Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Feature selection and dimension reduction for automatic gender identification

Gender identification based on speech signal has become gradually a matter of concern in recent years. In this context 6 feature types including MFCC, LPC, RC, LAR, pitch values and formants are compared for automatic gender identification and three best feature types are selected using four feature selection techniques. These techniques are GMM, Decision Tree, Fisher's Discriminant Ratio, and Volume of Overlap Region. A dimension reduction is done on the best three feature types and the best coefficients are then selected from each feature vector. Selected coefficients are evaluated for gender classification using three types of classifiers including GMM, SVM and MLP neural network. 96.09% gender identification performance was obtained as the best performance using the selected coefficients and MLP classifier.
Effects of chronic ethanol drinking on the blood brain barrier and ensuing neuronal toxicity in alcohol-preferring rats subjected to intraperitoneal LPS injection.

AIMS Although alcohol drinking impairs the blood-brain barrier (BBB), the underlying mechanism is not fully understood. Thus, the effects of chronic ethanol drinking on the BBB were studied in vivo. METHODS Alcohol-preferring rats were given for 70 days free choice water and 15% ethanol. Then, they received LPS by i.p. injection. Efflux of [(14)C]sucrose or [(14)C]dextran was measured by their microinjection into the brain. Endothelial cells and neurons were isolated from the brain and analysed for mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) and the tight-junction (TJ) protein phosphorylation, NFkappaB activation, mRNA levels of TJ proteins, inducible nitric oxide synthase, tumour necrosis factor alpha, interleukin-1 beta (IL-1beta), IL-10, CASPASE-8, and DNA damage. RESULTS LPS transiently increased [(14)C]sucrose efflux in water drinking, while it caused a lasting increase in [(14)C]sucrose and [(14)C]dextran efflux in ethanol-drinking rats. The time-course of changes in the TJ correlated with (i) an increase in extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK), p38(mapk) Jun-N-terminal Kinase (JNK), and TJ protein phosphorylation, (ii) RelA-p50 and p50-p50 activation, and (iii) a decrease in the TJ proteins' mRNA levels in endothelial cells and neurons. Apoptotic cells were detected in water drinking and LPS (WC-LPS) neurons at 24 h after LPS exposure. Neurons from Et-LPS rats did not exhibit apoptosis. CONCLUSIONS LPS injection in WC-LPS rats transiently disrupted the BBB. Lack of JNK activation and CASPASE-8 may be responsible for lack of apoptosis in endothelial cells and vice versa in neurons. Chronic alcohol drinking in ethanol drinking and LPS (Et-LPS) rats augmented and dysregulated the LPS-induced BBB abnormalities but suppressed apoptosis in neurons.
Noiseless coding of correlated information sources

Correlated information sequences \cdots ,X_{-1},X_0,X_1, \cdots and \cdots,Y_{-1},Y_0,Y_1, \cdots are generated by repeated independent drawings of a pair of discrete random variables X, Y from a given bivariate distribution P_{XY} (x,y) . We determine the minimum number of bits per character R_X and R_Y needed to encode these sequences so that they can be faithfully reproduced under a variety of assumptions regarding the encoders and decoders. The results, some of which are not at all obvious, are presented as an admissible rate region \mathcal{R} in the R_X - R_Y plane. They generalize a similar and well-known result for a single information sequence, namely R_X \geq H (X) for faithful reproduction.
TOPDOM: database of domains and motifs with conservative location in transmembrane proteins

Summary: The TOPDOM database is a collection of domains and sequence motifs located consistently on the same side of the membrane in α-helical transmembrane proteins. The database was created by scanning well-annotated transmembrane protein sequences in the UniProt database by specific domain or motif detecting algorithms. The identified domains or motifs were added to the database if they were uniformly annotated on the same side of the membrane of the various proteins in the UniProt database. The information about the location of the collected domains and motifs can be incorporated into constrained topology prediction algorithms, like HMMTOP, increasing the prediction accuracy. Availability: The TOPDOM database and the constrained HMMTOP prediction server are available on the page http://topdom.enzim.hu Contact: tusi@enzim.hu; lkalmar@enzim.hu
Complex Ratio Masking for Monaural Speech Separation

Speech separation systems usually operate on the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) of noisy speech, and enhance only the magnitude spectrum while leaving the phase spectrum unchanged. This is done because there was a belief that the phase spectrum is unimportant for speech enhancement. Recent studies, however, suggest that phase is important for perceptual quality, leading some researchers to consider magnitude and phase spectrum enhancements. We present a supervised monaural speech separation approach that simultaneously enhances the magnitude and phase spectra by operating in the complex domain. Our approach uses a deep neural network to estimate the real and imaginary components of the ideal ratio mask defined in the complex domain. We report separation results for the proposed method and compare them to related systems. The proposed approach improves over other methods when evaluated with several objective metrics, including the perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ), and a listening test where subjects prefer the proposed approach with at least a 69% rate.
Phylogenetic diversity meets conservation policy: small areas are key to preserving eucalypt lineages

