Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Example-based facial rigging

We introduce a method for generating facial blendshape rigs from a set of example poses of a CG character. Our system transfers controller semantics and expression dynamics from a generic template to the target blendshape model, while solving for an optimal reproduction of the training poses. This enables a scalable design process, where the user can iteratively add more training poses to refine the blendshape expression space. However, plausible animations can be obtained even with a single training pose. We show how formulating the optimization in gradient space yields superior results as compared to a direct optimization on blendshape vertices. We provide examples for both hand-crafted characters and 3D scans of a real actor and demonstrate the performance of our system in the context of markerless art-directable facial tracking.
Trichoderma harzianum T-22 Induces Systemic Resistance in Tomato Infected by Cucumber mosaic virus

Understanding the induction of plant defenses against viruses using biocontrol agents is essential for developing new strategies against these pathogens, given the ineffectiveness of chemical treatments. The ability of Trichoderma harzianum, strain T-22 (T22) to control Cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) in Solanum lycopersicum var. cerasiforme plants and the changes in the physiology of tomato treated/infected with T22/CMV were examined. Plant growth-promoting effects, photosynthetic performance, reactive oxygen species scavenging enzymes, and phytohormones were investigated. T22 improved tomato growth in terms of plant height and improved photosynthesis, total chlorophyll content and plant gas exchange. In contrast, CMV induced a negative effect on dry matter accumulation and inhibited the photosynthetic capacity. The analysis of plant hormones demonstrated that treating with T22 before or simultaneously to CMV infection, led to a systemic resistance by jasmonic acid/ethylene and salicylic acid signaling pathways. Conversely, systemic resistance was abscissic acid-dependent when T22 treatment was administered after the CMV infection. In conclusion, the data reported here indicate that the T22-based strategy may be the most effective measure against CMV.
Modeling Heading in Adult Soccer Players

Heading soccer balls can generate mild brain injuries and in the long run can lead to difficulty in solving problems, memory deficits, and language difficulties. Researchers evaluated the effects on the head for both correct and incorrect heading techniques. They based the head's geometry on medical images. They determined the injury's magnitude by comparing the neurological tissue's resistance with predictions of the generated stresses. The evaluation examined fast playing conditions in adult soccer, taking into account the ball's speed and the type of impact. Mathematical simulations using the finite element method indicated that correctly heading balls arriving at moderate speed presents a low risk of brain injury. However, damage can happen around the third cervical vertebra. These results coincide with medical studies. Incorrect heading greatly increases the brain injury risk and can alter the parietal area.
On the minimum description length principle for sources with piecewise constant parameters

Universal lossless coding in the presence of finitely many abrupt changes in the statistics of the source, at unknown points, is investigated. The minimum description length (MDL) principle is derived for this setting. In particular, it is shown that, for any uniquely decipherable code, for almost every combination of statistical parameter vectors governing each segment, and for almost every vector of transition instants, the minimum achievable redundancy is composed from 0.5 log n/n bits for each unknown segmental parameter and log n/n bits for each transition, where n is the length of the input string. This redundancy is shown to be attainable by a strongly sequential universal encoder, i.e., an encoder that does not utilize the knowledge of a prescribed value of n. >
Exploiting Sharing Opportunities for Real-time Complex Event Analytics

Complex event analytics systems continuously evaluate massive workloads of pattern queries on high volume event streams to detect and extract complex events of interest to the application. Such time-critical stream-based applications range from real-time fraud detection to personalized health monitoring. Achieving near real-time system responsiveness when processing these workloads composed of complex event pattern queries is their main challenge. In this article, we ﬁrst review several unique optimization opportunities that we have identiﬁed for complex event analytics. We then introduce a family of optimization strategies that consider event correlation over time to maximally leverage sharing opportunities in event pattern detection and aggregation. Lastly, we describe the event-stream transaction model we designed to ensure high performance shared pattern processing on modern multi-core architectures.
The Million-Dollar Question: Why Pre-Adolescents Watch Television

THE MILLION-DOLLAR QUESTION: WHY PRE-ADOLESCENTS WATCH TELEVISION Emily Anne Smurthwaite Department of Communications Master of Arts This study presents qualitative research examining the relationship youth have with television. Information for this study was collected through media journals, personal essays, in-depth interviews, and focus groups held with eighteen sixth-graders who attended a charter elementary school in Lindon, Utah. The question posed to the students multiple times during the data collection was: “Would you give up television for $1 million? ” Through the students’ answers and ensuing dialogue, the researcher examined the social value the pre-adolescents attributed to watching television. The findings identify three main categories the students said were reasons they were attached to television, which also corresponded adolescent-needs that have been identified by scholars. The categories are 1) youth need friendship and television offers potential to develop parasocial relationships 2) youth need intimacy and television is an activity they can do with and talk about with friends and 3) youth need to learn about the new group they’re being socialized into and television offers portrayals of future situations. The study also includes ideas about why television is so valuable to the youth; it concludes with suggestions for future research, including expanding this research to other demographics, and recommendations for parents and school teachers, including media literacy and parental mediation.
Rmst Is a Novel Marker for the Mouse Ventral Mesencephalic Floor Plate and the Anterior Dorsal Midline Cells

