Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fast intra mode decision for HEVC based on Transparent Composite Model

Compared with H.264/AVC, the newest video standard called High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) further improves video coding performance, but at the price of significant increase in its encoding complexity, especially in intra mode decision due to the adoption of complex block partition scheme and more intra prediction modes. To reduce the intra mode decision complexity in HEVC while maintaining its coding efficiency, in this paper, we first formulate the mode decision as a Bayesian decision problem based on the newly proposed Transparent Composite Model (TCM) and then present an outlier based fast intra mode decision method. Experiments show that for the All-Intra Main test configuration of HEVC, our method reduces, on average, the encoding time by 48% with an insignificant loss in coding efficiency (0.7% BD-Rate increase).
‘If this wasn’t here I probably wouldn’t be’: disabled workers’ views of employment support

UK governments since 1997 have introduced significant changes to move disabled people off benefits and into employment. Commentators have criticised the adoption of the ‘medical model’ of disability implicit in many of these policies, with its focus on individual rather than institutional change. This paper reports empirical data about participants’ experiences of one national supported employment programme. Participants of WORKSTEP were overwhelmingly positive about their experiences both of work and the support to find work. The rare reports of negative experiences reflect the focus on intervening at the level of individual workers, rather than the workplace or organisation of work. Analysis of their views is valuable in the light of ongoing welfare reform as well as recessionary pressures on labour markets and employment services, which, in emphasising individual solutions to employment problems, may overlook the need for more broad-based, social interventions.
Characterisation of Frenet–Serret and Bishop motions with applications to needle steering

SUMMARY Frenet–Serret and Bishop rigid-body motions have many potential applications in robotics, graphics and computer-aided design. In order to study these motions, new characterisations in terms of their velocity twists are derived. This is extended to general motions based on any moving frame to a space curve. Furthermore, it is shown that any such general moving frame motion is the product of a Frenet–Serret motion with a rotation about the tangent vector. These ideas are applied to a simple model of needle steering. A simple kinematic model of the path of the needle is derived. It is then shown that this leads to Frenet–Serret motions of the needle tip but with constant curvature. Finally, some remarks about curves with constant curvature are made.
General Health in Organizations: Relative Relevance of Emotional Intelligence, Trust, and Organizational Support

This study examined the predictive ability of emotional intelligence (EI), trust, and organizational support in general health. The sample consisted of 250 middle-level executives from 2-wheeler manufacturing organizations. Results suggest that the dimension of EI termed positive attitude about life predicted both factors of general health positively: (a) sense of accomplishment and contribution and (b) botheration-free existence. Organizational support predicted sense of accomplishment and contribution, whereas vertical trust predicted botheration-free existence, accompanied by the assertiveness and positive self-concept dimension of EI. The implications of the results are discussed in terms of promoting the general health of employees through training on EI skills and through the creation of an atmosphere of trust and recognition within the organization.
Epigenetic silencing of microRNA-199b-5p is associated with acquired chemoresistance via activation of JAG1-Notch1 signaling in ovarian cancer