Evolutionary and genetic knowledge is increasingly being valued in conservation theory, but is rarely considered in conservation planning and policy. Here, we integrate phylogenetic diversity (PD) with spatial reserve prioritization to evaluate how well the existing reserve system in Victoria, Australia captures the evolutionary lineages of eucalypts, which dominate forest canopies across the state. Forty-three per cent of remaining native woody vegetation in Victoria is located in protected areas (mostly national parks) representing 48% of the extant PD found in the state. A modest expansion in protected areas of 5% (less than 1% of the state area) would increase protected PD by 33% over current levels. In a recent policy change, portions of the national parks were opened for development. These tourism development zones hold over half the PD found in national parks with some species and clades falling entirely outside of protected zones within the national parks. This approach of using PD in spatial prioritization could be extended to any clade or area that has spatial and phylogenetic data. Our results demonstrate the relevance of PD to regional conservation policy by highlighting that small but strategically located areas disproportionally impact the preservation of evolutionary lineages.
Correlation Networks for Identifying Changes in Brain Connectivity during Epileptiform Discharges and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

The occurrence of epileptiform discharges (ED) in electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings of patients with epilepsy signifies a change in brain dynamics and particularly brain connectivity. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has been recently acknowledged as a non-invasive brain stimulation technique that can be used in focal epilepsy for therapeutic purposes. In this case study, it is investigated whether simple time-domain connectivity measures, namely cross-correlation and partial cross-correlation, can detect alterations in the connectivity structure estimated from selected EEG channels before and during ED, as well as how this changes with the application of TMS. The correlation for each channel pair is computed on non-overlapping windows of 1 s duration forming weighted networks. Further, binary networks are derived by thresholding or statistical significance tests (parametric and randomization tests). The information for the binary networks is summarized by statistical network measures, such as the average degree and the average path length. Alterations of brain connectivity before, during and after ED with or without TMS are identified by statistical analysis of the network measures at each state.
Evaluation of serum creatine phosphokinase in diagnosis of tubal ectopic pregnancy compared with intrauterine pregnancy and threatened abortion

Background: Vaginal sonograghy and serial -hCG are the most common diagnostic methods for ectopic pregnancy but about 50% of cases are initially misdiagnosed. In tubal pregnancy the zygote lies next to the muscular layer, and this invasion causes an increase in creatine phosphokinase (CPK) in blood. Objective: assessment of CPK and its isoenzyme CPK-MB as a diagnostic marker for tubal pregnancy. Materials and Methods: In this case-control study, 111 women between 16-40 years in first-trimester pregnancy admitted to emergency ward of Rasht Alzahra hospital with abdominal pain or vaginal bleeding were included and according to sonography and βhCG divided into 3 groups (N=37): tubal pregnancy (1), threatened abortion (2) and normal pregnancy (3). Blood samples were taken for totalCPK and CPK-MB before any invasive procedure. Results: Mean total CPK level were 96.27±63.9 u/lit (group 1), 55.37±14.1 u/lit (group 2) and 48.94±19.2 u/lit (group 3) and was significantly higher in tubal pregnancy compared to other groups. Mean CPK-MB levels in 3 groups were 15.62±5.2 u/lit, 17.32±6.9 u/lit, and 15.1±4.7 u/lit, respectively which was not significant. Conclusion: It seems that determination of total CPK can enhance the diagnostic value of tubal pregnancy.
Geografia de paisagem e perfil sanitário de bovinos curraleiro pé-duro criados nos biomas Cerrado e Caatinga

