Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Happiness and memory: affective significance of endowment and contrast.

Three studies (two conducted in Israel and one in the United States) examined associations between self-rated dispositional happiness and tendencies to treat memories of positive and negative events as sources of enhanced or attenuated happiness through the use of "endowment" and "contrast. " Although participants generally endorsed items describing happiness-enhancing tendencies more than happiness-diminishing ones, self-reported happiness was associated with greater endorsement of "positive endowment" items and less endorsement of "negative endowment" items, and also with less endorsement of items that involved contrasting the present with happier times in the past. Only in the American sample, however, was happiness associated with greater endorsement of items that involved contrasting the present with less happy times in the past. These data suggest that relatively unhappy people show somewhat conflicting memorial tendencies vis-à-vis happiness, whereas very happy people show simpler, and less conflicting, tendencies. These findings augment the existing literatures on the affective consequences of memory, which have been concerned more with mood than with temperament and/or have dealt only with a subset of the endowment and contrast tendencies explored in the present work.
Approximation algorithms for Interference Aware Broadcast in wireless networks

Broadcast is a fundamental operation in wireless networks and is well supported by the wireless channel. However, the interference resulting from a node's transmission pose a key challenge to the design of any broadcast algorithms/protocols. In particular, it is well known that a node's interference range is much larger than its transmission range and thus limits the number of transmitting and receiving nodes, which inevitably prolong broadcast. To this end, a number of past studies have designed broadcast algorithms that account for this interference range with the goal of deriving a broadcast schedule that minimizes latency. However, these works have only taken into account interference that occurs within the transmission range of a sender. Therefore, the resulting latency is non-optimal given that collision occurs at the receiver. In this paper, we address the Interference-Aware Broadcast Scheduling (IABS) problem, which aims to find a schedule with minimum broadcast latency subject to the constraint that a receiver is not within the interference range of any senders. We study the IABS problem under the protocol interference model, and present a constant approximation algorithm, called IABBS, and its enhanced version, IAEBS, that produces a maximum latency of at most 2⌊π/√(3)(α+1)2+ (π/2+1)(α+1)+1⌋ R, where α is the ratio between the interference range and the transmission range, i.e., α ≥ 1, and R is the radius of the network with respect to the source node of the broadcast. We have evaluated our algorithms under different network configurations and confirmed that the latencies achieved by our algorithms are much lower than existing schemes. In particular, compared to CABS, the best constant approximation broadcast algorithm to date, the broadcast latency achieved by IAEBS is 5 over 8 that of CABS.
A new role for muscle segment homeobox genes in mammalian embryonic diapause

Mammalian embryonic diapause is a phenomenon defined by the temporary arrest in blastocyst growth and metabolic activity within the uterus which synchronously becomes quiescent to blastocyst activation and implantation. This reproductive strategy temporally uncouples conception from parturition until environmental or maternal conditions are favourable for the survival of the mother and newborn. The underlying molecular mechanism by which the uterus and embryo temporarily achieve quiescence, maintain blastocyst survival and then resume blastocyst activation with subsequent implantation remains unknown. Here, we show that uterine expression of Msx1 or Msx2, members of an ancient, highly conserved homeobox gene family, persists in three unrelated mammalian species during diapause, followed by rapid downregulation with blastocyst activation and implantation. Mice with uterine inactivation of Msx1 and Msx2 fail to achieve diapause and reactivation. Remarkably, the North American mink and Australian tammar wallaby share similar expression patterns of MSX1 or MSX2 as in mice—it persists during diapause and is rapidly downregulated upon blastocyst activation and implantation. Evidence from mouse studies suggests that the effects of Msx genes in diapause are mediated through Wnt5a, a known transcriptional target of uterine Msx. These studies provide strong evidence that the Msx gene family constitutes a common conserved molecular mediator in the uterus during embryonic diapause to improve female reproductive fitness.
Abnormal event detection based on sparse reconstruction in crowded scenes

In this paper, we propose an algorithm of abnormal event detection in crowded scenes using sparse representation over the bases of normal motion feature descriptors. To construct an over-complete dictionary, we extract the histogram of maximal optical flow projection (HMOFP) feature from a set of normal training frames. Then the K-SVD dictionary training method is used to get a redundant dictionary after a process of selecting the training samples, which is better than the dictionary simply composed by the HMOFP feature of the whole training frames. In order to detect whether a frame is normal or not, we use the U-norm of the sparse reconstruction coefficients (i.e., the sparse reconstruction cost, SRC) to show the anomaly of the testing frame, which is simple but very effective. The experiment results on UMN dataset and the comparison to the state-of-the-art methods show that our algorithm is promising.
Collaborative Knowledge Discovery in Databases: A Knowledge Exchange Perspective

