Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Changes in gut hormone and glucose concentrations in relation to hunger and fullness.

BACKGROUND The search for biomarkers of appetite is very active. OBJECTIVES The aims were to compare dynamics of hunger and fullness ratings on a visual analog scale (VAS) with dynamics of glucagon-like peptide 1, peptide tyrosine-tyrosine, ghrelin, glucose, and insulin concentrations throughout different meal patterns-and thus different timings of nutrient delivery to the gut-by using a statistical approach that focuses on within-subject relations of these observations and to investigate whether appetite ratings are synchronized with or lag behind or in front of changes in hormone and glucose concentrations. DESIGN Subjects (n = 38) with a mean (±SD) age of 24 ± 6 y and BMI (in kg/m(2)) of 25.1 ± 3.1 came to the university twice for consumption of a 4-course lunch in 0.5 or 2 h (randomized crossover design). Per subject regression slopes and R(2) values of VAS scores on hormone and glucose concentrations were calculated. We tested whether the means of the slopes were different from zero. Regarding possible lags in the relations, the analyses were repeated with VAS scores related to hormone and glucose concentrations of the relevant previous and following measurement periods. RESULTS VAS scores and hormone and glucose concentrations changed synchronously (P < 0.005, R(2) = 0.4-0.7). Changes in ghrelin concentrations lagged behind (10-30 min) changes in hunger scores (P < 0.005, R(2) = 0.7) and insulin concentrations (P < 0.005, R(2) = 0.6), which suggests a role for insulin as a possible negative regulator of ghrelin. No major differences in slopes and R(2) values were found between the meal patterns. CONCLUSIONS This method may be useful for understanding possible differences in relations between VAS scores and hormone and glucose concentrations between subjects or conditions. Yet, the reported explained variation of 40% to 70% seems to be too small to use hormone and glucose concentrations as appropriate biomarkers for appetite, at least at the individual level and probably at the group level. This study started in 2007, which means that it was not registered as a clinical trial.
Comprehensive VM Protection Against Untrusted Hypervisor Through Retrofitted AMD Memory Encryption

The confidentiality of tenant’s data is confronted with high risk when facing hardware attacks and privileged malicious software. Hardware-based memory encryption is one of the promising means to provide strong guarantees of data security. Recently AMD has proposed its new memory encryption hardware called SME and SEV, which can selectively encrypt memory regions in a fine-grained manner, e.g., by setting the C-bits in the page table entries. More importantly, SEV further supports encrypted virtual machines. This, intuitively, has provided a new opportunity to protect data confidentiality in guest VMs against an untrusted hypervisor in the cloud environment. In this paper, we first provide a security analysis on the (in)security of SEV and uncover a set of security issues of using SEV as a means to defend against an untrusted hypervisor. Based on the study, we then propose a software-based extension to the SEV feature, namely Fidelius, to address those issues while retaining performance efficiency. Fidelius separates the management of critical resources from service provisioning and revokes the permissions of accessing specific resources from the un-trusted hypervisor. By adopting a sibling-based protection mechanism with non-bypassable memory isolation, Fidelius embraces both security and efficiency, as it introduces no new layer of abstraction. Meanwhile, Fidelius reuses the SEV API to provide a full VM life-cycle protection, including two sets of para-virtualized I/O interfaces to encode the I/O data, which is not considered in the SEV hardware design. A detailed and quantitative security analysis shows its effectiveness in protecting tenant’s data from a variety of attack surfaces, and the performance evaluation confirms the performance efficiency of Fidelius.
Intragenomic Long-Distance RNA–RNA Interactions in Plus-Strand RNA Plant Viruses