Epithelial ovarian cancer is a highly lethal and aggressive gynecological malignancy. The high mortality rate is due in part to the fact that many advanced cancer patients become refractory to current chemotherapeutic agents, leading to tumor recurrence and death. However, the underlying mechanisms leading to chemoresistance remain obscure. Here, we report that the loss of miR-199b-5p due to progressive epigenetic silencing leads to the activation of the JAG1-mediated Notch1 signaling cascade, thereby leading to the development of acquired chemoresistance in ovarian cancer. Using miRCURY LNA™ microRNA array and Q-PCR analyses of two pairs of cisplatin-sensitive and –resistant ovarian cancer cell lines, we identified miR-199b-5p as significantly down-regulated in cisplatin-resistant ovarian cancer cells and confirmed that miR-199b-5p is clinically associated with advanced and poor survival ovarian cancers. Interestingly, the loss of miR-199b-5p could be restored by 5-Aza-dC-mediated demethylation, and methylated specific PCR (MS-PCR), bisulfite-sequencing and pyrosequencing revealed that the promoter region of miR-199b-5p was hypermethylated. Computational and mechanistic analyses identified JAG1 as a primary target of miR-199b-5p. Notably, the reduced expression of miR-199b-5p was found to be inversely correlated with the increased expression of JAG1 using an ovarian cancer tissue array. Enforced expression of miR-199b-5p sensitized ovarian cancer cells to cisplatin-induced cytotoxicity both in vitro and in vivo. Conversely, re-expression of miR-199b-5p and siRNA-mediated JAG1 knockdown or treatment with Notch specific inhibitor γ-secretase (GSI) attenuated JAG1-Notch1 signaling activity, thereby enhancing cisplatin-mediated cell cytotoxicity. Taken together, our study suggests that the epigenetic silencing of miR-199b-5p during tumor progression is significantly associated with acquired chemoresistance in ovarian cancer through the activation of JAG1-Notch1 signaling.
Health and Quality of Life Outcomes

Background: Health-related quality of life (HRQOL) is a key outcome in arthritis, but few population-based studies have examined the relationship of specific arthritic conditions, such as osteoarthritis (OA) and rheumatoid arthritis (RA) with HRQOL. Methods: Older adults in Pennsylvania completed a mail version of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) HRQOL modules. Medicare data were used to identify subjects with OA, RA, and no arthritis diagnosis. We compared HRQOL responses among these groups, and we also examined relationships of demographic characteristics to HRQOL among subjects with arthritis. Results: In analyses controlling for demographic characteristics and comorbidity, subjects with OA and RA had poorer scores than those without arthritis on all HRQOL items, including general health, physical health, mental health, activity limitation, pain, sleep, and feeling healthy and full of energy. HRQOL scores were also lower for those with RA compared to OA. Among individuals with arthritis, all subject characteristics (including age, race, sex, nursing home residence, marital status, income, and comorbid illnesses) were significantly related to at least one HRQOL item. Older age, nursing home residence, and greater comorbidity were the most consistently associated with poorer HRQOL. Conclusions: Results of this study show that both OA and RA have a significant impact on multiple dimensions of HRQOL among older adults. Results also suggest the CDC HRQOL items are suitable for use among older adults and in mail surveys. Due to the rising number of older adults in many countries, the public health burden of arthritis is expected to increase dramatically. Efforts are needed to enhance access to medical care and disseminate self-management interventions for arthritis. Background Arthritis is one of the most common chronic diseases and a leading cause of disability in the United States (U.S.), and other developed countries [1-8]. In the U.S., 55% of individuals age 65 and older report having arthritis or chronic joint symptoms [9]. Due to the increasing number of older adults in many countries, the prevalence of arthritis is expected to rise dramatically [1,8,10-13]. In Published: 13 January 2004 Health and Quality of Life Outcomes 2004, 2:5 Received: 06 November 2003 Accepted: 13 January 2004 This article is available from: http://www.hqlo. com/content/2/1/5 © 2004 Dominick et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article: verbatim copying and redistribution of this article are permitted in all media for any purpose, provided this notice is preserved along with the article's original URL.
From Women of the Year to “Soccer Moms”: The Case of the Incredible Shrinking Women

In the 1992 U.S. election year, mainstream print and television news coverage was replete with hosannas for female politicians, praised as strong and politically powerful figures during this so-called ''Year of the Woman. '' Just 4 years later, 1996 election news reports relied upon a very different image to describe women vis-à-vis electoral politics: soccer moms. Soccer mom was the term used most recurrently in mainstream television and print media to refer to an aggregate of women, vis-à-vis electoral politics, who were described as crucial to the success of either presidential candidate: President Clinton or Robert Dole. This period of time represents a dramatic shift in news discourse: from discussing women as political power wielders (Women of the Year) to discussing women as a group of swing voters defined primarily by their filial obligations. This article considers some possible implications of this shift and argues that it represents a discursive connection between women voters reduced to a demographic category characterized by womens relationships to their children and an ideology of consumerism that reduces electoral politics to personal choices around product consumption and lifestyle.
Source Language Adaptation for Resource-Poor Machine Translation