The availability of specific markers expressed in different regions of the developing nervous system provides a useful tool to illuminate their development, regulation and function. We have identified by expression profiling a putative non-coding RNA, Rmst, that exhibits prominent expression in the midbrain floor plate region, the isthmus and the roof plate of the anterior neural tube. At the developmental stage when the ventral dopaminergic neuron territory is being established, Rmst expression appears to be restricted to the presumptive dopaminergic neurons of the ventral tegmental area that lies close to the ventral midline. Thus this study presents Rmst as a novel marker for the developing dopaminergic neurons in the mesencephalic floor plate as well as a marker for the dorsal midline cells of the anterior neural tube and the isthmic organizer.
Reflection from layered surfaces due to subsurface scattering

The reflection of light from most materials consists of two major terms: the specular and the diffuse. Specular reflection may be modeled from first principles by considering a rough surface consisting of perfect reflectors, or micro-facets. Diffuse reflection is generally considered to result from multiple scattering either from a rough surface or from within a layer near the surface. Accounting for diffuse reflection by Lambert? s Cosine Law, as is universally done in computer graphics, is not a physical theory based on first principles. This paper presents a model for subsurface scattering in layered surfaces in terms of one-dimensional linear transport theory. We derive explicit formulas for backscattering and transmission that can be directly incorporated in most rendering systems, and a general Monte Carlo method that is easily added to a ray tracer. This model is particularly appropriate for common layered materials appearing in nature, such as biological tissues (e.g. skin, leaves, etc.) or inorganic materials (e.g. snow, sand, paint, varnished or dusty surfaces). As an application of the model, we simulate the appearance of a face and a cluster of leaves from experimental data describing their layer properties.
Vicis: A reliable network for unreliable silicon

Process scaling has given designers billions of transistors to work with. As feature sizes near the atomic scale, extensive variation and wearout inevitably make margining uneconomical or impossible. The ElastIC project seeks to address this by creating a large-scale chip-multiprocessor that can self-diagnose, adapt, and heal. Creating large, flexible designs in this environment naturally lends itself to the repetitive nature of network-on-chip (NoC), but the loss of a single link or router will result in complete network failure. In this work we present Vicis, an ElastIC-style NoC that can tolerate the loss of many network components due to wearout induced hard faults. Vicis uses the inherent redundancy in the network and its routers in order to maintain correct operation while incurring a much lower area overhead than previously proposed N-modular redundancy (NMR) based solutions. Each router has a built-in-self-test (BIST) that diagnoses the locations of hard fault and runs a number of algorithms to best use ECC, port swapping, and a crossbar bypass bus to mitigate them. The routers work together to run distributed algorithms to solve network-wide problems as well, protecting the networking against critical failures in individual routers. In this work we show that with stuck-at fault rates as high as 1 in 2000 gates, Vicis will continue to operate with approximately half of its routers still functional and communicating.
Logo Retrieval in Document Images

This paper presents a scalable algorithm for segmentation free logo retrieval in document images. The contributions include the use of the SURF feature for logo retrieval, a novel indexing algorithm for efficient retrieval and a method to filter results using the orientation of local features and geometric constraints. Results demonstrate that logo retrieval can be performed with high accuracy and efficiently scaled to a large datasets.
Encapsulation of Cryptococcus neoformans impairs antigen-specific T-cell responses

The encapsulated yeast Cryptococcus neoformans is a significant cause of opportunistic infection in patients with impaired cell-mediated immunity. The major virulence determinant of the organism is an antiphagocytic polysaccharide capsule synthesized after entry into the host. Using both an encapsulated virulent strain and an acapsular avirulent mutant, we have demonstrated the reduced ability of the encapsulated strain to stimulate specific T-cell responses in vitro. This reduction was mediated by the antiphagocytic action of the capsule rather than by direct inhibition of antigen processing and presentation, since prior opsonization with complement enhanced the ingestion of encapsulated yeast cells by purified antigen-presenting cells and allowed significant T-cell activation. Once ingestion had occurred, cryptococci were efficiently processed by activated macrophages via a chloroquine-sensitive pathway. Cryptococcal antigens were available for T-cell recognition within 1 to 2 h of interaction with macrophages and presented in a major histocompatibility complex-restricted manner. Our results suggest that the antiphagocytic action of the polysaccharide capsule is an important determinant for the development of T-cell immunity to C. neoformans.
Functional Bioassays for Immune Monitoring of High-Risk Neuroblastoma Patients Treated with ch14.18/CHO Anti-GD2 Antibody

