Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evapotranspiration of partially vegetated surfaces from remote sensing

Evapotranspiration (ET) estimates are required for many applications in agricultural and environmental management, from hydrological applications to crop models and irrigation scheduling. Improvement in irrigation water management is achieved when crop water use is accurately quantified in time and space. Conventionally, ET can be measured using Bowen ratio energy balance systems, eddy covariance systems, surface renewal systems, weighing lysimeters and sap flows, among others. Although these techniques can provide accurate estimates of ET over a homogeneous area, they are mainly based on site measurements that are local, and cannot represent the spatial variability of ET within a field or region. Satellite data are ideally suited for deriving spatially continuous fields of ET using energy balance techniques. However for partially vegetated surfaces (i.e. orchards), the use of those techniques has been limited due to the low spatial resolution obtained from some type of sensors at the satellite platform, that difficult its utilization at a farm level. Here, the use of methodologies of images fusion that integrate information from different sensors, offer an opportunity to achieve a characterization with more detail that consistently can be used at a farm level. The main goal of this study is to evaluate the performance of a surface energy balance (SEB) model and an image fusion algorithm to estimate ET for partially vegetated surfaces. Special interest is focused in instantaneous and daily evapotranspiration. Surface energy fluxes calculated with a SEB model from both original and fused images are compared with Eddy Covariance measurements made over a blueberry and cherry orchard fields.
C-Peptide as a Measure of the Secretion and Hepatic Extraction of Insulin: Pitfalls and Limitations

The large and variable hepatic extraction of insulin is a major obstacle to our ability to quantitate insulin secretion accurately in human subjects. The evidence that C-peptide is secreted from the beta cell in equimolar concentration with insulin, but not extracted by the liver to any significant degree, has provided a firm scientific basis for the use of peripheral C-peptide concentrations as a semiquantitative marker of beta cell secretory activity in a variety of clinical situations. Thus, plasma C-peptide has proved to be extremely valuable in the study of the natural history of type 1 diabetes, to monitor insulin secretion in patients with insulin antibodies, and as an adjunct in the investigation of patients with hypoglycemic disorders. The use of the peripheral C-peptide concentration to accurately quantitate the rate of insulin secretion is more controversial. This is mainly because understanding of the kinetics and metabolism of C-peptide under different conditions is incomplete. Unfortunately, sufficient quantities of human C-peptide are not available to allow the experimental validation of the mathematical formulae that have been proposed for the calculation of insulin secretion from peripheral C-peptide concentrations. Until it is possible to perform such experiments, the accuracy of studies that have derived insulin secretion rates from peripheral C-peptide levels will remain uncertain. The assumption that the peripheral C-peptide:insulin molar ratio can be used as a reflection of hepatic insulin extraction has not been experimentally validated. The marked difference in the plasma half-lives of insulin and C-peptide complicates the interpretation of changes in their ratios. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Eight Years of Rider Measurement in the Android Malware Ecosystem

Despite the growing threat posed by the Android malware, the research community is still lacking a comprehensive view of common behaviors and emerging trends in malware families active on the platform. Without such view, researchers incur the risk of developing systems that only detect outdated threats, missing the most recent ones. In this article, we conduct the largest measurement of Android malware behavior to date, analyzing over 1.2 million malware samples that belong to 1.28K families over a period of eight years (from 2010 to 2017). We aim at understanding how Android malware has evolved over time, focusing on repackaging malware. In this type of threat different innocuous apps are piggybacked with a malicious payload (rider), allowing inexpensive malware manufacturing. One of the main challenges posed when studying repackaged malware is slicing the app to split benign components apart from the malicious ones. To address this problem, we use differential analysis to isolate software components that are irrelevant to the campaign and study the behavior of malicious riders alone. Our analysis framework relies on collective repositories and recent advances on the systematization of intelligence extracted from multiple anti-virus vendors. We find that since its infancy in 2010, the Android malware ecosystem has changed significantly, both in the type of malicious activity performed by malware and in the level of obfuscation used to avoid detection. Finally, we discuss what our findings mean for Android malware detection research, highlighting areas that need further attention by the research community. In particular, we show that riders of malware families evolve over time. This evidences important experimental bias in research works levering on automated systems for family identification without considering variants.
2‐Deoxyglucose Incorporation into Rat Brain Glycogen During Measurement of Local Cerebral Glucose Utilization by the 2‐Deoxyglucose Method

