Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
FEATURE TRACKING ON OCCLUDING BOUNDARIES FOR MODELING-BY-VIDEOTAPING

This paper proposes a novel method to deal with the tracking of feature points on occluding boundaries. It can distinguish the feature points on occluding boundaries from those inside the boundaries. It can detect the disappearance of a feature point caused by occlusion during the tracking. It can extract a newly appeared feature point suitable to tracking. For the purpose, we combined an adaptive region-based monitoring process with the ordinary block-based tracking process. When the monitoring process decides that the result of the block-based motion estimation is ambiguous, the motion is adjusted by using the region-based estimation. The decision is made based on the similarity measure of the regions in the blocks in succeeding frames. In order to use the factorization method to reconstruct the 3D shape from the tracking results which includes many blanks caused by the occlusion, we investigated a method which iterates the solution propagation among the 3D and the 2D coordinates of feature points and the camera parameters. It can ll in the unobserved feature coordinates from the observed ones obtained by tracking. We applied the method to several scenes obtained by a hand-held video camera.
Biochemical and immunochemical analysis of rat brain dynamin interaction with microtubules and organelles in vivo and in vitro

We have purified a 100-kD rat brain protein that has microtubule cross- linking activity in vitro, and have determined that it is dynamin, a putative microtubule-associated motility protein. We find that dynamin appears to be specific to neuronal tissue where it is present in both soluble and particulate tissue fractions. In the cytosol it is abundant, representing as much as 1.5% of the total extractable protein. Dynamin appears to be in particulate material due to association with a distinct subcellular membrane fraction. Surprisingly, by immunofluorescence analysis of PC12 cells we find that dynamin is distributed uniformly throughout the cytoplasm with no apparent microtubule association in either interphase, mitotic, or taxol-treated cells. Upon nerve growth factor (NGF) induction of PC12 cell differentiation into neurons, dynamin levels increase approximately twofold. In the cell body, the distribution of dynamin again remains clearly distinct from that of tubulin, and in axons, where microtubules are numerous and ordered into bundles, dynamin staining is sparse and punctate. On the other hand, in the most distal domain of growth cones, where there are relatively few microtubules, dynamin is particularly abundant. The dynamin staining of neurites is abolished by extraction of the cells with detergent under conditions that preserve microtubules, suggesting that dynamin in neurites is associated with membranes. We conclude that dynamin is a neuronal protein that is specifically associated with as yet unidentified vesicles. It is possible, but unproven, that it may link vesicles to microtubules for transport in differentiated axons.
Location Determination Using Radio Frequency RSSI and Deterministic Algorithm

In recent years, the employment of IEEE 802.11 radio signals for location determination in an indoor environment has drawn great attention. The basis of this technique is that the location of an object is estimated using an estimation algorithm and the radio frequency (RF) fingerprint database as a reference. The main target of this paper is to find an optimum strategy for the construction of the RF map and a decent estimation algorithm. By obtaining statistical data from several signal strength measurements, we investigate and identify three influential factors on the RSSI behavior. With this knowledge, we propose improvement to the existing deterministic algorithm. An algorithm for detection of and dealing with the aliasing problem is also suggested. Test results show that our proposed combinational deterministic method and the anti aliasing technique improves the system performance by up to 33% compared to other deterministic method using single scalar values.
Rapid Diagnosis of Mycobacterium tuberculosis with Truenat MTB: A Near-Care Approach

