Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Explicit Trust Delegation: Security for dynamic Grids

This paper addresses the issue of how to build dynamic Grids without using the non-standard proxy extensions that cause concern within the security community. The approach allows commonly available security tools and libraries to invoke requests (on the client side) and respond (on the server side) using only well-established security protocols. This description is made in the context of the UNICORE Grid infrastructure. UNICORE is known to have a strong, respected security model, but at the cost of not supporting some dynamic Grid capabilities. The discussion shows how UNICORE could be enhanced using Explicit Trust Delegation to provide dynamic capabilities, hitherto only possible in Grids supporting a proxy-based security model. We show how this approach provides a smooth migration path to proposed work on Virtual Organizations.
Intestinal Organoids—Current and Future Applications

Recent technical advances in the stem cell field have enabled the in vitro generation of complex structures resembling whole organs termed organoids. Most of these approaches employ culture systems that allow stem cell-derived or tissue progenitor cells to self-organize into three-dimensional (3D)-structures. Since organoids can be grown from different species (human, mouse, cat, dog), organs (intestine, kidney, brain, liver), and from patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells, they create significant prospects for modelling development and diseases, for toxicology and drug discovery studies, and in the field of regenerative medicine. Here, we report on intestinal stem cells, organoid culture, organoid disease modeling, transplantation, specifically covering the current and future uses of this exciting new insight model to the field of veterinary medicine.
Oligodendrocyte Precursor Cells in Spinal Cord Injury: A Review and Update

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a devastating condition to individuals, families, and society. Oligodendrocyte loss and demyelination contribute as major pathological processes of secondary damages after injury. Oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs), a subpopulation that accounts for 5 to 8% of cells within the central nervous system, are potential sources of oligodendrocyte replacement after SCI. OPCs react rapidly to injuries, proliferate at a high rate, and can differentiate into myelinating oligodendrocytes. However, posttraumatic endogenous remyelination is rarely complete, and a better understanding of OPCs' characteristics and their manipulations is critical to the development of novel therapies. In this review, we summarize known characteristics of OPCs and relevant regulative factors in both health and demyelinating disorders including SCI. More importantly, we highlight current evidence on post-SCI OPCs transplantation as a potential treatment option as well as the impediments against regeneration. Our aim is to shed lights on important knowledge gaps and to provoke thoughts for further researches and the development of therapeutic strategies.
The motor cortex: a network tuned to 7-14 Hz

The neocortex or six layer cortex consists of at least 52 cytoarchitectonically distinct areas in humans, and similar areas can be distinguished in rodents. Each of these areas has a defining set of extrinsic connections, identifiable functional roles, a distinct laminar arrangement, etc. Thus, neocortex is extensively subdivided into areas of anatomical and functional specialization, but less is known about the specialization of cellular and network physiology across areas. The motor cortex appears to have a distinct propensity to oscillate in the 7–14 Hz frequency range. Augmenting responses, normal mu and beta oscillations, and abnormal oscillations or after discharges caused by enhancing excitation or suppressing inhibition are all expressed around this frequency range. The substrate for this activity may be an excitatory network that is unique to the motor cortex or that is more strongly suppressed in other areas, such as somatosensory cortex. Interestingly, augmenting responses are dependent on behavioral state. They are abolished during behavioral arousal. Here, I briefly review this evidence.
Integrated Textbook: Augmenting Paper Textbooks with Digital Learning Support Using Digital Pens

Although quality of display devices is good right now, most textbooks are still printed on papers. At the same time, most learning support and e-learning courseware are built with the assumption that the student only read information displayed on the screen. In this paper, we present an environment that provides learning support via computers, digital devices and network when a student studies a course by reading paper textbooks with a digital pen. The learning support is organized based on the knowledge unit of the location positioning by the digital pen in the textbook. The support includes term explanation, related discussions, underline, and annotation. These studying actions and results on papers are stored in the computer as well for later use. Initial experiment result on using the system shows that students feel beneficial to their study
Efficient SIFT matching from keypoint descriptor properties

A modular approach to finding fast SIFT correspondences in single-image matching applications is proposed. Our algorithm exploits properties of the SIFT descriptor vector to find shortcuts to the most likely matches in a feature set. We are able to converge approximately 15 times faster than a linear search, and, respectively, four and five times faster than both PCA-SIFT and SURF (both of which use descriptor vectors that contain far fewer dimensions than SIFT), at near-equivalent recall and precision performance.
Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of HLA-B*5801 Testing in Preventing Allopurinol-Induced SJS/TEN in Thai Population