We propose a novel, language-independent approach for improving machine translation from a resource-poor language to X by adapting a large bi-text for a related resource-rich language and X (the same target language). We assume a small bi-text for the resource-poor language to X pair, which we use to learn word-level and phrase-level paraphrases and cross-lingual morphological variants between the resource-rich and the resource-poor language; we then adapt the former to get closer to the latter. Our experiments for Indonesian/Malay--English translation show that using the large adapted resource-rich bi-text yields 6.7 BLEU points of improvement over the unadapted one and 2.6 BLEU points over the original small bi-text. Moreover, combining the small bi-text with the adapted bi-text outperforms the corresponding combinations with the unadapted bi-text by 1.5--3 BLEU points. We also demonstrate applicability to other languages and domains.
A Momentum Exchange-based Immersed Boundary-Lattice Boltzmann Method for Fluid Structure Interaction

A new immersed boundary-lattice Boltzmann method (IB-LBM) is proposed and validated in this work by its application to simulate incompressible viscous flows. The conventional IB-LBM based on the lattice Boltzmann equation with external forcing term, which contains a boundary velocity to represent the effect that the moving boundary exerts on the bounce-back distribution functions, whereas the present method use the boundary velocity to compute the momentum exchange in terms of the momentum theorem. Moreover, the momentum exchange based IB-LBM meets the Galilean invariance. Numerical examples show that the present method can provide very accurate numerical results.
Modulation of cellular Phosphatidylinositol 3‐phosphate levels in primary macrophages affects heat‐killed but not viable Mycobacterium avium's transport through the phagosome maturation process

Most disease causing mycobacteria are intramacrophage pathogens which replicate within nonacidified phagosomes that can interact with the early endosomal network but fail to mature to a phagolysosome. The mycobacterial phagosome retain some proteins required for fusion with endocytic vesicles including Rab5 but lack others such as early endosomal autoantigen 1 (EEA1). As the membrane lipid phosphatidylinositol 3‐phosphate (PtdIns‐3‐P) is required for EEA1 membrane association and phagosome maturation, it may be a potential target of pathogenic mycobacteria. To test this hypothesis, macrophage cellular levels of PtdIns‐3‐P were altered by retroviral introduction of the type III Phosphoinositide 3‐Kinase (VPS34) and the PtdIns‐3‐P phosphatase myotubularin 1 (MTM1). By utilizing the PtdIns‐3‐P‐specific probes FYVE and PX coupled to EGFP (EGFP‐2‐FYVE and EGFP‐PX, respectively), the expression of PtdIns‐3‐P on the mycobacterial phagosome was addressed. All phagosomes containing viable Mycobacterium avium stained positive for EGFP‐2‐FYVE and EGFP‐PX despite obvious differences in PtdIns‐3‐P concentrations in cells expressing MTM1 or VPS34. Altering PtdIns‐3‐P cellular concentrations did not affect trafficking of live bacilli. However, a significant increase in the transport of killed bacilli to a late endosomal/lysosomal compartment was observed in VPS34‐compared to MTM1‐transduced macrophages. Therefore, although overexpression of PdtIns‐3‐P in macrophages can facilitate phagosome maturation, its effect on phagosomes containing viable M. avium was negligible.
Prediction and identification of the effectors of heterotrimeric G proteins in rice (Oryza sativa L.)

