Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Activity awareness in collaboratories

We are investigating the support for activity awareness in the CiteSeer collaboratory. Activity awareness is awareness of collaborators’ work that supports performance in complex tasks in long-term endeavors directed at significant goals. Based on empirical studies, we give three examples of supporting activity awareness in collaboratories: (1) Awareness of collaborators’ creative activity in distributed settings; (2) Awareness of scholarly resources through notification systems; and (3) Awareness of intellectual trends as defined by the community. We conclude by discussing the importance of awareness as a long-term, sustained activity to enhance collaboration in scientific communities.
Alexander Stratifications of Character Varieties

Equations defining the jumping loci for the first cohomology group of one-dimensional representations of a finitely presented group can be effectively computed using Fox calculus. In this paper, we give an exposition of Fox calculus in the language of group cohomology and in the language of finite abelian coverings of CW complexes. Work of Arapura and Simpson imply that if is the fundamental group o f a
Interleukin-6-174G/C Polymorphism Contributes to Periodontitis Susceptibility: An Updated Meta-Analysis of 21 Case-Control Studies

Introduction. Chronic Periodontitis (CP) is suggested to be related to gene variations. Present study aims to quantitatively estimate the association between interleukin-6- (IL-6-) 174G/C polymorphism and CP susceptibility. Materials and Methods. Pubmed, Embase, and Web of Science were searched up to May 2016. The meta-analyses were performed using STATA 12.0. Results. 21 studies were yielded. Significant associations were found under heterozygote comparison and dominant model in studies fulfilling HWE (GC versus GG: OR = 0.690, 95% CI = 0.560–0.849, P = 0.000; CC + GC versus GG: OR = 0.690, 95% CI = 0.568–0.838, P < 0.001); significant associations were found under heterozygote comparison and dominant model in Caucasian studies fulfilling HWE (GC versus GG: OR = 0.752, 95% CI = 0.577–0.980, P = 0.035; CC + GC versus GG: OR = 0.737, 95% CI = 0.576–0.944, P = 0.016); significant associations were found under allele comparison, heterozygote comparison, and dominant model in Brazilian population (C versus G: OR = 0.648, 95% CI = 0.497–0.845, P = 0.001; GC versus GG: OR = 0.621, 95% CI = 0.441–0.876, P = 0.007; CC + GC versus GG: OR = 0.649, 95% CI = 0.470–0.896, P = 0.009). Conclusion. IL-6 174 polymorphism is associated with CP susceptibility. In Brazilian and Caucasian population, IL-6 174 GG genotype plays as a risk factor to CP.
The Development and Characterization of a Human Mesothelioma In Vitro 3D Model to Investigate Immunotoxin Therapy

BACKGROUND Tumor microenvironments present significant barriers to penetration by antibodies and immunoconjugates. Tumor microenvironments, however, are difficult to study in vitro. Cells cultured as monolayers exhibit less resistance to therapy than those grown in vivo and an alternative research model more representative of the in vivo tumor is more desirable. SS1P is an immunotoxin composed of the Fv portion of a mesothelin-specific antibody fused to a bacterial toxin that is presently undergoing clinical trials in mesothelioma. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Here, we examined how the tumor microenvironment affects the penetration and killing activity of SS1P in a new three-dimensional (3D) spheroid model cultured in vitro using the human mesothelioma cell line (NCI-H226) and two primary cell lines isolated from the ascites of malignant mesothelioma patients. Mesothelioma cells grown as monolayers or as spheroids expressed comparable levels of mesothelin; however, spheroids were at least 100 times less affected by SS1P. To understand this disparity in cytotoxicity, we made fluorescence-labeled SS1P molecules and used confocal microscopy to examine the time course of SS1P penetration within spheroids. The penetration was limited after 4 hours. Interestingly, we found a significant increase in the number of tight junctions in the core area of spheroids by electron microscopy. Expression of E-Cadherin, a protein involved in the assembly and sealing of tight junctions and highly expressed in malignant mesothelioma, was found significantly increased in spheroids as compared to monolayers. Moreover, we found that siRNA silencing and antibody inhibition targeting E-Cadherin could enhance SS1P immunotoxin therapy in vitro. CONCLUSION/SIGNIFICANCE This work is one of the first to investigate immunotoxins in 3D tumor spheroids in vitro. This initial description of an in vitro tumor model may offer a simple and more representative model of in vivo tumors and will allow for further investigations of the microenvironmental effects on drug penetration and tumor cell killing. We believe that the methods developed here may apply to the studies of other tumor-targeting antibodies and immunoconjugates in vitro.
Ieee Computer Graphics and Applications Gradient-domain Shadow Edges Editing Soft Shadows in a Digital Photograph