Background Control of the global Tuberculosis (TB) burden is hindered by the lack of a simple and effective diagnostic test that can be utilized in resource-limited settings. Methods We evaluated the performance of Truenat MTB™, a chip-based nucleic acid amplification test in the detection of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) in clinical sputum specimens from 226 patients with suspected pulmonary tuberculosis (TB). The test involved sputum processing using Trueprep-MAG™ (nanoparticle-based protocol run on a battery-operated device) and real-time PCR performed on the Truelab Uno™ analyzer (handheld, battery-operated thermal cycler). Specimens were also examined for presence of MTB using smear microscopy, liquid culture and an in-house nested PCR protocol. Results were assessed in comparison to a composite reference standard (CRS) consisting of smear and culture results, clinical treatment and follow-up, and radiology findings. Results Based on the CRS, 191 patients had “Clinical-TB” (Definite and Probable-TB). Of which 154 patients are already on treatment, and 37 were treatment naïve cases. Remaining 35 were confirmed “Non-TB” cases which are treatment naïve cases. The Truenat MTB test was found to have sensitivity and specificity of 91.1% (CI: 86.1–94.7) and 100% (CI: 90.0–100) respectively, in comparison to 90.58% (CI: 85.5–94.3) and 91.43% (CI: 76.9–98.2) respectively for the in-house nested PCR protocol. Conclusion This preliminary study shows that the Truenat MTB test allows detection of TB in approximately one hour and can be utilized in near-care settings to provide quick and accurate diagnosis.
Free‐energy landscape of kinesin by a realistic lattice model

Structural fluctuations in the thermal equilibrium of the kinesin motor domain are studied using a lattice protein model with Gō interactions. By means of the multi‐self‐overlap ensemble Monte Carlo method and the principal component analysis, the free‐energy landscape is obtained. It is shown that kinesins have two subdomains that exhibit partial folding/unfolding at functionally important regions: one is located around the nucleotide binding site and the other includes the main microtubule binding site. These subdomains are consistent with structural variability that was reported recently based on experimentally‐obtained structures. On the other hand, such large structural fluctuations have not been captured by B‐factor or normal mode analyses. Thus, they are beyond the elastic regime, and it is essential to take into account chain connectivity for studying the function of kinesins. Proteins 2008. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
The relative value of labeled and unlabeled samples in pattern recognition with an unknown mixing parameter

We observe a training set Q composed of l labeled samples {(X/sub 1/,/spl theta//sub 1/),. ,(X/sub l/, /spl theta//sub l/)} and u unlabeled samples {X/sub 1/',. ,X/sub u/'}. The labels /spl theta//sub i/ are independent random variables satisfying Pr{/spl theta//sub i/=1}=/spl eta/, Pr{/spl theta//sub i/=2}=1-/spl eta/. The labeled observations X/sub i/ are independently distributed with conditional density f/sub /spl theta/i/(/spl middot/) given /spl theta//sub i/. Let (X/sub 0/,/spl theta//sub 0/) be a new sample, independently distributed as the samples in the training set. We observe X/sub 0/ and we wish to infer the classification /spl theta//sub 0/. In this paper we first assume that the distributions f/sub 1/(/spl middot/) and f/sub 2/(/spl middot/) are given and that the mixing parameter is unknown. We show that the relative value of labeled and unlabeled samples in reducing the risk of optimal classifiers is the ratio of the Fisher informations they carry about the parameter /spl eta/. We then assume that two densities g/sub 1/(/spl middot/) and g/sub 2/(/spl middot/) are given, but we do not know whether g/sub 1/(/spl middot/)=f/sub 1/(/spl middot/) and g/sub 2/(/spl middot/)=f/sub 2/(/spl middot/) or if the opposite holds, nor do we know /spl eta/. Thus the learning problem consists of both estimating the optimum partition of the observation space and assigning the classifications to the decision regions. Here, we show that labeled samples are necessary to construct a classification rule and that they are exponentially more valuable than unlabeled samples.
Active damping of a modified LCL filter applied to transformerless grid-connected PV inverter

Modified LCL (MLCL) filter can be employed in a transformerless PV grid-connected inverter for leakage current reduction without any modifications in the modulation technique and inverter topology. However, MLCL filter requires a damping scheme, either passive or active, to avoid possible instability in the grid connection. The use of passive damping in the MLCL filter causes additional power losses and also degrades the leakage current attenuation. On the other hand, the active damping can reduce the filter resonance peaks, maintaining the leakage current attenuation and not inserting power losses in the inverter. In this sense, this paper proposes an active damping scheme for MLCL filter and demonstrates its effectiveness in the leakage current reduction of a transformerless PV grid-connected three-level inverter. Results for a 10 kW PV inverter are included to validate the theoretical analysis.
Towards enabling probabilistic databases for participatory sensing