Heterotrimeric G protein signaling cascades are one of the primary metazoan sensing mechanisms linking a cell to environment. However, the number of experimentally identified effectors of G protein in plant is limited. We have therefore studied which tools are best suited for predicting G protein effectors in rice. Here, we compared the predicting performance of four classifiers with eight different encoding schemes on the effectors of G proteins by using 10-fold cross-validation. Four methods were evaluated: random forest, naive Bayes, K-nearest neighbors and support vector machine. We applied these methods to experimentally identified effectors of G proteins and randomly selected non-effector proteins, and tested their sensitivity and speciﬁcity. The result showed that random forest classifier with composition of K-spaced amino acid pairs and composition of motif or domain (CKSAAP_PROSITE_200) combination method yielded the best performance, with accuracy and the Mathew's correlation coefficient reaching 74.62% and 0.49, respectively. We have developed G-Effector, an online predictor, which outperforms BLAST, PSI-BLAST and HMMER on predicting the effectors of G proteins. This provided valuable guidance for the researchers to select classifiers combined with different feature selection encoding schemes. We used G-Effector to screen the effectors of G protein in rice, and confirmed the candidate effectors by gene co-expression data. Interestingly, one of the top 15 candidates, which did not appear in the training data set, was validated in a previous research work. Therefore, the candidate effectors list in this article provides both a clue for researchers as to their function and a framework of validation for future experimental work. It is accessible at http://bioinformatics.fafu. edu.cn/geffector.
Stroke volume obtained by electrical interrogation of the brachial artery: transbrachial electrical bioimpedance velocimetry

The goal of this study is to measure left ventricular stroke volume (SV) from the brachial artery (BA) using electrical bioimpedance. Doppler-derived SV was used for comparison. Twenty-nine healthy adults were recruited for study. Doppler echocardiographic-derived SV was obtained from the product of distal left ventricular outflow tract cross-sectional area and systolic velocity integral. SV from the BA was obtained by transbrachial electrical bioimpedance velocimetry (TBEV). Application of a current field across the left brachium was effected by injection of a constant magnitude, high frequency, low amperage, alternating current. Therein, a static voltage (U0) and pulsatile voltage change (ΔU(t)) were measured and converted to their corresponding impedances, Z0 and ΔZ(t). TBEV-derived SV was obtained by multiplying a square root value of the normalized, acceleration-based, peak first time derivative of ΔZ(t) by a volume conductor and systolic flow time. Inter-method agreement was determined by the Bland–Altman method. To assess the contribution of blood resistivity variations to ΔZ(t), BA diameters were measured at end-diastole and peak systolic expansion. Results indicate that since the BA demonstrates parabolic, laminar flow, with minimal diameter changes, blood resistivity variations are likely responsible for the derived impedance changes. Bland–Altman analysis shows that SV is obtainable by TBEV from healthy humans at rest.
Strategic Use of Multiple Texts for the Evaluation of Arguments

Two experiments were conducted to examine whether students use arguments with refutation in one text for evaluating the opposite arguments without refutation in another text. Undergraduate students read two conflicting texts in either of the two orders: pro arguments text first and con arguments text first. After reading each text, they evaluated the convincingness of individual arguments in the text. Finally, they wrote argumentative essays concerning controversial issues. Experiment 1 indicated that presentation order affected students’ evaluations of arguments in the case where most of them affirmed the refutational relations in their essays, suggesting the conditional use of multiple texts for argument evaluation. Experiment 2 replicated this result using more natural argumentative texts.
Airborne concentrations of PM(2.5) and diesel exhaust particles on Harlem sidewalks: a community-based pilot study.