Abstract: The incorporation of 14C into glycogen in rat brain has been measured under the same conditions that exist during the measurement of local cerebral glucose utilization by the autoradiographic 2‐[14C]deoxyglucose method. The results demonstrate that approximately 2% of the total 14C in brain 45 min after the pulse of 2‐[14C]deoxyglucose is contained in the glycogen portion, and, in fact, incorporated into α‐1‐4 and α‐1‐6 deoxyglucosyl linkages. When the brain is removed by dissection, as is routinely done in the course of the procedure of the 2‐[14C]deoxyglucose method to preserve the structure of the brain for autoradiography, the portion of total brain 14C contained in glycogen falls to less than 1%, presumably because of postmortem glycogenolysis which restores much of the label to deoxyglucose‐phosphates. In any case, the incorporation of the 14C into glycogen is of no consequence to the validity of the autoradiographic deoxyglucose method, not because of its small magnitude, but because 2‐[14C]deoxyglucose is incorporated into glycogen via [14C]deoxyglucose‐6‐phosphate, and the label in glycogen represents, therefore, an additional “trapped” product of deoxyglucose phosphorylation by hexokinase. With the autoradiographic 2‐[14C]deoxyglucose method, in which only total 14C concentration in the brain tissue is measured by quantitative autoradiography, it is essential that all the labeled products derived directly or indirectly from [14C]deoxyglucose phosphorylation by hexokinase be retained in the tissue; their chemical identity is of no significance.
Infants' Knowledge About Occlusion and Containment Events: A Surprising Discrepancy

The present research examined whether infants acquire general principles or more specific rules when learning about physical events. Experiments 1 and 2 investigated 4.5-month-old infants' ability to judge how much of a tall object should be hidden when lowered behind an occluder versus inside a container. The results indicated that at this age infants are able to reason about height in occlusion but not containment events. Experiment 3 showed that this latter ability does not emerge until about 7.5 months of age. The marked discrepancy in infants' reasoning about height in occlusion and containment events suggests that infants sort events into distinct categories, and acquire separate rules for each category.
Control of Posture, Subjective Vertical, and Body Scheme in Changing Gravitoinertial Field

Abstract : Spatial disorientation associated to decrease of sensorimotor performance may result in observers evolving in changing gravitoinertial field as created in aircrafts and other high dynamics modern vehicles. We have investigated the influence of body support orientation on the perception of egocentric and exocentric reference frames in 8 observers standing 80 cm off-center on a platform rotating at 120 deg.s(-1). Standing support was either a fixed horizontal board or a swinging pendulum. The perceptive task consisted in adjusting the orientation of a visual rod to indicate geocentric (subjective vertical (SV) and horizontal (SH)) and egocentric (head, trunk and platform orientations) references. Subjects' head and trunk, as well as rod orientations, were recorded with electromagnetic sensors (Polhemus Fastrack). The platform was equipped with sensors providing heel and toe vertical and lateral forces from both feet. Platform motion (when allowed to rotated in the swinging pendulum condition) was recorded with a potentiometer. We analyzed body postural reactions and compared veridical and perceived orientations in the two body support conditions. In the horizontal platform condition, to compensate the mechanical constraints caused by the centrifugal force, subjects leaned toward the axis of rotation adopting a hyperbolic body shape. Head was aligned with the gravitoinertial force. SH was not sensed as orthogonal to the SV. Foot pressure (vertical and lateral components) was higher under the outer than under the inner foot. In the swinging pendulum condition, SV and body were aligned with the gravitoinertial vector. SH and SV were orthogonal. Foot pressure was the same under both feet. In both conditions, head and body orientations were overestimated. The data suggest that, as the gravitoinertial vector evolves, the vestibular system induces compensatory postural adjustments. The hyperbolic body shape is thought to be due to body multisegmental coordination.
The Effects of Music Therapy on Vital Signs, Feeding, and Sleep in Premature Infants

OBJECTIVES: Recorded music risks overstimulation in NICUs. The live elements of music such as rhythm, breath, and parent-preferred lullabies may affect physiologic function (eg, heart and respiratory rates, O2 saturation levels, and activity levels) and developmental function (eg, sleep, feeding behavior, and weight gain) in premature infants. METHODS: A randomized clinical multisite trial of 272 premature infants aged ≥32 weeks with respiratory distress syndrome, clinical sepsis, and/or SGA (small for gestational age) served as their own controls in 11 NICUs. Infants received 3 interventions per week within a 2-week period, when data of physiologic and developmental domains were collected before, during, and after the interventions or no interventions and daily during a 2-week period. RESULTS: Three live music interventions showed changes in heart rate interactive with time. Lower heart rates occurred during the lullaby (P < .001) and rhythm intervention (P = .04). Sucking behavior showed differences with rhythm sound interventions (P = .03). Entrained breath sounds rendered lower heart rates after the intervention (P = .04) and differences in sleep patterns (P < .001). Caloric intake (P = .01) and sucking behavior (P = .02) were higher with parent-preferred lullabies. Music decreased parental stress perception (P < .001). CONCLUSIONS: The informed, intentional therapeutic use of live sound and parent-preferred lullabies applied by a certified music therapist can influence cardiac and respiratory function. Entrained with a premature infant’s observed vital signs, sound and lullaby may improve feeding behaviors and sucking patterns and may increase prolonged periods of quiet–alert states. Parent-preferred lullabies, sung live, can enhance bonding, thus decreasing the stress parents associate with premature infant care.
TSC-DL: Unsupervised trajectory segmentation of multi-modal surgical demonstrations with Deep Learning