Analise estatistica multivariada foi utilizada para agrupamentos ambientais, em Cerrado e Caatinga avaliando a relacao entre prevalencias sorologicas positivas para brucelose, diarreia viral bovina (BVD), rinotraqueite infecciosa bovina (IBR), leptospirose, leucose enzootica bovina (LEB), neosporose e toxoplasmose de bovinos Curraleiro Pe-Duro, juntamente com dados socioeconomicos dos municipios. Resultados sorologicos foram obtidos do banco de dados da Rede Pro Centro-Oeste; socioeconomicos do IBGE e ambientais da plataforma de dados do Laboratorio de Processamento de Imagens e Geoprocessamento da UFG e Instituto Nacional de Meteorologia, em dois periodos 2006 e 2011. Variaveis ambientais foram agrupadas, posteriormente foram realizadas analise discriminante e correlacao canonica. Em 2006, cluster 1 localizou-se em area de transicao Cerrado-Amazonia e associou-se as prevalencias de brucelose, leptospirose, LEB, IBR e BVD; Cluster 2 caracterizou por vegetacao tipicas de Cerrado e relacionou-se as prevalencias de neosporose e toxoplasmose; Cluster 3 diferenciou-se pelo estresse hidrico e apresentou os valores intermediarios de prevalencias; Cluster 4 caracterizou por areas para protecao ambiental da vegetacao remanescente; e cluster 5 constituiu-se ambiente antropizado no Cerrado. Em 2011, cluster 1 caracterizou-se por regioes de Cerrado ricas em vegetacao natural e Caatinga, mais quentes, menor pluviometria e baixas altitudes associaram-se as prevalencias de LEB, IBR e BVD; Cluster 2 regioes mais secas associadas a prevalencia de neosporose; Cluster 3 Cerrado antropizado com clima mais quente e umido, maior pluviosidade em elevadas altitudes relacionados as prevalencias de leptospirose e brucelose, na pecuaria leiteira. Avaliacao da paisagem na prevalencia de doencas bovinas reflete aspectos historico e socioeconomico da agropecuaria.
Measuring Semantic Similarity for Bengali Tweets Using WordNet

Similarity between natural language texts, sentences in terms of meaning, known as textual entailment, is a generic problem in the area of computational linguistics. In the last few years researchers worked on various aspects of textual entailment problem, but mostly restricted to English language. Here in this paper we present a method for measuring the semantic similarity of Bengali tweets using WordNet. Moreover we defined partial textual entailment (PTE) as in real data partial entailment cases are equally prevalent with the complete/direct entailment. Although by definition entailment is a directional relationship, but here we consider entailment more as semantic similarity.
Approximate Dynamic Programming By Minimizing Distributionally Robust Bounds

Approximate dynamic programming is a popular method for solving large Markov decision processes. This paper describes a new class of approximate dynamic programming (ADP) methods- distributionally robust ADP-that address the curse of dimensionality by minimizing a pessimistic bound on the policy loss. This approach turns ADP into an optimization problem, for which we derive new mathematical program formulations and analyze its properties. DRADP improves on the theoretical guarantees of existing ADP methods-it guarantees convergence and L1 norm based error bounds. The empirical evaluation of DRADP shows that the theoretical guarantees translate well into good performance on benchmark problems.
Edge preserving spatially varying mixtures for image segmentation

A new hierarchical Bayesian model is proposed for image segmentation based on Gaussian mixture models (GMM) with a prior enforcing spatial smoothness. According to this prior, the local differences of the contextual mixing proportions (i.e. the probabilities of class labels) are Studentpsilas t-distributed. The generative properties of the Student's t-pdf allow this prior to impose smoothness and simultaneously model the edges between the segments of the image. A maximum a posteriori (MAP) expectation-maximization (EM) based algorithm is used for Bayesian inference. An important feature of this algorithm is that all the parameters are automatically estimated from the data in closed form. Numerical experiments are presented that demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model for image segmentation as compared to standard GMM-based approaches and to GMM segmentation techniques with ldquostandardrdquo spatial smoothness constraints.
IS-LABEL: an Independent-Set based Labeling Scheme for Point-to-Point Distance Querying

We study the problem of computing shortest path or distance between two query vertices in a graph, which has numerous important applications. Quite a number of indexes have been proposed to answer such distance queries. However, all of these indexes can only process graphs of size barely up to 1 million vertices, which is rather small in view of many of the fast-growing real-world graphs today such as social networks and Web graphs. We propose an efficient index, which is a novel labeling scheme based on the independent set of a graph. We show that our method can handle graphs of size three orders of magnitude larger than those existing indexes.
Modeling and Tip Position Control of a Flexible Link Robot: Experimental Results

Abstract: This work describes the modeling and control of an experimental platform associated to a single link flexible robot, whose motion is restricted to an horizontal plane, thus neglecting the gravity effects. The modeling problem is addressed using the so-called Euler-Bernoulli beam equation. The design, construction and integration of an experimental set-up developed for this work is also presented. Two main control schemes are then devised for controlling the end tip position of the flexible link, the passive velocity feedback and strain feedback approaches. Finally, the overall system performance is illustrated by some experimental results obtained with both control methods.
The molecular organization of myosin in stress fibers of cultured cells