Background Stevens-Johnson syndrome (SJS) and Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis (TEN), caused by allopurinol therapy, are strongly associated with the human leukocyte antigen (HLA), HLA-B*5801. Identification of HLA-B*5801 genotype before prescribing allopurinol offers the possibility of avoiding allopurinol-induced SJS/TEN. As there is a paucity of evidence about economic value of such testing, this study aims to determine the cost-effectiveness of HLA-B*5801 testing compared with usual care (no genetic testing) before allopurinol administration in Thailand. Methods and Finding A decision analytical and Markov model was used to estimate life time costs and outcomes represented as quality adjusted life years (QALYs) gained. The model was populated with relevant information of the association between gene and allopurinol-induced SJS/TEN, test characteristics, costs, and epidemiologic data for Thailand from a societal perspective. Input data were obtained from the literature and a retrospective database analysis. The results were expressed as incremental cost per QALY gained. A base-case analysis was performed for patients at age 30. A series of sensitivity analyses including scenario, one-way, and probabilistic sensitivity analyses were constructed to explore the robustness of the findings. Based on a hypothetical cohort of 1,000 patients, the incremental total cost was 923,919 THB (USD 29,804) and incremental QALY was 5.89 with an ICER of 156,937.04 THB (USD 5,062) per QALY gained. The cost of gout management, incidence of SJS/TEN, case fatality rate of SJS/TEN, and cost of genetic testing are considered very influential parameters on the cost-effectiveness value of HLA-B*5801 testing. Conclusions The genetic testing for HLA-B*5801 before allopurinol administration is considered a highly potential cost-effective intervention in Thailand. The findings are sensitive to a number of factors. In addition to cost-effectiveness findings, consideration of other factors including ethical, legal, and social implications is needed for an informed policy decision making.
Food Insecurity in Urban Slums: Evidence from Ibadan Metropolis, Southwest Nigeria

Food insecurity is a major challenge among the urban poor who reside mainly in slums. The prevalence and determinants of food insecurity among households living in urban slums of Ibadan, Nigeria were therefore assessed. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and ordered probit model. Food insecurity was found to be prevalent among the slum residents, with about 81% being food insecure. Nine out of every 10 (89.1%) households were male-headed. The largest proportion of the mildly food insecure (37%) household heads were less than 30 years old, while the largest proportion of moderately food insecure (45%) and severely food insecure (38%) household heads were within the age cohort of 31 to 40 years. Less than half of the mildly food insecure household heads had secondary school education while about three quarters of the moderately food insecure households had primary school education. Approximately one out of every food secure, mildly food insecure and moderately food insecure households (50, 54 and 57%, respectively) had five to nine members, while about 62% of the severely food insecure households had the same household size. A half (50%) of the food secure household had access to water closet toilet facility, while pit latrine, use of bucket and open defecation were prominent among the mildly food insecure, moderately food insecure, and severely food insecure households, respectively. Food insecurity status was explained by educational status of household head, household size, per capita income and duration of stay in the slum.
Nonlinearity-tolerant time domain hybrid modulation for 4–8 bits/symbol based on 2A8PSK

We propose time domain hybrid modulation to cover 4–8 bits/symbol range, based on 5, 6, and 7 bits/symbol 4D-2A8PSK. Simulation results indicate that they have up to 1.6 dB higher span loss budget than the hybrid modulation based on conventional modulation formats in nonlinear channels.
Atherosclerotic coronary lesions with inadequate compensatory enlargement have smaller plaque and vessel volumes: observations with three dimensional intravascular ultrasound in vivo

Objective To compare vessel, lumen, and plaque volumes in atherosclerotic coronary lesions with inadequate compensatory enlargement versus lesions with adequate compensatory enlargement. Design 35 angiographically significant coronary lesions were examined by intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) during motorised transducer pullback. Segments 20 mm in length were analysed using a validated automated three dimensional analysis system. IVUS was used to classify lesions as having inadequate (group I) or adequate (group II) compensatory enlargement. Results There was no significant difference in quantitative angiographic measurements and the IVUS minimum lumen cross sectional area between groups I (n = 15) and II (n = 20). In group I, the vessel cross sectional area was 13.3 (3.0) mm2 at the lesion site and 14.4 (3.6) mm2 at the distal reference (p < 0.01), whereas in group II it was 17.5 (5.6) mm2 at the lesion site and 14.0 (6.0) mm2 at the distal reference (p < 0.001). Vessel and plaque cross sectional areas were significantly smaller in group I than in group II (13.3 (3.0)v 17.5 (5.6) mm2, p < 0.01; and 10.9 (2.8) v 15.2 (4.9) mm2, p < 0.005). Similarly, vessel and plaque volume were smaller in group I (291.0 (61.0) v 353.7 (110.0) mm3, and 177.5 (48.4) v 228.0 (92.8) mm3, p < 0.05 for both). Lumen areas and volumes were similar. Conclusions In lesions with inadequate compensatory enlargement, both vessel and plaque volume appear to be smaller than in lesions with adequate compensatory enlargement.
Musical vs. real world feedback signals