Plant viruses that contain positive-strand RNA genomes represent an important class of pathogen. The genomes of these viruses harbor RNA sequences and higher-order RNA structures that are essential for the regulation of viral processes during infections. In recent years, it has become increasingly evident that, in addition to locally positioned RNA structures, long-distance intragenomic interactions, involving nucleotide base pairing over large distances, also contribute significantly to the control of various viral events. Viral processes that are modulated by such interactions include genome replication, translation initiation, translational recoding, and subgenomic mRNA transcription. Here, we review the structure and function of different types of long-distance RNA–RNA interactions, herein termed LDRIs, present in members of the family Tombusviridae and other plus-strand RNA plant viruses.
Effects of weave density, yarn twist and yarn count on fabric handle of polyester woven fabrics by objective evaluation method

Systematic research works were carried out to clarify the effects of weave density, yarn twist, and yarn count on fabric handle of polyester fabrics made for the purpose, and quantitative influence was clearly shown. “Kosh” and “hari” increase with weft yarn density and “shinayakasa” and “shari” decrease with the density. The effect of the density on “fukurami” and “kishimi” is small. The effect of yarn twist is revealed remarkably on dechine and yoryu. “Koshi” and “hari” decrease and “shinayakasa” and “shari” increase with the twist in the case of dechine; however, all the primary handles increase a little with the twist for yoryu. “Kishimi” of yoryu increases greatly with the twist. “Koshi” and “hari” increase and “shinayakasa” decreases with yarn count for taffeta and georgette. The effect of the count on “fukurami” and “kishimi” is small for both fabrics. These results could provide useful information to design ideal fabrics having desirable handle.
Realization and Characterization of a Bulk-Type All-Silicon High Pressure Sensor

Distinct from conventional diaphragm-type pressure sensors, a silicon-based bulk-type high pressure sensor has been analyzed, realized, and characterized. External hydrostatic pressure acting on the sensor is converted to a biaxial compression inside an all-silicon encapsulated vacuum cavity. The stress anisotropy is analytically modeled and numerically simulated. The biaxial compression is measured using two pairs of piezoresistors oriented to optimally utilize the anisotropy of silicon piezoresistance. An improved pressure seal in the test-package allowed extended testing of the sensor up to a pressure of 200 MPa and a temperature of 175 °C. Reported also is a zero-offset of the sensor, largely attributed to the tensile stress induced by the insulating cover oxide after cooling from the high-temperature dopant activation anneal. [2017-0253]
Lévy flight movements prevent extinctions and maximize population abundances in fragile Lotka–Volterra systems

Significance The ubiquity of scale-free mobility in nature, as observed in systems ranging from microorganisms to fishing boats, has stimulated a number of foraging theories and individual-based random search models. Here, we unveil an essential yet unexplored property of multiple-scale motion, which relates to the stability of entire populations. We use Lotka–Volterra models to predict that foragers diffusing normally tend to go extinct in fragile fragmented ecosystems, whereas their populations become resilient to degraded conditions and have maximized abundances when individuals perform scale-free Lévy flights. Our analytical and simulated results shift the scope of multiple-scale foraging from the individual level to the scales of collective phenomena that are of primary interest in conservation biology. Multiple-scale mobility is ubiquitous in nature and has become instrumental for understanding and modeling animal foraging behavior. However, the impact of individual movements on the long-term stability of populations remains largely unexplored. We analyze deterministic and stochastic Lotka–Volterra systems, where mobile predators consume scarce resources (prey) confined in patches. In fragile systems (that is, those unfavorable to species coexistence), the predator species has a maximized abundance and is resilient to degraded prey conditions when individual mobility is multiple scaled. Within the Lévy flight model, highly superdiffusive foragers rarely encounter prey patches and go extinct, whereas normally diffusing foragers tend to proliferate within patches, causing extinctions by overexploitation. Lévy flights of intermediate index allow a sustainable balance between patch exploitation and regeneration over wide ranges of demographic rates. Our analytical and simulated results can explain field observations and suggest that scale-free random movements are an important mechanism by which entire populations adapt to scarcity in fragmented ecosystems.
Effects of strength training program on hip extensors and knee extensors strength of lower limb in children with spastic diplegic cerebral palsy

