied.
Habitat fragmentation, climate change, and inbreeding in plants

Habitat fragmentation and climate change are recognized as major threats to biodiversity. The major challenge for present day plant populations is how to adapt and cope with altered abiotic and biotic environments caused by climate change, when at the same time adaptive and evolutionary potential is decreased as habitat fragmentation reduces genetic variation and increases inbreeding. Although the ecological and evolutionary effects of fragmentation and climate change have been investigated separately, their combined effects remained largely unexplored. In this review, we will discuss the individual and joint effects of habitat fragmentation and climate change on plants and how the abilities and ways in which plants can respond and cope with climate change may be compromised due to habitat fragmentation.
Receptor-mediated endocytosis of carcinoembryonic antigen by rat liver Kupffer cells.

In vivo, carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) is removed from the circulation by the liver Kupffer cells. Immunologically identifiable CEA is transferred from these macrophages to the hepatocytes, where degradation is completed. Circulatory clearance of CEA is specific, rapid [t1/2 = 3.7 +/- 0.9 (S.D.) min], and saturable. In vitro, Kupffer cells take up CEA by a saturable process which is time/temperature dependent and colchicine sensitive. Isolated Kupffer cells endocytose CEA with an apparent Km of 6 X 10(-8) M. There are approximately 16,000 CEA binding sites per cell. Nonspecific cross-reacting antigen (NCA), a glycoprotein structurally similar to CEA, is recognized with lower affinity by the same receptor. Endocytosis is independent of the nonreducing terminal sugars on the molecule: CEA modified by Smith degradation inhibits Kupffer cell recognition of native CEA. Since performic acid oxidized CEA also inhibits endocytosis, receptor binding is similarly independent of intact protein conformation. Isolated Kupffer cells have mannose and/or N-acetyl glucosamine receptor activity but do not internalize CEA by that mechanism. Galactose-terminated glycoproteins impede CEA and NCA clearance in vivo but not Kupffer cell endocytosis in vitro. Radiolabeled CEA released from isolated Kupffer cells following endocytosis shows no apparent molecular weight change. However, the released CEA contains species with higher isoelectric points, suggesting that perhaps the removal of sialic acid and the resulting exposure of galactose residues mediate the subsequent transfer to the hepatocyte.
A Biologically-Inspired Framework for Contour Detection Using Superpixel-Based Candidates and Hierarchical Visual Cues

Contour detection has been extensively investigated as a fundamental problem in computer vision. In this study, a biologically-inspired candidate weighting framework is proposed for the challenging task of detecting meaningful contours. In contrast to previous models that detect contours from pixels, a modified superpixel generation processing is proposed to generate a contour candidate set and then weigh the candidates by extracting hierarchical visual cues. We extract the low-level visual local cues to weigh the contour intrinsic property and mid-level visual cues on the basis of Gestalt principles for weighting the contour grouping constraint. Experimental results tested on the BSDS benchmark show that the proposed framework exhibits promising performances to capture meaningful contours in complex scenes.
Large-Scale Signature Matching Using Multi-stage Hashing

In this paper, we propose a fast large-scale signature matching method based on locality sensitive hashing (LSH). Shape Context features are used to describe the structure of signatures. Two stages of hashing are performed to find the nearest neighbours for query signatures. In the first stage, we use M randomly generated hyper planes to separate shape context feature points into different bins, and compute a term-frequency histogram to represent the feature point distribution as a feature vector. In the second stage we again use LSH to categorize the high-level features into different classes. The experiments are carried out on two datasets - DS-I, a small dataset contains 189 signatures, and DS-II, a large dataset created by our group which contains 26,000 signatures. We show that our algorithm can achieve a high accuracy even when few signatures are collected from one same person and perform fast matching when dealing with a large dataset.
Performance Analysis of Asymmetric RF/FSO Dual-Hop Relaying Systems for UAV Applications