Sound families comprised of either musical sounds (abstract musical signals), communications sounds (based on traditional electronic signals), or real world sounds (based on naturally occurring, nonmusical events) were designed to provide auditory feedback in a graphical user interface. Typical business users mapped the sounds to functions and rated their confidence in the functional mapping. The sounds which mapped well to functions were then tested within the context of a graphical user interface business communications simulation. Users rated the pleasantness and appropriateness of each sound and selected the best sound for each function. In general, real world sounds mapped most reliably to the functions. However, users consistently preferred musical sounds to the real world sounds. Of the eleven feedback signals selected for specific functions four were communications based and seven were musical. None of the real world auditory signals were acceptable.
The effects of the dopamine agonist rotigotine on hemispatial neglect following stroke

Hemispatial neglect following right-hemisphere stroke is a common and disabling disorder, for which there is currently no effective pharmacological treatment. Dopamine agonists have been shown to play a role in selective attention and working memory, two core cognitive components of neglect. Here, we investigated whether the dopamine agonist rotigotine would have a beneficial effect on hemispatial neglect in stroke patients. A double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled ABA design was used, in which each patient was assessed for 20 testing sessions, in three phases: pretreatment (Phase A1), on transdermal rotigotine for 7–11 days (Phase B) and post-treatment (Phase A2), with the exact duration of each phase randomized within limits. Outcome measures included performance on cancellation (visual search), line bisection, visual working memory, selective attention and sustained attention tasks, as well as measures of motor control. Sixteen right-hemisphere stroke patients were recruited, all of whom completed the trial. Performance on the Mesulam shape cancellation task improved significantly while on rotigotine, with the number of targets found on the left side increasing by 12.8% (P = 0.012) on treatment and spatial bias reducing by 8.1% (P = 0.016). This improvement in visual search was associated with an enhancement in selective attention but not on our measures of working memory or sustained attention. The positive effect of rotigotine on visual search was not associated with the degree of preservation of prefrontal cortex and occurred even in patients with significant prefrontal involvement. Rotigotine was not associated with any significant improvement in motor performance. This proof-of-concept study suggests a beneficial role of dopaminergic modulation on visual search and selective attention in patients with hemispatial neglect following stroke.
Wearing Many (Social) Hats: How Different Are Your Different Social Network Personae?

This paper investigates when users create profiles in different social networks, whether they are redundant expressions of the same persona, or they are adapted to each platform. Using the personal webpages of 116,998 users on About.me, we identify and extract matched user profiles on several major social networks including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. We find evidence for distinct site-specific norms, such as differences in the language used in the text of the profile self-description, and the kind of picture used as profile image. By learning a model that robustly identifies the platform given a user’s profile image (0.657–0.829 AUC) or self-description (0.608–0.847 AUC), we confirm that users do adapt their behaviour to individual platforms in an identifiable and learnable manner. However, different genders and age groups adapt their behaviour differently from each other, and these differences are, in general, consistent across different platforms. We show that differences in social profile construction correspond to differences in how formal or informal the platform is.
Active Inference, Evidence Accumulation, and the Urn Task

Abstract Deciding how much evidence to accumulate before making a decision is a problem we and other animals often face, but one that is not completely understood. This issue is particularly important because a tendency to sample less information (often known as reflection impulsivity) is a feature in several psychopathologies, such as psychosis. A formal understanding of information sampling may therefore clarify the computational anatomy of psychopathology. In this theoretical letter, we consider evidence accumulation in terms of active (Bayesian) inference using a generic model of Markov decision processes. Here, agents are equipped with beliefs about their own behavior—in this case, that they will make informed decisions. Normative decision making is then modeled using variational Bayes to minimize surprise about choice outcomes. Under this scheme, different facets of belief updating map naturally onto the functional anatomy of the brain (at least at a heuristic level). Of particular interest is the key role played by the expected precision of beliefs about control, which we have previously suggested may be encoded by dopaminergic neurons in the midbrain. We show that manipulating expected precision strongly affects how much information an agent characteristically samples, and thus provides a possible link between impulsivity and dopaminergic dysfunction. Our study therefore represents a step toward understanding evidence accumulation in terms of neurobiologically plausible Bayesian inference and may cast light on why this process is disordered in psychopathology.
Hydration of the lower stratosphere by ice crystal geysers over land convective systems