[Purpose] The purpose of this study was to determine whether strength training programs for hip extensors and knee extensors improve gross motor function of children with cerebral palsy in Myanmar. [Subjects and Methods] Forty children (25 boys and 15 girls, mean age: 6.07 ± 2.74 years) from National Rehabilitation Hospital, Yangon, Myanmar, who had been diagnosed with spastic diplegic cerebral palsy, Gross Motor Classification System I and II participated in a 6-week strength training program (45 minutes per day, 3 days per week) on hip and knee extensors. Assessment was made, before and after intervention, of the amount of training weight in pounds, as well as Gross Motor Function Measure (GMFM) dimensions D (standing) and E (walking, running, jumping). [Results] All scores had increased significantly after the strength-training program. [Conclusion] A simple method of strength-training program for hip and knee extensors might lead to improved muscle strength and gross motor function in children with spastic diplegic cerebral palsy.
A New Fault-Tolerant Strategy for a Cascaded H-Bridge Based STATCOM

This paper introduces a new fault-tolerant strategy for a cascaded H-bridge (CHB)-based static synchronous compensator (STATCOM) with a single failure in power switches. A modified selective harmonic elimination pulse width modulation technique is proposed for postfault operation which generates the maximum possible balanced line-to-line voltages at the ac side of the converter. The dc-link voltages of H-bridge cells are used as another degree of freedom; and by an efficient amount of increase at the dc-link voltages, the rated capacity of STATCOM is restored without any extra component. Furthermore, by applying an effective voltage balancing scheme, voltages of dc-side capacitors are kept balanced in postfault operation. A three-phase seven-level CHB-based STATCOM is simulated in PSCAD/EMTDC environment to verify the feasibility and performance of the proposed method and also experimental results are provided based on a three-phase five-level scaled down laboratory prototype which validates the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.
Automated Quality Assurance for Image‐Guided Radiation Therapy

The use of image‐guided patient positioning requires fast and reliable Quality Assurance (QA) methods to ensure the megavoltage (MV) treatment beam coincides with the integrated kilovoltage (kV) or volumetric cone‐beam CT (CBCT) imaging and guidance systems. Current QA protocol is based on visually observing deviations of certain features in acquired kV in‐room treatment images such as markers, distances, or HU values from phantom specifications. This is a time‐consuming and subjective task because these features are identified by human operators. The method implemented in this study automated an IGRT QA protocol by using specific image processing algorithms that rigorously detected phantom features and performed all measurements involved in a classical QA protocol. The algorithm was tested on four different IGRT QA phantoms. Image analysis algorithms were able to detect QA features with the same accuracy as the manual approach but significantly faster. All described tests were performed in a single procedure, with acquisition of the images taking approximately 5 minutes, and the automated software analysis taking less than 1 minute. The study showed that the automated image analysis based procedure may be used as a daily QA procedure because it is completely automated and uses a single phantom setup. PACS numbers: 87.56. Fc
A RapidArc planning strategy for prostate with simultaneous integrated boost

Since the clinical implementation of novel rotational forms of intensity‐modulated radiotherapy, a variety of planning studies have been published that reinforce the major selling points of the technique. Namely, comparable or even improved dose distributions with a reduction in both monitor units and treatment times, when compared with static gantry intensity‐modulated radiotherapy. Although the data are promising, a rigorous approach to produce these plans has yet to be established. As a result, this study outlines a robust and streamlined planning strategy with a concentration on RapidArc class solutions for prostate with a simultaneous integrated boost. This planning strategy outlines the field setup, recommended starting objectives, required user interactions to be made throughout optimization and post‐optimization adjustments. A comparative planning study, with static gantry IMRT, is then presented as justification for the planning strategy itself. A variety of parameters are evaluated relating to both the planning itself (optimization and calculation time) and the plans that result. Results of this comparative study are in line with previously published data, and the planning process is streamlined to a point where the RapidArc optimization time takes 15±1.3 minutes. Application of this planning strategy reduces the dependence of the produced plan on the experience of the planner, and has the potential to streamline the planning process within radiotherapy departments. PACS numbers: 87.55. x, 87.55. D, 87.55. de, 87.55. dk
The PMIP 4 contribution to CMIP 6 – Part 3 : the Last Millennium