Participatory sensing has emerged as a new data collection paradigm, in which humans use their own devices (cell phone accelerometers, cameras, etc.) as sensors. This paradigm enables to collect a huge amount of data from the crowd for world-wide applications, without spending cost to buy dedicated sensors. Despite of this benefit, the data collected from human sensors are inherently uncertain due to no quality guarantee from the participants. Moreover, the participatory sensing data are time series that not only exhibit highly irregular dependencies on time, but also vary from sensor to sensor. To overcome these issues, we study in this paper the problem of creating probabilistic data from given (uncertain) time series collected by participatory sensors. We approach the problem in two steps. In the first step, we generate probabilistic times series from raw time series using a dynamical model from the time series literature. In the second step, we combine probabilistic time series from multiple sensors based on the mutual relationship between the reliability of the sensors and the quality of their data. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate the efficiency of our approach on both real data and synthetic data.
Cigarette smoking and diabetes mellitus: evidence of a positive association from a large prospective cohort study.

OBJECTIVE Only a few prospective studies have examined the relationship between the frequency of cigarette smoking and the incidence of diabetes mellitus. The purpose of this study was to determine whether greater frequency of cigarette smoking accelerated the development of diabetes mellitus, and whether quitting reversed the effect. METHODS Data were collected in the Cancer Prevention Study I, a prospective cohort study conducted from 1959 through 1972 by the American Cancer Society where volunteers recruited more than one million acquaintances in 25 US states. From these over one million original participants, 275,190 men and 434,637 women aged > or = 30 years were selected for the primary analysis using predetermined criteria. RESULTS As smoking increased, the rate of diabetes increased for both men and women. Among those who smoked > or = 2 packs per day at baseline, men had a 45% higher diabetes rate than men who had never smoked; the comparable increase for women was 74%. Quitting smoking reduced the rate of diabetes to that of non-smokers after 5 years in women and after 10 years in men. CONCLUSIONS A dose-response relationship seems likely between smoking and incidence of diabetes. Smokers who quit may derive substantial benefit from doing so. Confirmation of these observations is needed through additional epidemiological and biological research.
Insertion Tree Phasers: Efficient and Scalable Barrier Synchronization for Fine-Grained Parallelism

This paper presents an algorithm and a data structure for scalable dynamic synchronization in fine-grained parallelism. The algorithm supports the full generality of phasers with dynamic, two-phase, and point-to-point synchronization. It retains the scalability of classical tree barriers, but provides unbounded dynamicity by employing a tailor-made insertion tree data structure. It is the first completely documented implementation strategy for a scalable phaser synchronization construct. Our evaluation shows that it can be used as a drop-in replacement for classic barriers without harming performance, despite its additional complexity and potential for performance optimizations. Furthermore, our approach overcomes performance and scalability limitations which have been present in other phaser proposals.
SpeechraterTM: a construct-driven approach to scoring spontaneous non-native speech

This paper presents an overview of the SpeechRater system of Educational Testing Service (ETS), a fully operational automated scoring system for non-native spontaneous speech employed in a practice context. This novel system stands in contrast to most prior speech scoring systems which focus on fairly predictable, low entropy speech such as read-aloud speech or short and predictable responses. We motivate our approach by grounding our work in the TOEFL® iBT speaking construct ("what constitutes a speaker's ability to speak comprehensibly, coherently and appropriately? ") and rubrics ("what levels of proficiency do we expect to observe for different score levels in different aspects or dimensions of speech? "). SpeechRater consists of three main components: the speech recognizer, trained on about 30 hours of non-native speech, the feature computation module, computing about 40 features predominantly in the fluency dimension, and the scoring model, which combines a selected set of speech features to predict a speaking score using multiple regression. On the task of estimating the total score for a set of three responses, our best model achieves a correlation of 0.67 with human scores and a quadratically weighted kappa of 0.61, which compares to an inter-human correlation of 0.94 and an inter-human weighted kappa of 0.93.
Wolbachia infection and Lepidoptera of conservation concern