In this paper, we analyze the performance of a dual-hop relaying system composed of asymmetric radio frequency (RF) and free-space optics (FSO) (RF/FSO) links. We consider an asymmetric amplify-and-forward (AF) relay which converts the received RF signal into an optical signal using the subcarrier intensity modulation (SIM) scheme. The RF and FSO channels are assumed to experience Rayleigh and Gamma-Gamma fading distributions, respectively. Particularly, we derive the average probability of error as well as ergodic capacity upper bound of the asymmetric RF/FSO dual-hop relaying system, in closed-forms. As a result, the asymmetric RF/FSO relaying system shows slightly worse performance in average probability of error and ergodic capacity upper bound than the RF/RF relaying system in the low SNR. Over the SNR of 20 dB, however, the asymmetric RF/FSO relaying system shows very similar performance in average probability of error and ergodic capacity upper bound to the RF/RF relaying system. The derived mathematical expressions are verified by exactly matching Monte-Carlo simulation results.
Analysis of Changes in the Total Lymphocyte and Eosinophil Count during Immunotherapy for Metastatic Renal Cell Carcinoma: Correlation with Response and Survival

The aims of this study were to analyze lymphocyte and eosinophil counts in consecutive peripheral blood samples taken during immunotherapy for metastatic renal cell carcinoma (mRCC) and to correlate the findings with objective response and survival. A total of 40 patients with mRCC who received immunotherapy with interleukin-2, interferon-α, and 5-fluorouracil were analyzed. Objective responses were observed in 14 patients, including 2 (5%) who showed a complete response (CR) and 12 (30%) who showed a partial response (PR). Eleven patients (27%) achieved stable disease (SD), and 15 patients (38%) had progressive disease (PD). Changes from baseline in the total lymphocyte counts were significantly higher in the responding patients (CR+PR+SD) than in the non-responding patients (PD) (p=0.017), but no difference was seen in the total eosinophil counts (p=0.275). Univariate analysis identified the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG) performance status (p=0.017), the presence of a primary renal tumor (p<0.001) and the peripheral lymphocyte counts at week 4 (p=0.034) as prognostic factors, but a low ECOG performance status (p=0.003) and the presence of a primary renal tumor (p=0.001) were identified as independent poor prognostic factors by multivariate analysis. This study provides further evidence that changes in blood lymphocyte counts may serve as an objective indicator of objective responses.
Deep Bisulfite Sequencing of Aberrantly Methylated Loci in a Patient with Multiple Methylation Defects

NLRP7 is a maternal effect gene as maternal mutations in this gene cause recurrent hydatidiform moles, spontaneous abortions and stillbirths, whereas live births are very rare. We have studied a patient with multiple anomalies born to a mother with a heterozygous NLRP7 mutation. By array-based CpG methylation analysis of blood DNA from the patient, his parents and 18 normal controls on Illumina Infinium HumanMethylation27 BeadChips we found that the patient had methylation changes (delta ß ≥ 0.3) at many imprinted loci as well as at 87 CpGs associated with 85 genes of unknown imprinting status. Using a pseudoproband (permutation) approach, we found methylation changes at only 7-24 CpGs (mean 15; standard deviation 4.84) in the controls. Thus, the number of abberantly methylated CpGs in the patient is more than 14 standard deviations higher. In order to identify novel imprinted genes among the 85 conspicuous genes in the patient, we selected 19 (mainly hypomethylated) genes for deep bisulfite amplicon sequencing on the ROCHE/454 Genome Sequencer in the patient and at least two additional controls. These controls had not been included in the array analysis and were heterozygous for a single nucleotide polymorphism at the test locus, so that allele-specific DNA methylation patterns could be determined. Apart from FAM50B, which we proved to be imprinted in blood, we did not observe allele-specific DNA methylation at the other 18 loci. We conclude that the patient does not only have methylation defects at imprinted loci but (at least in blood) also an excess of methylation changes at apparently non-imprinted loci.
Source-location privacy in energy-constrained sensor network routing