The possible impact of deep convective overshooting over land has been explored by six simultaneous soundings of water vapour, particles and ozone in the lower stratosphere next to Mesoscale Convective Systems (MCSs) during the monsoon season over West Africa in Niamey, Niger in August 2006. The water vapour measurements were carried out using a fast response FLASH-B Lyman-alpha hygrometer. The high vertical resolution observations of the instrument show the presence of accumulation of enhanced water vapour layers between the tropopause at 370 K and the 420 K level. Most of these moist layers are shown connected with overshooting events occurring upwind as identified from satellite IR images over which the air mass probed by the sondes passed during the three previous days. In the case of a local overshoot identified by echo top turrets above the tropopause by the MIT C-band radar also in Niamey, tight coincidence was found between enhanced water vapour, ice crystal and ozone dip layers indicative of fast uplift of tropospheric air across the tropopause. The water vapour mixing ratio in the enriched layers exceeds frequently by 1–3 ppmv the average 6 ppmv saturation ratio at the tropopause and by up to 7 ppmv in the extreme case of local storm in coincidence with the presence of ice crystals. The presence of such layers strongly suggests hydration of the lower stratosphere by geyser-like injection of ice particles over overshooting turrets. The pile-like increase of water vapour up to 19 km seen by the high-resolution hygrometer during the season of maximum temperature of the tropopause, suggests that the above hydration mechanism may contribute to the summer maximum moisture in the lower stratosphere. If this interpretation is correct, hydration by ice geysers across the tropopause might be an important contributor to the stratospheric water vapour budget.
TRANS: Schema-Aware Mapping of OWL Ontologies into Relational Databases

An ontology is an explicit specification of shared conceptualization. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies, and is endorsed by the World Wide Web Consortium. The main operation on ontologies is to query them and to store them so as to answer queries efficiently. By mapping ontologies to relational databases, we can leverage the power of SQL for ontology reasoning over millions of instances. We address the problem of efficiently mapping and querying OWL ontologies using relational databases. We present an OWL ontology mapping tool, called TRANS which can automatically map OWL ontology to mapped relational schema. Using TRANS, we answer both extensional queries and some intentional queries. We compare our approach with schema-aware OWL-mapping tool, Genea.
Enthalpy and volume changes in lipid membranes I. The proportionality of heat and volume changes in the lipid melting transition and its implication for the elastic constants.

Differential scanning calorimetry, pressure calorimetry, and densitometry have been employed to study the relation between volume and enthalpy changes in the melting regime of lipid membranes. We demonstrate a rigid proportional relation between volume expansion coefficient and heat capacity. This result is first shown in densitometric experiments. It implies that calorimetric profiles obey a simple scaling law for the temperature axes in experiments with applied hydrostatic pressure. In a theoretical paper (Heimburg, T. Biochim. Biophys. Acta 1998, 1415, 147-162), we have argued that this relation has far-reaching consequences for the predictiblity of elastic constants from the heat capacity. The proportionality constant between volume and enthalpy changes is found to be independent of the lipid, which has interesting consequences for the calculation of the elastic constants of biological lipid mixtures with unknown composition. We demonstrate this for lung surfactant, which displays a similar relation between volume and enthalpy changes.
Real-time gesture recognition using deterministic boosting

A gesture recognition system which can reliably recognize single-hand gestures in real time on a 600Mhz notebook computer is described. The system has a vocabulary of 46 gestures including the American sign language letterspelling alphabet and digits. It includes mouse movements such as drag and drop, and is demonstrated controlling a windowed operating system, editing a document and performing file-system operations with extremely low error rates over long time periods. Real-time performance is provided by a novel combination of exemplar-based classification and a new “deterministic boosting” algorithm which can allow for fast online retraining. Importantly, each frame of video is processed independently: no temporal Markov model is used to constrain gesture identity, and the search region is the entire image. This places stringent requirements on the accuracy and speed of recognition, which are met by our proposed architecture. Gesture recognition is an area of active current research in computer vision. The prospect of a user-interface in which natural gestures can be used to enhance human-computer interaction brings visions of more accessible computer systems, and ultimately of higher bandwidth interactions than will be possible using keyboard and mouse alone. This paper describes a system for automatic real-time control of a windowed operating system entirely based on one-handed gesture recognition. Using a computer-mounted video camera as the sensor, the system can reliably interpret a 46-element gesture set at 15 frames per second on a 600MHz notebook PC. The gesture set, shown in figure 1, comprises the 36 letters and digits of the American Sign Language fingerspelling alphabet [ 9], three ‘mouse buttons’, and some ancillary gestures. The accompanying video, and figure 4, show a transcript of about five minutes of system operation in which files are created, renamed, moved, and edited—entirely under gesture control. This corresponds to a per-image recognition rate of over 99%, which exceeds any reported system to date, whether or not real-time. This significant improvement in performance is the outcome of three factors: 1. The general engineering of the system means that preprocessing is reliable on every frame. Lighting is controlled with just enough care to ensure that most skin pixels are detected using simple image processing. The user wears a coloured wrist band which allows the orientation of the hand to be easily computed. 2. An exemplar-based classifier[11, 19] ensures that recognition of the gesture label from a preprocessed image uses a rich, informative model, allowing a large gesture vocabulary to be employed. 817