23 Computational Photography T he pixels in a digital photograph blend together scene components in seemingly irreversible ways and provide us precious little information about the scene's apparent shape, illumination, and reflectance properties. Barrow and Tenenbaum proposed a way of decomposing a single photograph into many intrinsic images, each representing one physical constituent of the scene, such as reflectance and illumination. 1 However, this problem is severely ill-posed; estimating scene and material properties requires much more information. Consequently, changing the physical parameters of a scene in a digital photograph is a nontrivial task. Perceptually, shadows are perhaps one of the most important illumination components in any photograph. They provide important visual cues for understanding shape, occlusion, contact between objects, and even surface texture. A shadow's sharpness, shape, and color depend on the shape of the light source, the geometry and opacity of the occluder, the reflectance properties of the shadowed surface, and the interreflec-tions among objects within the scene. In this article, we develop tools for shadow modification in images where a shadowed region is characterized by soft boundaries with varying sharpness along the shadow edges. Modeling shadow edges presents an interesting challenge because they can vary from infinitely sharp edges for shadows produced by a point light source to extremely soft edges for shadows produced by large area light sources. (See the " Related Work in Shadow Modeling " sidebar on the next page for previous methods.) We propose an entirely image-based shadow editing tool for a single-input image. We fit a gradient-domain shadow-edge model to the shadows and then remove the shadow from the image itself, leaving behind gradient estimates for a uniformly illuminated scene. Once we've separated these elements, we can independently manipulate the shadow-edge model to simulate a much wider range of lighting conditions, including ambient-only lighting, direct lighting from the camera viewpoint with no significant shadows, shadows from synthetic or ide-alized occluders, and area light sources (see Figure 1a–d on page 24). These machine-adjustable photographs can offer interactivity that might improve images' expres-siveness and help us investigate the influence of boundary sharpness on the perception of object-to-object contact, as well as understand how humans assess shadows to estimate object height above a ground plane. We manipulate shadows by accurately describing their edges with a controllable, shadow edge model. We then use this shadow edge model to replace and edit shadows in the original photograph. The …
Fractal Reconfigurable Multiband Communicating Antenna for Cognitive Radio

A novel antenna structure is proposed by combining the concept of a reconfigurable and fractal with the parasitic elements technique to obtain the multiband frequency reconfigurable antenna. Fractal antenna with triangular slot is designed for operating at multiple frequencies. The integration of PIN diode switches to the antenna changes the frequency of the antenna dynamically. This is done by changing the switch state to either on or off mode. Proposed antenna is designed and simulated in HFSS and parametric analysis has been carried out and fabricated on FR4 substrate. The electrical lengths are varied by operating switches on and off. The proper activation/deactivation of the switches alters the current flow and changes resonance frequency. This paper presents a fabricated compact fractal shaped frequency reconfigurable antenna for multiband operation along with measured results. The proposed antenna is most suitable for Cognitive Radio.
Vowel Production Manifold: Intrinsic Factor Analysis of Vowel Articulation

The manner in which the organization of vowels in a compact space reflects the relationship between their production and perception remains to be clarified in the field of speech science, although it is believed that vowels exist in a compact space with a regular structure rather than as an unstructured blob. In the articulatory domain, some traditional representations such as those based on the results of tongue position analysis and linear factor analysis are used. However, the former partially encodes information on vowel articulation, and the latter only reflects the linear degrees of freedom of vowel articulation. Since nonlinear degrees of freedom exist during the production of vowels, the traditional linear factor analysis is not suitable. In this paper, we proposed the use of Laplacian eigenmaps for analyzing the intrinsic factors affecting vowel articulation and obtain a compact manifold representation of vowels. On the manifold, vowels have distinct cluster positions depending on the similarities in their production and perception. On the basis of vowel articulation, we state that the first dimension of the manifold structure is related to the tongue height position and the second dimension to mouth opening. The third dimension is related to the articulation location of vowels along the vocal tract which is curved along the manifold. A similar topological manifold structure is explored in the vowel acoustic space. Quantitatively, on the basis of the conditional entropy criterion and vowel identification experiments, we confirmed that the analyzed compact manifold structure encodes more information on vowels than do traditional representations.
SNP Discovery and Linkage Map Construction in Cultivated Tomato