As sensor-driven applications become increasingly integrated into our lives, issues related to sensor privacy will become increasingly important. Although many privacy-related issues can be addressed by security mechanisms, one sensor network privacy issue that cannot be adequately addressed by network security is confidentiality of the source sensor's location. In this paper, we focus on protecting the source's location by introducing suitable modifications to sensor routing protocols to make it difficult for an adversary to backtrack to the origin of the sensor communication. In particular, we focus on the class of flooding protocols. While developing and evaluating our privacy-aware routing protocols, we jointly consider issues of location-privacy as well as the amount of energy consumed by the sensor network. Motivated by the observations, we propose a flexible routing strategy, known as <i>phantom routing</i>, which protects the source's location. Phantom routing is a two-stage routing scheme that first consists of a directed walk along a random direction, followed by routing from the phantom source to the sink. Our investigations have shown that phantom routing is a powerful technique for protecting the location of the source during sensor transmissions.
Modelling A User Population for Designing Information Retrieval Metrics

Although Average Precision (AP) has been the most widely-used retrieval effectiveness metric since the advent of Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), the general belief among researchers is that it lacks a user model. In light of this, Robertson recently pointed out that AP can be interpreted as a special case of Normalised Cumulative Precision (NCP), computed as an expectation of precision over a population of users who eventually stop at different ranks in a list of retrieved documents. He regards AP as a crude version of NCP, in that the probability distribution of the user’s stopping behaviour is uniform across all relevant documents. In this paper, we generalise NCP further and demonstrate that AP and its graded-relevance version Q-measure are in fact reasonable metrics despite the above uniform probability assumption. From a probabilistic perspective, these metrics emphasise long-tail users who tend to dig deep into the ranked list, and thereby achieve high reliability. We also demonstrate that one of our newmetrics, calledNCU gu,β=1, maintains high correlation with AP and shows the highest discriminative power, i.e., the proportion of statistically significantly different system pairs given a confidence level, by utilising graded relevance in a novel way. Our experimental results are consistent across
The yellowing of epoxy resin adhesives: report on natural dark aging

Abstract Various room temperature cure epoxy resin adhesives suitable for glass conservation have been tested for their resistance to yellowing under natural dark aging conditions (22°C). Trends in yellowing in relation to chemical composition of formulations are discussed. Although the majority of epoxy resins tested demonstrated an unacceptable level of stability, some resins havebeen identified with an intermediate level of stability and can be recommended for use in conservation.
Phosphorus‐Graphene Nanosheet Hybrids as Lithium‐Ion Anode with Exceptional High‐Temperature Cycling Stability

A red phosphorus‐graphene nanosheet hybrid is reported as an anode material for lithium‐ion batteries. Graphene nanosheets form a sea‐like, highly electronically conductive matrix, where the island‐like phosphorus particles are dispersed. Benefiting from this structure and properties of phosphorus, the hybrid delivers high initial capacity and exhibits promising retention at 60 °C.
LncRNA MALAT1 acts as an oncogene in multiple myeloma through sponging miR-509-5p to modulate FOXP1 expression

Previous studies showed that Metastasis associated lung adenocarcinoma transcript 1(MALAT1) acted as an oncogene in Multiple Myeloma (MM). However, the underlying mechanism of MALAT1 in MM remains unclear. Quantitative real time-PCR(qRT-PCR) was used to determine MALAT1 expression in MM samples and cell lines. in vitro function assays were used to determine the function of MALAT1 on MM cells. Bioinformatics tools were used to predict the targets of MALAT1 and miR-509-5p, respectively. Furthermore, rescue experiments were performed to further confirm the regulation of miR-509-5p by MALAT1. In the present study, our data showed that MALAT1 expression was upregulated in MM samples and cell lines. In function assays, we confirmed that MALAT1 inhibition significantly suppressed cells proliferation, induced cells apoptosis, arrested cells in G1/S phase, and inhibited MM cells growth in vivo. Furthermore, MALAT1 was identified to function as a competitive endogenous RNA (ceRNA) for miR-509-5p to promote MM cell viability. Additionally, our results suggested that miR-509-5p targeted the 3’-UTR of FOXP1 to suppress MM cells progression. Meanwhile, our results showed that miR-509-5p inhibitors significantly abrogated the decreased expression of FOXP1 induced by MALAT1 suppression, indicating that MALAT1 could positively regulate FOXP1 expression by sponging miR-509-5p. Our findings suggested that MALAT1/miR-509-5p/FOXP1 axis was one of the key signalings in mediating MM cell growth, and further indicated that MALAT1 could act as a novel diagnostic marker and therapeutic target for the treatment of MM.
Whole Body Awareness for Controlling a Robotic Transfemoral Prosthesis