Citation for published version: Jungclaus, JH, Bard, E, Baroni, M, Braconnot, P, Cao, J, Chini, LP, Egorova, T, Evans, M, GonzálezRouco, JF, Goosse, H, Hurtt, G, Joos, F, Kaplan, J, Khodri, M, Goldewijk, KK, Krivova, N, Legrande, AN, Lorenz, SJ, Luterbacher, J, Man, W, Meinshausen, M, Moberg, A, Nehrbass-Ahles, C, Otto-Bliesner, BL, Phipps, SJ, Pongratz, J, Rozanov, E, Schmidt, GA, Schmidt, H, Schmutz, W, Schurer, A, Shapiro1, AI, Sigl, M, Smerdon, JE, Solanki, SK, Timmreck, C, Toohey, M, Usoskin, IG, Wagner, S, Wu, C-Y, Yeo, KL, Zanchettin, D, Zhang, Q & Zorita, E 2017, 'The PMIP4 contribution to CMIP6 – Part 3: the Last Millennium, Scientific Objective and Experimental Design for the PMIP4 past1000 simulations', Geoscientific Model Development. https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2016-278
Video event representation for abnormal event detection

In recent years surveillance video analysis has become an emerging area of research as video surveillance system is used in all places for monitoring the happenings to ensure safety. Automatic video surveillance system is useful for all applications like military surveillance, traffic monitoring, health monitoring of elder people at home, street surveillance. It is essential to represent video events for the further processing like video browsing, retrieval, summarization. Hence this paper presents a novel method for representing visual events in a video for event detection. For efficient visual event representation shape and motion can be used as features. Hence, pyramid of HOG (PHOG) feature is extracted for shape information and then it is combined with Histogram of magnitude, orientation and entropy of Optical Flow (HMOEOF) to have motion information. The extracted features are used to train the SVM classifier in order to detect and classify the events in the video as normal or abnormal. The proposed method results an equal error rate of 16.71% which shows that it outperforms well compared to other event detection approaches.
Decoding complexity-aware, rate, distortion optimized HEVC video encoding

Video content adaptation has become a popular application layer approach to reduce the decoding complexity and the associated energy consumption of video playback. In this context, this paper proposes an encoding algorithm to generate less complex HEVC bit streams with minimal impact to the coding efficiency. The experimental results reveal a −17.27 % average decoding complexity reduction and up to −24.91 % energy reduction for openHEVC based software decoding with only −0.73 dB BD-PSNR loss.
Classification of Alzheimer's Disease Using Whole Brain Hierarchical Network

Regions of interest (ROIs) based classification has been widely investigated for analysis of brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images to assist the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) including its early warning and developing stages, e.g., mild cognitive impairment (MCI) including MCI converted to AD (MCIc) and MCI not converted to AD (MCInc). Since an ROI representation of brain structures is obtained either by pre-definition or by adaptive parcellation, the corresponding ROI in different brains can be measured. However, due to noise and small sample size of MRI images, representations generated from single or multiple ROIs may not be sufficient to reveal the underlying anatomical differences between the groups of disease-affected patients and health controls (HC). In this paper, we employ a whole brain hierarchical network (WBHN) to represent each subject. The whole brain of each subject is divided into 90, 54, 14, and 1 regions based on Automated Anatomical Labeling (AAL) atlas. The connectivity between each pair of regions is computed in terms of Pearson's correlation coefficient and used as classification feature. Then, to reduce the dimensionality of features, we select the features with higher $F-$ scores. Finally, we use multiple kernel boosting (MKBoost) algorithm to perform the classification. Our proposed method is evaluated on MRI images of 710 subjects (200 AD, 120 MCIc, 160 MCInc, and 230 HC) from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database. The experimental results show that our proposed method achieves an accuracy of 94.65 percent and an area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) of 0.954 for AD/HC classification, an accuracy of 89.63 percent and an AUC of 0.907 for AD/MCI classification, an accuracy of 85.79 percent and an AUC of 0.826 for MCI/HC classification, and an accuracy of 72.08 percent and an AUC of 0.716 for MCIc/MCInc classification, respectively. Our results demonstrate that our proposed method is efficient and promising for clinical applications for the diagnosis of AD via MRI images.
Multi-frame super resolution using frame selection and multiple fusion for 250 million pixel images