In a Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) process, human capabilities and judgment are still a fundamental ingredient to ensure that useful and valid knowledge is derived from data. Such capabilities assume the form of skills and expertise in different domains such as databases, statistics, machine learning, data mining, as well as the specific business/application domain. Thus, in order to manage a knowledge discovery project, a team of different experts is worth being constituted. In this paper we analyze the Collaborative Knowledge Discovery in Databases environment in terms of the different information team workers need to exchange to collaborate, surveying the main existing technologies for information representation and exchange, and enlightening possible directions of future work. Furthermore, we propose an open environment supporting users in the management of specific KDD information and activities.
Effective Flexible Delivery in Higher Education: An Australian Case

Abstract - In 1999, the Bachelor of Electronic Commerce degree started at the Ipswich campus of the University of Queensland with an initial intake of approximately 50 students. Subjects were offered to students using technology and flexible delivery methods. This paper details the authors’ experiences in building and presenting a cornerstone subject, Introduction to Computer-based Information Systems, in this new degree using flexible delivery techniques. This paper discusses the question, "What is flexible delivery? " Then, it proceeds to reflect on how the concept was operationalised using a combination of e-mail, web-based technologies, and face-to-face contact classes. The proposition is put forward that flexible delivery does not mean contactless delivery, nor does it mean structureless delivery. Finally, the results are presented of several data collection exercises on the relative effectiveness of the presentation methods employed. These results provide preliminary support for the propositions that structure and regular face-to-face contact remain highly valued and effective components of a subject’s presentation.
The Sequence Characteristics and Expression Models Reveal Superoxide Dismutase Involved in Cold Response and Fruiting Body Development in Volvariella volvacea

As the first defence for cells to counteract the toxicity of active oxygen, superoxide dismutase (SOD) plays an important role in the response of living organisms to stress and cell differentiation. One extracellular Cu-ZnSOD (ecCu-ZnSOD), and two MnSODs, were identified based on the Volvariella volvacea genome sequence. All three genes have complicated alternative splicing modes during transcription; only when the fourth intron is retained can the Vv_Cu-Znsod1 gene be translated into a protein sequence with SOD functional domains. The expression levels of the three sod genes in the pilei are higher than in the stipe. The Vv_Cu-Znsod1 and the Vv_Mnsod2 are co-expressed in different developmental stages of the fruiting body, with the highest level of expression in the pilei of the egg stage, and they show a significant, positive correlation with the efficiency of karyogamy, indicating the potential role of these two genes during karyogamy. The expression of the ecCu-Znsod and two Vv_Mnsod genes showed a significant up-regulated when treated by cold stress for one hour; however, the lack of the intracellular Cu-ZnSOD encoding gene (icCu-Znsod) and the special locus of the ecCu-Znsod gene initiation codon suggested a possible reason for the autolysis phenomenon of V. volvacea in cold conditions.
Train&align: A new online tool for automatic phonetic alignment

Several automatic phonetic alignment tools have been proposed in the literature. They usually rely on pre-trained speaker-independent models to align new corpora. Their drawback is that they cover a very limited number of languages and might not perform properly for different speaking styles. This paper presents a new tool for automatic phonetic alignment available online. Its specificity is that it trains the model directly on the corpus to align, which makes it applicable to any language and speaking style. Experiments on three corpora show that it provides results comparable to other existing tools. It also allows the tuning of some training parameters. The use of tied-state triphones, for example, shows further improvement of about 1.5% for a 20 ms threshold. A manually-aligned part of the corpus can also be used as bootstrap to improve the model quality. Alignment rates were found to significantly increase, up to 20%, using only 30 seconds of bootstrapping data.
Selection of Characteristic Frames in Video for Efficient Action Recognition

Vision based human action recognition has been an active research field in recent years. Exemplar matching is an important and popular methodology in this field, however, most previous works perform exemplar matching on the whole input video clip for recognition. Such a strategy is computationally expensive and limits its practical usage. In this paper, we present a martingale framework for selection of characteristic frames from an input video clip without requiring any prior knowledge. Action recognition is operated on these selected characteristic frames. Experiments on 10 studied actions from WEIZMANN dataset demonstrate a significant improvement in computational efficiency (54% reduction) while achieving the same recognition precision. key words: exemplar matching, action recognition, characteristic frames
A construction of particle counter by using laser light scattering

A simple particle counting system was constructed by using laser light scattering technique. The main components consist of a 50 mW green laser diode (λ = 532 nm) and a Hamamatsu H5784 photomultiplier tube (PMT). The intensity of scattered light from a particle was measured with a PMT. The pulse height from a PMT is proportional to the size of a particle. The silica powder with the size of 75 µm, 100 µm and 150 µm were used as reference particles, winnowed by sieve and measured by image analyzer to ensure the reference size. Resulting in the pulse height of 100 mV, 200 mV and 400 mV respectively, from a PMT. The experimental results showed that an implementation of particle counter can be used to measure a quantity as well as an approximate size of the particles.
The effects of drought, heat and elevated atmospheric CO2 on physiology and growth of Eucalyptus – Does climate-of-origin matter?**

