Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Urban Avifauna of Kuching, Borneo, and the possible impact of cats on its structure

Urban landscapes have depauperate avifaunas, but there have been few studies of urban bird communities in Southeast Asia. Domestic cats can attain very high densities in urban environments, and are known to have detrimental effects on local avian assemblages. The aim of this study was to describe the urban bird assemblage of Kuching, an equatorial city in Borneo, and to investigate its potential relationship with the abundance of cats. The density of birds and domestic cats was examined in ten discrete urban areas from November 2014 to April 2015 using line transects. A total of 1,844 bird observations were made, involving 27 species. Bird species richness and diversity were negatively related to cat density (R2 = 0.41 and 0.43, respectively), but cat density did not significantly affect bird density (R2 = 0.032). Bird species richness was strongly correlated with the size of urban areas (R2 = 0.76, P = 0.001) suggesting that larger areas offer additional habitat or niches (e.g. street trees, parks, waterways), which in turn support more species. Reduction of habitat heterogeneity and type of surrounding matrix, as well as the presence of abundant introduced predators may play important roles in structuring the composition and population dynamics of this urban bird community. Urban areas do have some biodiversity conservation value, but the challenge is to enhance this value through better planning.
Surrogate functionality of celluloses as tablet excipients

Background: The variety of excipients from different sources and prices to which we have access gives rise to the necessity to evaluate their functional characteristics. The aim of this work is to determine some physical and technological characteristics of celluloses from different sources, India and United States, to ascertain their functionality as tablet excipients. Methods: The used surrogate functionality properties are particle morphology and particle size distribution, compactibility, ejection pressure, and the disintegration properties of pure excipients and their compressed tablets. Results: The innovators Avicel and Croscarmellose show advantages over the generic celluloses Alfacel and Carmacel. Avicel PH 101 and 102 show an average of 26% greater compactibility than both types of Alfacel, whereas the compactibility of Croscarmellose is greater than that of Carmacel in about 50%. Avicel tablets compacted at a compaction pressure of 47 MPa exhibit shorter disintegration times (3.7 minutes) than Alfacel tablets (28 minutes), whereas Carmacel show better disintegrant properties than Croscarmellose. This occurs regardless of the similar particle morphology, size, and size distribution. As expected, all celluloses show low ejection pressures. Conclusion: The surrogate functionality properties of the generic celluloses are still considered as satisfactory to be used as tablet excipients, although they are inferior in some aspects to innovator celluloses. Alfacel and Carmacel have the potential to be used as filler, binder, and disintegrant, in the design of tablets. Moreover, one should bear in mind that the differences reported here may be altered because of a possible inter-batch variability and variations in the moisture content.
Polymorphisms of Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor and Retinopathy of Prematurity.

PURPOSE Retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) is a major problem among preterm survivors of neonatal intensive care. Neovascularization of the retina is prominent in the proliferative stages of ROP and is under the control of factors such as vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF). The authors investigated the association of ROP with VEGF genetic polymorphisms and clinical (maternal, perinatal, neonatal) risk factors among preterm infants admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit. METHODS The frequencies of VEGF 634 C/G and VEGF 936 C/T polymorphisms were determined in DNA from 102 preterm infants by polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) technique. RESULTS The frequency of the VEGF 634 CG genotype was significantly higher, whereas the frequency of the VEGF 634 CC genotype was significantly lower among neonates with ROP. The frequencies of the VEGF 634 GG, VEGF 936 CC, and VEGF 936 CT genotypes were similar in both groups. The distribution of VEGF 634 G allele was significantly different between the two groups. By logistic regression analysis, low birth weight, presence of maternal disease, respiratory distress syndrome, hypotension, and VEGF 634 CG genotype remained significant risk factors for the development of ROP. CONCLUSIONS The results support the hypothesis that the carrier state of VEGF 634 C/G polymorphism has an impact on the risk of ROP in infants. A broader study may suggest that this marker could be used as an indicator in the screening for ROP.
[Bronchopulmonary dysplasia].