In this paper, we propose a multi-frame super-resolution (SR) method using a frame selection and a multiple fusion for 250 million pixel image processing. When a tiny part (with a target that is several kilometers away from the camera) is enlarged, quality of the part tends to get poor due to spatial deformations and noise mainly caused by long distance and atmosphere turbulence. In this paper, we first propose an adaptive frame selection method that select a small part of frames with small blur according to the corresponding edge images detected by sobel filters. Then, we propose a multiple fusion scheme to reconstruct selected images in order to removing deformation. In our multiple fusion scheme, all of the alternate images are reference images for reconstruction, by this way both deformation and noise can be removed effectively without expensive computation. Our proposed method for enhancing the quality of 250 million pixel images performs better than conventional multi-frame super-resolution methods in accuracy, simplicity and ease of implementation so that it is quite suitable for commercial use.
“The Two Brothers”: Reconciling Perceptual-Cognitive and Statistical Models of Musical Evolution

While the “units, events and dynamics” of memetic evolution have been abstractly theorized (Lynch, 1998), they have not been applied systematically to real corpora in music. Some researchers, convinced of the validity of cultural evolution in more than the metaphorical sense adopted by much musicology, but perhaps skeptical of some or all of the claims of memetics, have attempted statistically based corpus-analysis techniques of music drawn from molecular biology, and these have offered strong evidence in favor of system-level change over time (Savage, 2017). This article argues that such statistical approaches, while illuminating, ignore the psychological realities of music-information grouping, the transmission of such groups with varying degrees of fidelity, their selection according to relative perceptual-cognitive salience, and the power of this Darwinian process to drive the systemic changes (such as the development over time of systems of tonal organization in music) that statistical methodologies measure. It asserts that a synthesis between such statistical approaches to the study of music-cultural change and the theory of memetics as applied to music (Jan, 2007), in particular the latter's perceptual-cognitive elements, would harness the strengths of each approach and deepen understanding of cultural evolution in music.
Development and evaluation of a food frequency questionnaire for Vietnamese female immigrants in Korea: the Korean Genome and Epidemiology Study (KoGES)

The objectives of this study were to develop a food-frequency questionnaire (FFQ) for Vietnamese female immigrants in Korea and to evaluate the validity of the FFQ. A total of 80 food items were selected in developing the FFQ according to consumption frequency, the contribution of energy and other nutrients, and the cooking methods based on one-day 24 hour recall (24HR) from 918 Vietnamese female immigrants between November 2006 and November 2007. The FFQ was validated by comparison with 24HR of 425 Vietnamese female immigrants between November 2008 and August 2009. The absolute nutrient intake calculated from the FFQ was higher than that estimated by 24HR for most nutrients. The correlation coefficients between 24HR and FFQ ranged from 0.10 (vitamin C) - 0.36 (energy) for crude intake, 0.05 (vitamin E) - 0.32 (calcium) for per 1000 kcal, and 0.08 (zinc) - 0.34 (calcium) for energy-adjusted, respectively. More than 70% of subjects were classified into the same or adjacent agreement groups for nutrients other than fiber, sodium, vitamin A, vitamin C, and vitamin E, while less than 10% of subjects were classified into complete disagreement groups. We conclude that the FFQ appears to be an acceptable tool for estimating nutrient intake and dietary patterns of Vietnamese female immigrants in Korea. Future studies to validate the FFQ using various biomarkers or other dietary assessment methods are needed.