Few intraspecific genetic linkage maps have been reported for cultivated tomato, mainly because genetic diversity within Solanum lycopersicum is much less than that between tomato species. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), the most abundant source of genomic variation, are the most promising source of polymorphisms for the construction of linkage maps for closely related intraspecific lines. In this study, we developed SNP markers based on expressed sequence tags for the construction of intraspecific linkage maps in tomato. Out of the 5607 SNP positions detected through in silico analysis, 1536 were selected for high-throughput genotyping of two mapping populations derived from crosses between ‘Micro-Tom’ and either ‘Ailsa Craig’ or ‘M82’. A total of 1137 markers, including 793 out of the 1338 successfully genotyped SNPs, along with 344 simple sequence repeat and intronic polymorphism markers, were mapped onto two linkage maps, which covered 1467.8 and 1422.7 cM, respectively. The SNP markers developed were then screened against cultivated tomato lines in order to estimate the transferability of these SNPs to other breeding materials. The molecular markers and linkage maps represent a milestone in the genomics and genetics, and are the first step toward molecular breeding of cultivated tomato. Information on the DNA markers, linkage maps, and SNP genotypes for these tomato lines is available at http://www.kazusa. or.jp/tomato/.
Expected return, realized return, and asset pricing tests

Finance theory indicates that investor decisions are based on expected, rather than actual, returns. Nevertheless, nearly all research into asset-pricing models has been based on actual returns. The author points out that actual returns are not a reasonable proxy for expected returns. He develops an approach for estimating expected returns and applies it to the analysis of returns on Treasury securities. He also addresses implications for analyzing stock returns.
Content or Community? A Digital Business Strategy for Content Providers in the Social Age

The content industry has been undergoing a tremendous transformation in the last two decades. We focus in this paper on recent changes in the form of social computing. Although the content industry has implemented social computing to a large extent, it has done so from a techno-centric approach in which social features are viewed as complementary rather than integral to content. This approach does not capitalize on users' social behavior in the website and does not answer the content industry's need to elicit payment from consumers. We suggest that both of these objectives can be achieved by acknowledging the fusion between content and community, making the social experience central to the content website's digital business strategy. We use data from Last.fm, a site offering both music consumption and online community features. The basic use of Last.fm is free, and premium services are provided for a fixed monthly subscription fee. Although the premium services on Last.fm are aimed primarily at improving the content consumption experience, we find that willingness to pay for premium services is strongly associated with the level of community participation of the user. Drawing from the literature on levels of participation in online communities, we show that consumers' willingness to pay increases as they climb the so-called "ladder of participation" on the website. Moreover, we find that willingness to pay is more strongly linked to community participation than to the volume of content consumption. We control for self-selection bias by using propensity score matching. We extend our results by estimating a hazard model to study the effect of community activity on the time between joining the website and the subscription decision. Our results suggest that firms whose digital business models remain viable in a world of "freemium" will be those that take a strategic rather than techno-centric view of social media, that integrate social media into the consumption and purchase experience rather than use it merely as a substitute for offline soft marketing. We provide new evidence of the importance of fusing social computing with content delivery and, in the process, lay a foundation for a broader strategic path for the digital content industry in an age of growing user participation.
From capture to simulation

We explore the connection between fluid capture, simulation and proximal methods, a class of algorithms commonly used for inverse problems in image processing and computer vision. Our key finding is that the proximal operator constraining fluid velocities to be divergence-free is directly equivalent to the pressure-projection methods commonly used in incompressible flow solvers. This observation lets us treat the inverse problem of fluid tracking as a constrained flow problem all while working in an efficient, modular framework. In addition it lets us tightly couple fluid simulation into flow tracking, providing a global prior that significantly increases tracking accuracy and temporal coherence as compared to previous techniques. We demonstrate how we can use these improved results for a variety of applications, such as re-simulation, detail enhancement, and domain modification. We furthermore give an outlook of the applications beyond fluid tracking that our proximal operator framework could enable by exploring the connection of deblurring and fluid guiding.
An unobtrusive Android person verification using accelerometer based gait

Mobile devices are ubiquitous enough to be considered as a valid token for proof of claim to identity. Unfortunately, the small size of mobile devices also means that it is prone to being misplaced and stolen. Gait biometric on accelerometer equipped mobile devices can add another layer of security in the event of theft, as it would refute a fraudulent claim to identity. As an extra bonus, gait data can be collected without the knowledge of the person handling the mobile device. In this paper, we describe how mobile devices can be used unobtrusively for the purpose of person verification. Person verification is achieved by classification of accelerometer based gait data recorded by said mobile device. Use cases for this approach is presented in a framework; supported by proof of concept experimental results.
Female labour force status and fertility behaviour: some theoretical, methodological and policy issues.