The growth of robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery has led to sizable datasets of fixed-camera video and kinematic recordings of surgical subtasks. Segmentation of these trajectories into locally-similar contiguous sections can facilitate learning from demonstrations, skill assessment, and salvaging good segments from otherwise inconsistent demonstrations. Manual, or supervised, segmentation can be prone to error and impractical for large datasets. We present Transition State Clustering with Deep Learning (TSC-DL), a new unsupervised algorithm that leverages video and kinematic data for task-level segmentation, and finds regions of the visual feature space that correlate with transition events using features constructed from layers of pre-trained image classification Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). We report results on three datasets comparing Deep Learning architectures (AlexNet and VGG), choice of convolutional layer, dimensionality reduction techniques, visual encoding, and the use of Scale Invariant Feature Transforms (SIFT). We find that the deep architectures extract features that result in up-to a 30.4% improvement in Silhouette Score (a measure of cluster tightness) over the traditional “shallow” features from SIFT. We also present cases where TSC-DL discovers human annotator omissions. Supplementary material, data and code is available at: http://berkeleyautomation.github. io/tsc-dl/.
Issues of filter design for binary wavelet transform

Wavelet decomposition has recently been generalized to the binary field in which the arithmetic is performed wholly in GF(2). In order to maintain an invertible binary wavelet transform with desirable multiresolution properties, the bandwidth, the perfect reconstruction and the vanishing moment constraints are placed on the binary filters. While they guarantee an invertible transform, the transform becomes non-orthogonal and non-biorthogonal in which the inverse filters could be signal-length dependent. We propose to apply the perpendicular constraint on the binary filters to make them length-independent. A filter design strategy is outlined in which a filter design for a length of eight is given. We also propose an efficient implementation structure for the binary filters that saves memory space and reduces the computational complexity.
Crowdsourcing Question-Answer Meaning Representations

We introduce Question-Answer Meaning Representations (QAMRs), which represent the predicate-argument structure of a sentence as a set of question-answer pairs. We develop a crowdsourcing scheme to show that QAMRs can be labeled with very little training, and gather a dataset with over 5,000 sentences and 100,000 questions. A qualitative analysis demonstrates that the crowd-generated question-answer pairs cover the vast majority of predicate-argument relationships in existing datasets (including PropBank, NomBank, and QA-SRL) along with many previously under-resourced ones, including implicit arguments and relations. We also report baseline models for question generation and answering, and summarize a recent approach for using QAMR labels to improve an Open IE system. These results suggest the freely available QAMR data and annotation scheme should support significant future work.
Effects of n-3 long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids on depressed mood: systematic review of published trials.

BACKGROUND Greater dietary intakes of n-3 long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (n-3 PUFAs) may be beneficial for depressed mood. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to systematically review all published randomized controlled trials investigating the effects of n-3 PUFAs on depressed mood. DESIGN Eight medical and health databases were searched over all years of records until June 2006 for trials that exposed participants to n-3 PUFAs or fish, measured depressed mood, were conducted on human participants, and included a comparison group. RESULTS Eighteen randomized controlled trials were identified; 12 were included in a meta-analysis. The pooled standardized difference in mean outcome (fixed-effects model) was 0.13 SDs (95% CI: 0.01, 0.25) in those receiving n-3 PUFAs compared with placebo, with strong evidence of heterogeneity (I2 = 79%, P < 0.001). The presence of funnel plot asymmetry suggested that publication bias was the likely source of heterogeneity. Sensitivity analyses that excluded one large trial increased the effect size estimates but did not reduce heterogeneity. Meta-regression provided some evidence that the effect was stronger in trials involving populations with major depression-the difference in the effect size estimates was 0.73 (95% CI: 0.05, 1.41; P = 0.04), but there was still considerable heterogeneity when trials that involved populations with major depression were pooled separately (I2 = 72%, P < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS Trial evidence that examines the effects of n-3 PUFAs on depressed mood is limited and is difficult to summarize and evaluate because of considerable heterogeneity. The evidence available provides little support for the use of n-3 PUFAs to improve depressed mood. Larger trials with adequate power to detect clinically important benefits are required.
Dynamics of the Human Structural Connectome Underlying Working Memory Training