Abstract Conservation of at-risk species requires multi-faceted and carefully-considered management approaches to be successful. For arthropods, the presence of endosymbiotic bacteria, such as Wolbachia (Rickettsiales: Rickettsiaceae), may complicate management plans and exacerbate the challenges faced by conservation managers. Wolbachia poses a substantial and underappreciated threat to the conservation of arthropods because infection may induce a number of phenotypic effects, most of which are considered deleterious to the host population. In this study, the prevalence of Wolbachia infection in lepidopteran species of conservation concern was examined. Using standard molecular techniques, 22 species of Lepidoptera were screened, of which 19 were infected with Wolbachia. This rate is comparable to that observed in insects as a whole. However, this is likely an underestimate because geographic sampling was not extensive and may not have included infected segments of the species' ranges. Wolbachia infections may be particularly problematic for conservation management plans that incorporate captive propagation or translocation. Inadvertent introduction of Wolbachia into uninfected populations or introduction of a new strain may put these populations at greater risk for extinction. Further sampling to investigate the geographic extent of Wolbachia infections within species of conservation concern and experiments designed to determine the nature of the infection phenotype(s) are necessary to manage the potential threat of infection.
[3H]Methoxymethyl-3-[(2-methyl-1,3-thiazol-4-yl)ethynyl]pyridine Binding to Metabotropic Glutamate Receptor Subtype 5 in Rodent Brain: In Vitro and in Vivo Characterization

The binding of [3H]methoxymethyl-3-[(2-methyl-1,3-thiazol-4-yl)ethynyl]pyridine (methoxymethyl-MTEP), a potent and selective antagonist for metabotropic glutamate (mGlu)5 receptors, was characterized in rat brain both in vitro and in vivo. Nonspecific binding, as defined with 10 μM 2-methyl-6-(phenylethynyl)-pyridine (MPEP), was less than 10% of total binding in rat brain membranes. The binding of [3H]methoxymethyl-MTEP was of high affinity (K d = 20 ± 2.7 nM), saturable (B max = 487 ± 48 fmol/mg protein), and to a single site. The mGlu5 antagonists methoxymethyl-MTEP and MPEP displaced [3H]methoxymethyl-MTEP binding with IC50values of 30 and 15 nM, respectively. In vivo administration of [3H]methoxymethyl-MTEP (50 μCi/kg i.v.) revealed 12-fold higher binding in hippocampus (an area enriched in mGlu5 receptors) relative to cerebellum (an area with few mGlu5 receptors) in rats. Similarly, administration of [3H]methoxymethyl-MTEP to mGlu5-deficient mice demonstrated binding at background levels in forebrain, whereas wild-type littermates exhibited 17-fold higher binding in forebrain relative to cerebellum. Systemic administration of unlabeled mGlu5 antagonists methoxymethyl-MTEP and MPEP to rats reduced the binding of [3H]methoxymethyl-MTEP with ID50 values of 0.8 and 2 mg/kg i.p., respectively, 1 h post-treatment. The mGlu5 agonist 2-chloro-5-hydroxyphenylglycine (CHPG) (0.3, 1, and 3 μmol) dose-dependently increased phosphoinositide (PI) hydrolysis in the hippocampus after i.c. v. administration in rats. CHPG-evoked increases in PI hydrolysis were blocked with MPEP at a dose (10 mg/kg i.p.) that markedly reduced [3H]methoxymethyl-MTEP binding in vivo. These results indicate that [3H]methoxymethyl-MTEP is a selective radioligand for labeling mGlu5 and is useful for studying the binding of mGlu5 receptors in rat brain in vitro and in vivo.
Enron's Spreadsheets and Related Emails: A Dataset and Analysis