This study attempts to examine the dynamics of the relationship between female labor force participation and fertility behavior. The assumptions underlying the supposition that labor force status affects fertility are as follows: 1) outside home employment provides alternative satisfactions to having children; 1) marriage is delayed; 3) each child reduces potential income for the mother; 4) working wives improve their status; and 5) independence from children in old age. A working woman will have fewer children and use contraception more frequently if she is paid for her work as much as a man is paid for his and has status; can participate in community and family decision-making; is committed to her work; finds it hard to transfer child-care responsibilities to others; and works for a long period before having children. Labor force participation is dependent on several variables such as age, education, duration of marriage, husband-wife role relationship, fecundity, and availability of contraception. The reasons why women do not work, e.g., too many children, not enough opportunity, have not been adequately studied. Few studies have controlled for all the variables to determine the net effect of female work status on fertility, and their findings are inconclusive. In developing countries more opportunities for women will open up as male attitudes become less negative toward women working outside the home.
Supporting students’ mental health in schools: what do teachers want and need?

ABSTRACT There is a growing expectation in the UK for teachers to have an understanding of common mental health problems in young people. This study aims to identify the training needs of secondary school teachers to enable them to adequately support and educate their students around mental health. Nine focus groups, each with between four to eight participants, were conducted with secondary school teachers in the UK. Discussions were centred on the needs and wants of teachers in terms of mental health training, provision and advice. Participants were also shown three online resources as an example of existing training. Thematic analysis was used to structure the data. Participants wanted training on how to identify and provide early support for students who are struggling, without taking on the perceived role of a therapist. Participants also emphasised the strong need for practical, interactive and expert-led training that provides resources that can be adapted to individual settings. Implications and recommendations are discussed.
Wavelet transform domain filters: a spatially selective noise filtration technique

Wavelet transforms are multiresolution decompositions that can be used to analyze signals and images. They describe a signal by the power at each scale and position. Edges can be located very effectively in the wavelet transform domain. A spatially selective noise filtration technique based on the direct spatial correlation of the wavelet transform at several adjacent scales is introduced. A high correlation is used to infer that there is a significant feature at the position that should be passed through the filter. The authors have tested the technique on simulated signals, phantom images, and real MR images. It is found that the technique can reduce noise contents in signals and images by more than 80% while maintaining at least 80% of the value of the gradient at most edges. The authors did not observe any Gibbs' ringing or significant resolution loss on the filtered images. Artifacts that arose from the filtration are very small and local. The noise filtration technique is quite robust. There are many possible extensions of the technique. The authors see its applications in spatially dependent noise filtration, edge detection and enhancement, image restoration, and motion artifact removal. They have compared the performance of the technique to that of the Weiner filter and found it to be superior.
Analysis of matrix metalloproteinase-7 expression in eutopic and ectopic endometrium samples from patients with different forms of endometriosis.

BACKGROUND The objective of the present study was to expand our understanding of the role of matrix metalloproteinase-7 (MMP-7) in the pathophysiology of endometriosis. METHODS Expression levels of MMP-7 mRNA and protein in the eutopic endometrium and ectopic endometrium of patients with different forms of endometriosis were measured with immunohistochemistry and real-time RT-PCR. Endometrial tissues from patients with uterine myomas and those with macroscopically normal pelvic cavities were included as comparison groups. The real-time RT-PCR utilized endometrial cells isolated by laser capture microdissection. MMP-7 immunostained cells were quantified using a computerized image analysis system. RESULTS MMP-7 expression levels were significantly higher in the endometrial epithelial cells from patients with deep infiltrating endometriosis compared with those isolated from the endometria of patients with only superficial peritoneal endometriosis, uterine myomas or normal endometrium, in the proliferative, late secretory and menstrual phases. MMP-7 protein expression was detected in the ectopic endometrial epithelial cells of 13 samples of deep infiltrating endometriosis (24.5%), 11 samples of ovarian endometriosis (28.6%), 23 samples of black peritoneal lesions (76.7%) and 24 samples of red peritoneal lesions (100%). MMP-7 protein expression in epithelial cells was significantly higher in red peritoneal lesions compared with that of deep infiltrating endometriosis, ovarian endometriosis and black peritoneal lesions, in all phases of the menstrual cycle. CONCLUSION These findings suggest that MMP-7 expression levels vary significantly among the different forms of endometriosis.