Brain region-specific changes have been demonstrated with a variety of cognitive training interventions. The effect of cognitive training on brain subnetworks in humans, however, remains largely unknown, with studies limited to functional networks. Here, we used a well-established working memory training program and state-of-the art neuroimaging methods in 40 healthy adults (21 females, mean age 26.5 years). Near and far-transfer training effects were assessed using computerized working memory and executive function tasks. Adaptive working memory training led to improvement on (non)trained working memory tasks and generalization to tasks of reasoning and inhibition. Graph theoretical analysis of the structural (white matter) network connectivity (“connectome”) revealed increased global integration within a frontoparietal attention network following adaptive working memory training compared with the nonadaptive group. Furthermore, the impact on the outcome of graph theoretical analyses of different white matter metrics to infer “connection strength” was evaluated. Increased efficiency of the frontoparietal network was best captured when using connection strengths derived from MR metrics that are thought to be more sensitive to differences in myelination (putatively indexed by the [quantitative] longitudinal relaxation rate, R1) than previously used diffusion MRI metrics (fractional anisotropy or fiber-tracking recovered streamlines). Our findings emphasize the critical role of specific microstructural markers in providing important hints toward the mechanisms underpinning training-induced plasticity that may drive working memory improvement in clinical populations. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT This is the first study to explore training-induced changes in the structural connectome using a well-controlled design to examine cognitive training with up-to-date neuroimaging methods. We found changes in global integration based on white matter connectivity within a frontoparietal attention network following adaptive working memory training compared with a nonadaptive comparison group. Furthermore, the impact of different diffusion MR metrics and more specific markers of white matter on the graph theoretical findings was evaluated. An increase in network global efficiency following working memory training was best captured when connection strengths were weighted by MR relaxation rates (influenced by myelination). These results are important for the optimization of cognitive training programs for healthy individuals and people with brain disease.
Histamine Receptors in the Isolated Human Middle Meningeal Artery. A Comparison with Cerebral and Temporal Arteries

The subtypes of histamine receptors mediating dilatation of human meningeal arteries have been tested in vitro, using “selective” antagonists, and compared with cerebral and temporal arteries previously examined. Dilatory responses were tested after preconstriction with prostaglandin F2a. Both mepyramine and cimetidine caused a parallel shift to the right of the histamine concentration-response curve, suggesting the presence of both H1- and H2- receptors. Combined treatment with mepyramine and cimetidine caused further displacement of the concentration-response curve to the right. Schild analysis indicated pA2 values of 6.3 for cimetidine and 9.8 for mepyramine in situations of near complete blockade of either of the receptors. Both H1- and H2- receptors seem of importance for the histamine-induced dilatation in meningeal arteries and neither appear to dominate. The data considered in conjunction with our previous findings support the finding that experimental histamine-induced headache due to vasodilatation is intracranial of origin.
Effects of weighted vests and sled towing on sprint kinematics

In this study, we compared sprint kinematics of sled towing and vest sprinting with the same relative loads. Twenty athletes performed 30-m sprints in three different conditions: (a) un-resisted, (b) sled towing, and (c) vest sprinting. During sled towing and vest sprinting, external loads of 15% and 20% of body mass were used. Sprint times were recorded over 10 and 30 m. Sagittal-plane high-speed video data were recorded at 5, 15, and 25 m from the start. Relative to the un-resisted condition, sprint time increased (7.5 to 19.8%) in both resisted conditions, resulting mainly from decreased step length ( − 5.2 to − 16.5%) with small decreases in step frequency ( − 2.7 to − 6.1%). Sled towing increased stance phase duration (14.7 to 26.0%), trunk angle (12.5 to 71.5%), and knee angle (10.3 to 22.7%), and decreased swing phase duration ( − 4.8 to − 15.2%) relative to the un-resisted condition. Vest sprinting increased stance phase duration (12.8 to 24.5%) and decreased swing phase duration ( − 8.4 to − 14.4%) and trunk angle ( − 1.7 to − 13.0%). There were significant differences between the two resisted conditions in trunk, thigh, and knee angles. We conclude that sled towing and vest sprinting have different effects on some kinematics and hence change the overload experienced by muscle groups.
High temperature low cycle fatigue behaviour of hot isostatically pressed superalloy Udimet 720 LI

Abstract Nickel base superalloy Udimet 720 LI was processed through a powder metallurgy (P/M) hot isostatic pressing (HIP) route. The effects of this consolidation technique (HIPing) on low cycle fatigue (LCF) properties were evaluated and are reported in this paper. Total strain controlled LCF tests have been conducted in air at 550°C at a nominal strain rate of 6.67 × 10−3 s−1. The as-HIPed Udimet 720 Li exhibits stable behaviour followed by very mild cyclic hardening at total strain amplitudes ± 0.4–0.5%. However, cyclic hardening has been observed at total strain amplitudes ± 0.6–1.2%. The cyclic hardening is attributed to dynamic strain aging (DSA). The dual slope behaviour in a Coffin-Manson plot is attributed to a change in fracture mechanism.