Effective treatment of high-risk neuroblastoma (NB) remains a major challenge in pediatric oncology. Human/mouse chimeric monoclonal anti-GD2 antibody (mAb) ch14.18 is emerging as a treatment option to improve outcome. After establishing a production process in Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells, ch14.18/CHO was made available in Europe for clinical trials. Here, we describe validated functional bioassays for the purpose of immune monitoring of these trials and demonstrate GD2-specific immune effector functions of ch14.18/CHO in treated patients. Two calcein-based bioassays for complement-dependent- (CDC) and antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity (ADCC) were set up based on patient serum and immune cells tested against NB cells. For this purpose, we identified LA-N-1 NB cells as best suited within a panel of cell lines. Assay conditions were first established using serum and cells of healthy donors. We found an effector-to-target (E:T) cell ratio of 20∶1 for PBMC preparations as best suited for GD2-specific ADCC analysis. A simplified method of effector cell preparation by lysis of erythrocytes was evaluated revealing equivalent results at an E:T ratio of 40∶1. Optimal results for CDC were found with a serum dilution at 1∶8. For validation, both within-assay and inter-assay precision were determined and coefficients of variation (CV) were below 20%. Sample quality following storage at room temperature (RT) showed that sodium-heparin-anticoagulated blood and serum are stable for 48 h and 96 h, respectively. Application of these bioassays to blood samples of three selected high-risk NB patients treated with ch14.18/CHO (100 mg/m2) revealed GD2-specific increases in CDC (4.5–9.4 fold) and ADCC (4.6–6.0 fold) on day 8 compared to baseline, indicating assay applicability for the monitoring of multicenter clinical trials requiring sample shipment at RT for central lab analysis.
The family context of low-income parents who restrict child screen time.

BACKGROUND The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that parents restrict child screen time to two hours per day, but many preschool-aged children exceed this viewing recommendation. Modifying children's viewing habits will require collaborating with parents, but little is known about the factors that influence parents' capacity for effective screen-related parenting. This study aimed to identify the demographic, family and community contextual factors associated with low-income parents' restriction of child screen time. METHODS Parents (N=146) of children (age 2-5 years) attending Head Start centers in the United States completed a self-report survey in 2010 assessing parent and child screen use (television, DVD, video, video games, and leisure-time computer use), parent restriction of child screen time, and family (parent stress, social support, and life pressures) and community (neighborhood safety and social capital) factors. RESULTS Children were more likely to meet the American Academy of Pediatrics screen time recommendation if their parent reported high restriction of child screen time. Parent and child demographic characteristics were not associated with parents' restriction of child screen time. In multivariate analysis, less parent screen time, fewer parent life pressures, and greater social support were associated with parents' high restriction of screen time. CONCLUSION Family contextual factors may play an important role in enabling low-income parents to restrict their children's screen time. When counseling low-income parents about the importance of restricting child screen time, practitioners should be sensitive to family contextual factors that may influence parents' capacity to implement this behavior change.
Party and Candidate Websites: A Comparative Explanatory Analysis

This study provides a systematic investigation of party and candidate websites across five countries. It examines three prominent features of current online political communication (interactivity, political personalization, and mobilization). Furthermore it assesses to what extent country, party, and source characteristics explain differences in the usage of these features. In total, 63 websites and 416 pages in Germany, Romania, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Great Britain were subject to a systematic content analysis. The findings suggest that differences in party and source characteristics explain variation in levels of mobilization, interactivity, and personalization, with, for example, party websites trying to mobilize citizens while websites belonging to politicians are used as a platform for self-promotion. In general, results show that the division of countries into East and West European is less important.
Cardiovascular sequelae of toxaemia of pregnancy.

OBJECTIVE: To determine whether the rate of cardiovascular disease is different among parous women with a general practitioner reported history of toxaemia of pregnancy than among those not reported to have experienced toxaemia, or among nulliparous women. DESIGN: Prospective cohort study. SETTING: 1400 general practitioners throughout the United Kingdom. SUBJECTS: Women who had never used oral contraceptives who were recruited to the Royal College of General Practitioners' oral contraception study (original cohort about 23000). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Age, social class, and smoking standardised incidence rates for hypertensive disease, acute myocardial infarction, other acute ischaemic heart disease, other chronic ischaemic heart disease, angina pectoris, total ischaemic heart disease, total cerebrovascular disease, and total venous thromboembolic disease in the three groups. RESULTS: Compared with parous women with no history of toxaemia, those who had experienced toxaemia had a significantly increased risk of hypertensive disease (relative risk (RR) 2.35), acute myocardial infarction (RR 2.24), chronic ischaemic heart disease (RR 1.74), angina pectoris (RR 1.53), all ischaemic heart disease (RR 1.65), and venous thromboembolism (RR 1.62). The rates for all cerebrovascular disease and peripheral vascular disease were also increased but not significantly. Nulliparous women were more likely to develop hypertension or all cerebrovascular disease later in life than parous women without a history of toxaemia. CONCLUSIONS: A history of toxaemia of pregnancy increases the risk of several distinct cardiovascular conditions later in life. Although causality cannot be inferred (other characteristics of the women may account for both an increased risk of toxaemia and a risk of subsequent vascular disease), the findings merit further research because of their potential importance.
The Prevalence of and Risk Factors Associated with Pterygium in a Rural Adult Chinese Population: The Handan Eye Study