Residents of the dense urban core neighborhoods of New York City (NYC) have expressed increasing concern about the potential human health impacts of diesel vehicle emissions. We measured concentrations of particulate matter [less than/equal to] 2.5 micro in aerodynamic diameter (PM(2.5)) and diesel exhaust particles (DEP) on sidewalks in Harlem, NYC, and tested whether spatial variations in concentrations were related to local diesel traffic density. Eight-hour (1000-1800 hr) air samples for PM(2.5 )and elemental carbon (EC) were collected for 5 days in July 1996 on sidewalks adjacent to four geographically distinct Harlem intersections. Samples were taken using portable monitors worn by study staff. Simultaneous traffic counts for diesel trucks, buses, cars, and pedestrians were carried out at each intersection on [Greater/equal to] 2 of the 5 sampling days. Eight-hour diesel vehicle counts ranged from 61 to 2,467 across the four sites. Mean concentrations of PM(2.5) exhibited only modest site-to-site variation (37-47 microg/m(3)), reflecting the importance of broader regional sources of PM(2.5). In contrast, EC concentrations varied 4-fold across sites (from 1.5 to 6 microg/m(3)), and were associated with bus and truck counts on adjacent streets and, at one site, with the presence of a bus depot. A high correlation (r = 0.95) was observed between EC concentrations measured analytically and a blackness measurement based on PM(2.5) filter reflectance, suggesting the utility of the latter as a surrogate measure of DEP in future community-based studies. These results show that local diesel sources in Harlem create spatial variations in sidewalk concentrations of DEP. The study also demonstrates the feasibility of a new paradigm for community-based research involving full and active partnership between academic scientists and community-based organizations. ImagesFigure 1Figure 2Figure 3Figure 4Figure 5
Increasing Secondary Teachers’ Behavior-Specific Praise Using a Video Self-Modeling and Visual Performance Feedback Intervention

Teachers working with students with emotional/behavioral disorders (EBD) in elementary schools can be helped to increase use of an important behavioral strategy, behavior-specific praise statements (BSPS). Unfortunately, teachers’ behaviors return to baseline levels when researchers leave, and little is known about the use of praise on high school students. To investigate strategies to promote maintenance of behavior change, an intervention combining visual performance feedback and video self-modeling was implemented with three teachers of high school students with EBD. A multiple baseline with embedded withdrawal design demonstrated a functional relation between the intervention and increased use of BSPS; however, only one teacher continued to give BSPS when the intervention was withdrawn. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.
Fault-Proneness Estimation and Java Migration: A Preliminary Case Study

The paper presents and discusses an industrial case study, where an eight year running software project has been analyzed. We collected about 1000 daily-versions, together with the file version control system, and bug tracking data. This project has been migrated from Java 1.4 to Java 1.5, and visible effects of this migration on the bytecode are presented and discussed. From this case study, we expect to observe the effects on the code size produced by the Java technology migration, and to improve the performances of already existing fault-proneness estimation models. Preliminary results about fault-proneness estimation are shown.
Comparison of the Effects of Resistance Exercise Orders on Number of Repetitions, Serum IGF-1, Testosterone and Cortisol Levels in Normal-Weight and Obese Men

Background: Exercise order affects repetition performance and acute hormonal responses to resistance training (RT) programs. Objectives: The purpose of this study was to compare the acute effects of two different resistance exercise orders (REO) on number of repetitions and serum Insulin-like Growth Factor-1 (IGF-1), testosterone and cortisol levels in normal-weight and obese men. Materials and Methods: 25 untrained college-aged men were assigned to either obese (n = 11) or normal-weight (n = 15) groups. Subjects performed two REO protocols in 2 exercise groups. In the first group subjects began with large-muscle group and progressed to small-muscle group (Protocol A), while in the other group subjects performed the same exercise but in reverse sequence (Protocol B). Each activity was performed in 3 consecutive sets of 10 repetitions maximum to near fatigue. Results: REOs did not affect number of repetitions in none of the groups. The average rating of perceived exertion was higher for protocol B in both groups. IGF-1 and testosterone increased immediately post exercise for both protocols and in both groups, however immediately post exercise increase in IGF-1 and testosterone were lower in obese group. Cortisol response to REO was weaker in obese group. Conclusions: Performing large muscle group exercises first in RE training and progressing to small muscle group produced greater anabolic hormonal response relative to reverse sequence in normal-weight young adult men. Anabolic hormonal response to REOs was blunted in the obese group.