OBJECTIVE To present a wide-ranging review of the literature on broncopulmonary dysplasia, covering new definitions, pathophysiology, prevention, treatment, prognosis and progression. SOURCES OF DATA The most relevant articles published on the subject since it was first described in 1967 were selected from MEDLINE search results. SUMMARY OF THE FINDINGS Bronchopulmonary dysplasia is considered one of the primary causes of chronic lung disease among infants. It is associated with frequent and prolonged hospital admissions, in particular for pulmonary diseases, with high rates of mortality and alterations to neuropsychomotor development and pondero-statural growth. Pathogenesis is complex, being primarily influenced by prematurity, infection, supplementary oxygen and mechanical ventilation. Prevention involves appropriate prenatal care, the prevention of premature delivery, prenatal corticosteroids, surfactant replacement therapy and "protective" ventilatory strategies. Treatment of bronchopulmonary dysplasia patients demands a multidisciplinary team. When indicated, oxygen supplementation is extremely important. Despite increased risk of morbidity and mortality during the first years of life, long term progress is favorable in the majority of cases. CONCLUSIONS Bronchopulmonary dysplasia has been and continues to be studied in great depth with the objective of identifying its causes and possible prevention and treatment strategies. Controversies remain with respect of these issues and also about the prognosis of these patients, in particular when the subject is long-term progress of "new" bronchopulmonary dysplasia patients.
Natural Environment Illumination: Coherent Interactive Augmented Reality for Mobile and Non-Mobile Devices

Augmented Reality offers many applications today, especially on mobile devices. Due to the lack of mobile hardware for illumination measurements, photorealistic rendering with consistent appearance of virtual objects is still an area of active research. In this paper, we present a full two-stage pipeline for environment acquisition and augmentation of live camera images using a mobile device with a depth sensor. We show how to directly work on a recorded 3D point cloud of the real environment containing high dynamic range color values. For unknown and automatically changing camera settings, a color compensation method is introduced. Based on this, we show photorealistic augmentations using variants of differential light simulation techniques. The presented methods are tailored for mobile devices and run at interactive frame rates. However, our methods are scalable to trade performance for quality and can produce quality renderings on desktop hardware.
Vata-L: Visual-Analogue Test Assessing Anosognosia for Language Impairment

Lack of awareness (anosognosia) for one's own language impairments has rarely been investigated, despite hampering language rehabilitation. Assessment of anosognosia by means of self-report is particularly complex, as a patient's language difficulties may seriously prevent or bias the assessment. Other methods, such as measures of self-correction and error detection, have provided valuable information, although they are an indirect form of assessment of anosognosia and are not exempt from methodological criticisms. In this study we report on a new tool, the VATA-L (Visual-Analogue Test for Anosognosia for Language impairment), geared at assessing explicit anosognosia for aphasia. The VATA-L compares the patient's self-evaluation with caregivers’ evaluations of the patient's verbal communication abilities in a series of common situations. By means of non-verbal support and a system of check questions, this test minimizes some of the methodological limitations of existing diagnostic tools (e.g., structured interviews), enhancing reliability, and enabling assessment of patients with aphasia. Finally, normative data provided in the study allow a clearer interpretation of the patient's performance and facilitate assessment of anosognosia.
Constructor-based Logics

Many computer science applications concern properties that are true for a restricted class of models. In this paper, a couple of constructor-based institutions are presented. These institutions are defined on top of some base institutions, roughly speaking, by enhancing the syntax with constructor symbols and restricting the semantics to models with elements that are reachable by constructors. The proof rules for the constructor-based Horn logics, formalized as institutions, are defined in this paper, and a proof of completeness is provided in the abstract framework of institutions.
Face recognition for look-alikes: A preliminary study

One of the major challenges of face recognition is to design a feature extractor and matcher that reduces the intraclass variations and increases the inter-class variations. The feature extraction algorithm has to be robust enough to extract similar features for a particular subject despite variations in quality, pose, illumination, expression, aging, and disguise. The problem is exacerbated when there are two individuals with lower inter-class variations, i.e., look-alikes. In such cases, the intra-class similarity is higher than the inter-class variation for these two individuals. This research explores the problem of look-alike faces and their effect on human performance and automatic face recognition algorithms. There is three fold contribution in this research: firstly, we analyze the human recognition capabilities for look-alike appearances. Secondly, we compare human recognition performance with ten existing face recognition algorithms, and finally, proposed an algorithm to improve the face verification accuracy. The analysis shows that neither humans nor automatic face recognition algorithms are efficient in recognizing look-alikes.
Quantitative and theoretical analysis of species distribution models for invasive species risk assessment and management