Restoring locomotion functionality of transfemoral amputees is essential for early rehabilitation treatment and for preserving mobility and independence in daily life. Research in wearable robotics fostered the development of innovative active mechatronic lower-limb prostheses designed with the goal to reduce the cognitive and physical effort of lower-limb amputees in rehabilitation and daily life activities. To ensure benefits to the users, active mechatronic prostheses are expected to be aware of the user intention and properly interact in a closed human-in-the-loop paradigm. In the state of the art various cognitive interfaces have been proposed to online decode the user's intention. Electromyography in combination with mechanical sensing such as inertial or pressure sensors is a widely adopted solution for driving active mechatronic prostheses. In this framework, researchers also explored targeted muscles re-innervation for an objective-oriented surgical amputation promoting wider usability of active prostheses. However, information kept by the neural component of the cognitive interface deteriorates in a prolonged use scenario due to electrodes-related issues, thereby undermining the correct functionality of the active prosthesis. The objective of this work is to present a novel controller for an active transfemoral prosthesis based on whole body awareness relying on a wireless distributed non-invasive sensory apparatus acting as cognitive interface. A finite-state machine controller based on signals monitored from the wearable interface performs subject-independent intention detection of functional tasks such as ground level walking, stair ascent, and sit-to-stand maneuvres and their main sub-phases. Experimental activities carried out with four transfemoral amputees (among them one dysvascular) demonstrated high reliability of the controller capable of providing 100% accuracy rate in treadmill walking even for weak subjects and low walking speeds. The minimum success rate was of 94.8% in performing sit-to-stand tasks. All the participants showed high confidence in using the transfemoral active prosthesis even without training period thanks to intuitiveness of the whole body awareness controller.
Macroeconomic Factors and the Correlation of Stock and Bond Returns

This paper examines the correlation between stock and bond returns. It first documents that the major trends in stock-bond correlation for G7 countries follow a similar reverting pattern in the past forty years. Next, an asset pricing model is employed to show that the correlation of stock and bond returns can be explained by their common exposure to macroeconomic factors. The link between the stock-bond correlation and macroeconomic factors is examined using three successively more realistic formulations of asset return dynamics. Empirical results indicate that the major trends in stock-bond correlation are determined primarily by uncertainty about expected inflation. Unexpected inflation and the real interest rate are significant to a lesser degree. Forecasting this stock-bond correlation using macroeconomic factors also helps improve investors' asset allocation decisions. One implication of this link between trends in stock-bond correlation and inflation risk is the Murphy's Law of Diversification: Diversification opportunities are least available when they are most needed.
Similarity flooding: a versatile graph matching algorithm and its application to schema matching

Matching elements of two data schemas or two data instances plays a key role in data warehousing, e-business, or even biochemical applications. In this paper we present a matching algorithm based on a fixpoint computation that is usable across different scenarios. The algorithm takes two graphs (schemas, catalogs, or other data structures) as input, and produces as output a mapping between corresponding nodes of the graphs. Depending on the matching goal, a subset of the mapping is chosen using filters. After our algorithm runs, we expect a human to check and if necessary adjust the results. As a matter of fact, we evaluate the 'accuracy' of the algorithm by counting the number of needed adjustments. We conducted a user study, in which our accuracy metric was used to estimate the labor savings that the users could obtain by utilizing our algorithm to obtain an initial matching. Finally, we illustrate how our matching algorithm is deployed as one of several high-level operators in an implemented testbed for managing information models and mappings.