Spreadsheets are used extensively in business processes around the world and as such, are a topic of research interest. Over the past few years, many spreadsheet studies have been performed on the EUSES spreadsheet corpus. While this corpus has served the spreadsheet community well, the spreadsheets it contains are mainly gathered with search engines and might therefore not represent spreadsheets used in companies. This paper presents an analysis of a new dataset, extracted from the Enron email archive, containing over 15,000 spreadsheets used within the Enron Corporation. In addition to the spreadsheets, we also present an analysis of the associated emails, where we look into spreadsheet-specific email behavior. Our analysis shows that 1) 24% of Enron spreadsheets with at least one formula contain an Excel error, 2) there is little diversity in the functions used in spreadsheets: 76% of spreadsheets in the presented corpus use the same 15 functions and, 3) the spreadsheets are substantially more smelly than the EUSES corpus, especially in terms of long calculation chains. Regarding the emails, we observe that spreadsheets 1) are a frequent topic of email conversation with 10% of emails either referring to or sending spreadsheets and 2) the emails are frequently discussing errors in and updates to spreadsheets.
Evaluating nursing administration instruments.

OBJECTIVE To identify and evaluate available measures that can be used to examine the effects of management innovations in five important areas: autonomy, conflict, job satisfaction, leadership, and organizational climate. BACKGROUND Management interventions target the context in which care is delivered and through which evidence for practice diffuses. These innovations need to be evaluated for their effects on desired outcomes. However, busy nurses may not have the time to locate, evaluate, and select instruments to measure expected nursing administration outcomes without research-based guidance. Multiple and complex important contextual variables need psychometrically sound and easy-to-use measurement instruments identified for use in both practice and research. METHOD An expert focus group consensus methodology was used in this evaluation research to review available instruments in the five areas and evaluate which of these instruments are psychometrically sound and easy to use in the practice setting. RESULTS The result is a portfolio of measures, clustered by concept and displayed on a spreadsheet. Retrieval information is provided. The portfolio includes the expert consensus judgment as well as useful descriptive information. CONCLUSIONS The research reported here identifies psychometrically sound and easy-to-use instruments for measuring five key variables to be included in a portfolio. The results of this study can be used as a beginning for saving time in instrument selection and as an aid for determining the best instrument for measuring outcomes from a clinical or management intervention.
Densification and microstructure of Al2O3-cBN composites prepared by spark plasma sintering

Al 2 O 3 -cubic boron nitride (cBN) composites were prepared from Al 2 O 3 and cBN powders by spark plasma sintering (SPS) at temperatures of 1200 to 1600°C for 600 s under a pressure of 100 MPa. Densification, phase transformation, microstructure and mechanical properties of the Al 2 O 3 -cBN composites were investigated. Fully dense Al 2 O 3 -cBN composites containing 10 to 20 vol% cBN with a relative density of more than 98% were obtained at 1300°C for 600 s without the phase transformation from cBN to hexagonal BN (hBN). The transformation of cBN was more greatly accelerated in the Al 2 O 3 -cBN composite than in cBN. The cBN phase to Al 2 O 3 inhibited the grain growth of Al 2 O 3 in the Al 2 O 3 -cBN composite. Vickers hardness of dense Al 2 O 3 -cBN composites containing 10 to 20 vol% cBN sintered at 1300°C showed the maximum value of 26 GPa. The Al 2 O 3 -cBN composite containing 20 vol% cBN sintered at 1300°C had the highest fracture toughness of 4.1 MPa·m 1/2 .
Graphical Histories for Visualization: Supporting Analysis, Communication, and Evaluation

Interactive history tools, ranging from basic undo and redo to branching timelines of user actions, facilitate iterative forms of interaction. In this paper, we investigate the design of history mechanisms for information visualization. We present a design space analysis of both architectural and interface issues, identifying design decisions and associated trade-offs. Based on this analysis, we contribute a design study of graphical history tools for Tableau, a database visualization system. These tools record and visualize interaction histories, support data analysis and communication of findings, and contribute novel mechanisms for presenting, managing, and exporting histories. Furthermore, we have analyzed aggregated collections of history sessions to evaluate Tableau usage. We describe additional tools for analyzing userspsila history logs and how they have been applied to study usage patterns in Tableau.