Quantitative and theoretical analysis of species distribution models for invasive species risk assessment and management by Ursula Torres Mankiewicz Biological invasions are a major component of global change leading to numerous impacts on biodiversity, natural and managed ecosystems and natural resources. Despite being more vulnerable to biotic exchange, freshwater ecosystems have tended to receive less attention in invasive species research. There is an urgent need to maintain freshwater ecosystem ecological quality which requires a deeper knowledge about the species that may cause a biological invasion, as well as the process of invasion. To prevent and mitigate the effects of invasive species, biosecurity systems have been implemented in all trading nations around the world. In such systems, the estimation of species potential distribution is key to invasive species risk assessment, and decision making around that risk. Species distribution models (SDM) are therefore important tools used for early detection and are helpful for the design of improved programs for management of such species. However, these models rely on a number of assumptions that may not be valid for all species and all taxa, and there are concerns about the reliability of model predictions in new areas. The main aim of this research was to investigate the key assumptions that underlie the use of species distribution models, to understand their impact on predictions, and to determine the reliability of those predictions. SDM characterize the species niche to infer predictions in new areas by relying on two main assumptions: the species niche remains unchanged during the invasion (niche conservatism) and that target species occupies all the suitable environments (species are at equilibrium with the environment). This thesis investigated whether these assumptions hold and, if they do not, how they could impact species distribution predictions. To further determine the reliability of SDM predictions in new areas, I investigated the impact of extrapolation when models are required to project into new areas, and the impact of evaluation methods on model performance on the reliability of predictions.
My-active and healthy ageing (My-AHA): An ICT platform to detect frailty risk and propose intervention

Stemming from a holistic view of interrelated frailties, cognitive decline, physical frailty, depression and anxiety, social isolation and poor sleep quality, My-AHA proposes an ICT platform for early detection of pre-frailty and intervention to sustain active and healthy ageing and slowing or reversing further decline. The main aim of My-AHA is to reduce frailty risk by improving physical activity and cognitive function, psychological state, social resources, nutrition, sleep and overall well-being in older adults with pre-frailty symptoms. It will empower older citizens to better manage their own health, providing new ways of health monitoring and disease prevention through individualized profiling and personalized recommendations, feedback and support. An ICT-based platform will detect defined risks in the frailty domains early and accurately via non-stigmatising embedded sensors and data readily available in the daily living environment of older adults. When risk is detected (pre-frail), My-AHA will provide targeted ICT-based interventions. These interventions will follow an integrated approach to motivate users to participate in physical exercise, cognitively stimulating games and social networking to achieve long-term behavioural change, sustained by continued end user engagement with My-AHA. A randomized controlled study (RCT), involving 300 subjects receiving intervention, and 300 controls from many EU and non EU countries, to evaluate intercultural aspects, is ongoing in order to evaluate efficacy of the my-AHA platform. The ultimate aim is to deliver significant innovation in the area of active and healthy ageing through cooperation between European health care organizations, SMEs, and NGOs.1
Stretched strings in noncommutative field theory

Motivated by recent discussions of IR-UV mixing in noncommutative field theories, we perform a detailed analysis of the nonplanar amplitudes of the bosonic open string in the presence of an external B field at the one-loop level. We carefully isolate, at the string theory level, the contribution which is responsible for the IR-UV behavior in the field theory limit. We show that it is a pure open string effect by deriving it from the factorization of the one-loop amplitude into the disk amplitudes of intermediate open string insertions. We suggest that it is natural to understand IR-UV mixing as the creation of intermediate ''stretched strings. '' (c) 2000 The American Physical Society.
The Performance Pyramid Framework to Information Systems Security Management Process

The investigation in this paper takes a social and organizational approach to information systems security management and proposes a framework which illustrates three important issues in the process of security management through goal setting, these are: trust, culture, and risk communication. Three case studies show evidence that there is a chain reaction among these issues with a subsequent effect on the level of security goal setting. Ultimately, the paper identifies the determinants of trust within the IT departments of three financial institutions in Greece and provides also a discussion regarding the research methods that were used to obtain the results.
Calculation of elastic strain and electronic effects on surface segregation.

We present an electronic theory for calculating the heat of impurity segregation at metal surfaces by considering both the electronic contribution to the surface energy and the size-mismatch energy. The attractive part of the total energy is described by a multiband tight-binding Hartree Hamiltonian, and for the repulsive part Born-Mayer-type interatomic repulsions are assumed, which may depend on charge transfer. With simplifying assumptions about the density of states and the charge transfer, the heat of segregation and the equilibrium geometry can be obtained from an expression which depends only on the bulk cohesive energy, the bulk modulus, and the atomic size of the alloy components. Using this theory, we calculate the heat of segregation of Rh, Cu, and Au impurities on different Pt single-crystal surfaces and make a comparison with existing experimental data.
Learning to Understand Natural Language with Less Human Effort