ABSTRACT Purpose: To describe the prevalence and risk factors for pterygium in a rural adult Chinese population. Methods: A total of 7557 people aged 30 years and over were randomly selected from 13 villages in a rural county, Yongnian, within Handan district, Hebei Province of China. All eligible subjects were invited to undergo a comprehensive eye examination. A slit-lamp was used to examine the anterior segment for evidence of pterygium. Pterygium was graded for severity (G1 to G3) by visibility of episcleral vessels. Results: Of 6685 participants (88.5% of 7557) included in this study, pterygium was present in 401 (6.0%). Using direct standardization to the 2000 China population census for rural residents, the prevalence of pterygium was 7.1% (95% confidence interval [CI], 6.5–7.8%) among subjects aged 40+ years, and 4.8% (95% CI 4.3–5.3%) when including those aged 30–39 years. Pterygium was more common in men than in women (age-adjusted odds ratio [OR] 2.0, 95% CI 1.4–2.8). Prevalence increased with age (OR 1.8, 95% CI 1.6–2.1 per decade increase in age). Current smoking appeared to be protective (OR 0.5, 95% CI 0.4–0.7). Of eyes with any pterygium, 4.6% (95% CI 1.9–7.3%) had low vision. Conclusion: Approximately one in ten adults had pterygium in this rural Chinese population. Age and male sex were positively, and current smoking negatively associated with the prevalence of pterygium.
Effects of the Student Success Skill Program on Feelings of Connectedness, Parent-Child Relationship, and Success Skill Engagement in Middle School Students

The author of the current study examined the effects of the Student Success Skills (SSS) program on middle school students’ perceptions of connectedness, parent-child relationship, and engagement in success skills. The sample included 41 predominantly Hispanic seventh grade students from an impoverished community in the rural southwest. The author used a paired-samples t-test to determine the effects of the SSS program on connectedness, parent-child relationship, and success skill engagement. Overall, students reported significantly decreased perceptions of connectedness and success skill engagement. A rationale for the students’ results reflects the context of current educational climate, sex factors, and ethnic considerations. Based on results and discussion, the author provides implications for the practice of school counselors and suggestions for future research.
Subjective and autonomic stress responses in alexithymia

Alexithymia refers to a specific disturbance in emotional processing that is manifested through difficulties in identifying and verbalizing feelings. The main objective of this investigation has been the study about the relationship between subjective and autonomic physiological reactivity pattern to stressful laboratory situation, related with alexithymia level, assessed by the Toronto Alexithymia Scale, TAS-20. The experiment involved six phases: I-adaptation, II-relaxation, III-stress (mental arithmetic), IV-relaxation, V-stress (watching a distressing film), and VI-relaxation. During all periods, the subjective self-perception of physiological activation and autonomic reactivity (using the Palmar Sweat Index), was assessed. Results showed a significantly dissociation by group between subjective selfperception of physiological arousal and self-perception of affective arousal in questionnaire scores, during adaptation period exclusively. The results don't show significant correlations among groups between the subjective self-perception of activation and the autonomous reactivity. These results are discussed in terms of their alexithymic characteristics they are associated with autonomic arousal.
Lysozymuria and acute disorders of renal function

On the assumption that increased urinary lysozyme concentration (`lysozymuria') indicates tubular proteinuria and therefore impaired tubular function, urinary lysozyme has been estimated in acute disorders where transient disturbances of renal function might be expected, in cases diagnosed clinically as extrarenal uraemia, and in a few examples of acute renal disease. Reversible lysozymuria occurred with hypokalaemia, postoperative `collapse', electrolyte depletion, severe extrarenal infection, acute pyelonephritis, the nephrotic syndrome, after a few apparently uncomplicated surgical operations, and very transiently after ventricular fibrillation abolished by DC shock. There was no lysozymuria with severe uraemic heart failure, aspirin and paracetamol poisoning, or severe jaundice, nor in two cases of acute glomerulonephritis. Although lysozymuria may occasionally be useful in the clinical diagnosis of acutely disordered renal function, the results suggest that its value is limited; on the other hand, they have provided information on renal pathophysiology in acute disease.