Antibodies to chicken gizzard myosin, subfragment 1, light chain 20, and light meromyosin were used to visualize myosin in stress fibers of cultured chicken cells. The antibody specificity was tested on purified gizzard proteins and total cell lysates using immunogold silver staining on protein blots. Immunofluorescence on cultured chicken fibroblasts and epithelial cells exhibited a similar staining pattern of antibodies to total myosin, subfragment 1, and light chain 20, whereas the antibodies to light meromyosin showed a substantially different reaction. The electron microscopic distribution of these antibodies was investigated using the indirect and direct immunogold staining method on permeabilized and fixed cells. The indirect approach enabled us to describe the general distribution of myosin in stress fibers. Direct double immunogold labeling, however, provided more detailed information on the orientation of myosin molecules and their localization relative to alpha-actinin: alpha-actinin, identified with antibodies coupled to 10-nm gold, was concentrated in the dense bodies or electron-dense bands of stress fibers, whereas myosin was confined to the intervening electron-lucid regions. Depending on the antibodies used in combination with alpha-actinin, the intervening regions revealed a different staining pattern: antibodies to myosin (reactive with the head portion of nonmuscle myosin) and to light chain 20 (both coupled to 5-nm gold) labeled two opposite bands adjacent to alpha- actinin, and antibodies to light meromyosin (coupled to 5-nm gold) labeled a single central zone. Based on these results, we conclude that myosin in stress fibers is organized into bipolar filaments.
Interactive Texture Synthesis on Surfaces using Jump Maps

We introduce a new method for fast texture synthesis on surfaces from examples. We generalize the image-based jump map texture synthesis algorithm, which partitions the task of texture synthesis into a slower analysis phase and a fast synthesis phase, by developing a new synthesis phase which works directly on arbitrary surfaces. Our method is one to two orders of magnitude faster than existing techniques, and does not generate any new texture images, enabling interactive applications for reasonably-sized meshes. This capability would be useful in many areas, including the texturing of dynamically-generated surfaces, interactive modelling applications, and rapid prototyping workflows.Our method remains simple to implement, assigning an offset in texture space to each edge of the mesh, followed by ]a walk over the mesh vertices to assign texture coordinates. A final step ensures each triangle receives consistent texture coordinates at its corners, and if available, texture blending can be used to improve the quality of results.
The dynamics of virus epidemics in Varroa -infested honey bee colonies

Summary 1. When the parasitic mite Varroa jumped species from the eastern to the western honey bee, millions of infested bee colonies died. Recent work has revealed that the probable cause of this collapse is that mites provide a new route of transmission, by acting as a vector, for certain bee viruses. 2. Using a mathematical model parameterized by recently collected data on bee viruses, we investigate the relationship between the mite load in a colony and the possibility of a virus epidemic occurring within a bee colony. 3. The model suggests that the balance of coexistence between mite, virus and bee in the eastern honey bee, has been lost in the western bee host, not simply because of the new transmission route, but also because mite populations in western honey bee colonies has exceeded a critical epidemic threshold. We quantify the critical epidemic mite load for two well-studied bee viruses, acute paralysis virus and deformed wing virus, through the colony’s yearly life cycle. 4. As well as providing practical insights into mite control strategies, the model allows us to disentangle the relative importance of different bee and mite behaviours in virus spread. We consider the evolutionary aspects of the new route of virus transmission, looking in particular at how changes to social organization might bring about collective resistance.
Further attacks on Yeung-Mintzer fragile watermarking scheme

In this paper, we describe new and improved attacks on the authentication scheme previously proposed by Yeung and Mintzer. Previous attacks assumed that the binary watermark logo inserted in an image for the purposes of authentication was known. Here we remove that assumption and show how the scheme is still vulnerable, even if the binary logo is not known but the attacker has access to multiple images that have been watermarked with the same secret key and contain the same (but unknown) logo. We present two attacks. The first attack infers the secret watermark insertion function and the binary logo, given multiple images authenticated with the same key and containing the same logo. We show that a very good approximation to the logo and watermark insertion function can be constructed using as few as two images. With color images, one needs many more images, nevertheless the attack is still feasible. The second attack we present, which we call the 'collage-attack' is a variation of the Holliman-Memon counterfeiting attack. The proposed variation does not require knowledge of the watermark logo and produces counterfeits of superior quality by means of a suitable dithering process that we develop.
Calculation of amino acid pKaS in a protein from a continuum electrostatic model: Method and sensitivity analysis

We used continuum electrostatic theory to calculate pKas of amino acids in protein. A Green's function formalism, based on a finite‐difference solution to the Poisson–Boltzmann equation for a unit point charge, yields electrostatic potentials that allow calculation of amino acid pKas to an estimated accuracy of tenths of a pKa unit. Improvements over previous methods include the ability to focus the finite difference grid to arbitrarily small grid spacing, an analytical representation of the molecular surface, and a novel procedure to calculate the reaction field potential. Using this method, we performed a sensitivity analysis of calculated pKas in the photosynthetic reaction center. Calculated pKas are most sensitive for residues that are not well‐exposed to solvent. Variations in the parameters of the continuum electrostatic model cause pKa shifts that are larger than the accuracy of the numerical method, but probably not large enough to account for some of the discrepancies between calculated and experimentally measured pKas that have been reported for the reaction center. © 1996 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.