Abstract : Learning to understand the meaning of natural language is an important problem within language processing that has the potential to revolutionize human interactions with computer systems. Informally, the problem specification is to map natural language text to a formal semantic representation connected to the real world. This problem has applications such as information extraction and understanding robot commands, and also may be helpful for other natural language processing tasks. Human annotation is a significant bottleneck in constructing language understanding systems. These systems have two components that are both constructed using human annotation: a semantic parser and a knowledge base. Semantic parsers are typically trained on individually-annotated sentences. Knowledge bases are typically manually constructed and given to the system. While these annotations can be provided in simple settings -- specifically, when the knowledge base is small -- the annotation burden quickly becomes unbearable as the size of the knowledge base increases. More annotated sentences are required to train the semantic parser and the knowledge base itself requires more annotations. Alternative methods to build language understanding systems that require less human annotation are necessary in order to learn to understand natural language in these more challenging settings. This thesis explores alternative supervision assumptions for building language understanding systems with the goal of reducing the annotation burden described above. I focus on two applications: information extraction and understanding language in physical environments. In the information extraction application, I present algorithms for training semantic parsers using only predicate instances from a knowledge base and an unlabeled text corpus.
Morphological Operations to Segment a Tumor from a Magnetic Resonance Image

This paper describes an efficient framework for the extraction of a brain tumor from magnetic resonance (MR) images. Before the segmentation process, a median filter is used to filter the image. Then, the morphological gradient is computed and added to the filtered image for intensity enhancement. After the enhancement process, the thresholding value is calculated using the mean and the standard deviation of the image. This thresholding value is used to binarize the image followed by the morphological operations. Moreover, the combination of these morphological operations allows to compute the local thresholding image supported by a flood-fill algorithm and a pixel replacement process to extract the tumor from the brain. Thus, this framework provides a new source of evidence in the field of segmentation that the specialist can aggregate with the segmentation results in order to soften his/her own decision.
B*-trees: a new representation for non-slicing floorplans

We present in this paper an efficient, flexible, and effective data structure, <italic>B<supscrpt>*</supscrpt>-trees</italic> for non-slicing floorplans. B<supscrpt>*</supscrpt>-trees are based on ordered binary trees and the admissible placement presented in [1]. Inheriting from the nice properties of ordered binary trees, B<supscrpt>*</supscrpt>-trees are very easy for implementation and can perform the respective primitive tree, operations search, insertion, and deletion in only <italic>O</italic>(1), <italic>O</italic>(1), and <italic>O</italic>(<italic>n</italic>) times while existing representations for non-slicing floorplans need at least <italic>O</italic>(<italic>n</italic>) time for each of these operations, where <italic>n</italic> is the number of modules. The correspondence between an admissible placement and its induced B<supscrpt>*</supscrpt>-tree is 1-to-1 (i.e., no redundancy); further, the transformation between them takes only linear time. Unlike other representations for non-slicing floorplans that need to construct constraint graphs for cost evaluation, in particular, the evaluation can be performed on B<supscrpt>*</supscrpt>-trees and their corresponding placements <italic>directly</italic> and <italic>incrementally</italic>. We further show the flexibility of B<supscrpt>*</supscrpt>-trees by exploring how to handle rotated, pre-placed, soft, and rectilinear modules. Experimental results on MCNC benchmarks show that the B<supscrpt>*</supscrpt>-tree representation runs about 4.5 times faster, consumes about 60% less memory, and results in smaller silicon area than the O-tree one [1]. We also develop a B<supscrpt>*</supscrpt>-tree based simulated annealing scheme for floorplan design; the scheme achieves near optimum area utilization even for rectilinear modules.
Analysis of granuloma formation in double cytokine-deficient mice reveals a central role for IL-10 in polarizing both T helper cell 1- and T helper cell 2-type cytokine responses in vivo.

In response to i.v. -injected eggs of Schistosoma mansoni, normal mice develop a dominant type 2 response, whereas IL-10-deficient animals generate a mixed type 1/type 2 cytokine profile and show reduced pulmonary granuloma formation. IL-4-deficient mice, while displaying diminished type 2 responses and granulomatous inflammation, also do not fully default to a type 1 cytokine profile. Strikingly, mice doubly deficient in IL-4 and IL-10 are completely defective in pulmonary granuloma formation and develop a highly polarized type 1 cytokine pattern. In analogous fashion, mice deficient in both IL-12 and IL-10 generate highly exacerbated type 2 cytokine responses, whereas in wild-type animals, IL-12 depletion minimally effects egg-induced cytokine production. Together, these results argue first that IL-10 is an important endogenous down-regulator of type 2 as well as type 1 cytokine synthesis, and second, that its induction is critical for type 2 response polarization in vivo.