This thesis assessed the effects of future climate factors (i.e. [CO2], heat waves and soil water availability) on growth and physiology of Eucalyptus species originating in different climates-of-origin. The main aim was to test intra-specific variation of plant traits to climate change. Four tree species native to Australia were selected due to their national ecological and international economic importance: Eucalyptus camaldulensis, Eucalyptus grandis, Eucalyptus melliodora and Eucalyptus coolabah. I tested the response of E. camaldulensis to elevated atmospheric [CO2] (eCO2), heat and drought stress; E. grandis to eCO2 and drought stress; and the acclimation response of E. melliodora and E. coolabah to wetting and drying cycles with final drought to mortality. Phenotypic plasticity in leaf gas exchange, growth and non-structural carbohydrate (NSC) reserves was significantly different in E. camaldulensis and E. grandis when subjected to heat and/or water stress. In E. grandis, the tallest trees from cool temperatures had the largest growth reductions during stress. In E. camaldulensis, trees originating in semi-arid climates initiated leaf abscission early and conserved NSC, which led to faster stem and leaf area recovery than trees frommore mesic climates. Moreover, eCO2 ameliorated stress responses related to photosynthesis when trees were either heat-stressed or water-limited; timeto-leaf-death was extended in one provenance of E. camaldulensis in eCO2. There was no acclimation of leaf gas exchange to variable water availability during the series of droughts in E. melliodora and E. coolabah. Yet, species had contrasting water-use strategies linked to their distributional range across Australia. Eucalyptus coolabah originating in a semi-arid climate reduced its leaf area to prevent hydraulic failure, while E. melliodora originating in a mesic climate utilised NSC reserves to tolerate water limitation. These results highlight the importance of soil water availability for physiological functioning and growth, but they also show that intra-specific differences exist in response to heat and drought. In conclusion, my PhD research extends information on interand intra-specific differences in phenotypic plasticity of trees to the main and interactive effects of climate factors, which can be used to identify plantation trees for future climate regimes.
Cost utility of palivizumab prophylaxis among pre-term infants in the United States: a national policy perspective

Abstract Objective: The cost-effectiveness of palivizumab has previously been reported among certain guideline-eligible, high-risk premature infants in Medicaid. Because guideline authorities base decisions on a national perspective, the economic model of palivizumab was adapted to include all infants, that is, public and privately insured patients (60% of palivizumab use is public, 40% is private). Methods: This study examined four groups of premature infants without chronic lung disease of prematurity or congenital heart disease: (1) <32 weeks gestational age (wGA) and ≤6 months chronologic age (CA); (2) 32–34 wGA, ≤3 months CA, with 2009 American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) risk factors (RFs); (3) 32–35 wGA, ≤6 months CA, with 2006 AAP RFs; and (4) 32–35 wGA, ≤6 months CA, with ≤1 RF. An average estimate was used between public and private payors for (1) background rates of respiratory syncytial virus hospitalization (RSV-H), (2) direct medical costs associated with RSV-H, and (3) cost of palivizumab. Incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICERs) are reported in cost per quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) gained. Sensitivity analyses were performed. Results: Palivizumab saved costs and improved QALYs among infants <32 wGA. Palivizumab was cost-effective in infants 32–34 wGA with 2009 AAP RFs ($44,774 per QALY) and in infants 32–35 wGA with 2006 AAP RFs ($79,477 per QALY). The ICER for infants 32–35 wGA with ≤1 RF was $464,476 per QALY. Influential variables in the sensitivity analysis included background rate of RSV-H and cost and efficacy of palivizumab. Limitations: The results are not generalizable to populations outside of the US. The model did not examine all RFs. The wholesale acquisition cost was used as a payment benchmark; actual price paid by end providers varies. Conclusions: From a national policy perspective, palivizumab remained cost-effective for publically and commercially insured, guideline-eligible, high-risk premature infants. Palivizumab was not cost-effective in infants of 32–35 wGA with ≤1 RF.
An analysis of the overvoltage in the secondary network, considering a transient grounding resistance.

This work presents an analysis of the overvoltage in the secondary network caused by lightning discharges that are transferred from the primary through the transformer. Numerical simulations using TLM- Transmission Line Modeling and ATP- Alternative Transients Program are presented to show and to establish comparisons between two models for the grounding resistance of the transformer and customer: the traditional model with constant resistance and the model proposed in this work, considering a transient resistance.
Loop-Free Link Stability Metrics for Proactive Routing in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

To improve communication quality in wireless ad hoc networks, it is definitely important to select stable links as communication paths. To this end, various mobility metrics are presented in the literature. However, the routing loop problem, which is inevitably involved in link-state proactive routing scheme, has not been discussed well. In this paper, we propose a simple dynamic metrics in respect of link stability, which is loop-free throughout dynamic metric transition. Through a theoretical analysis of loop-freeness, we present our new strategy to achieve loop-freeness with sufficiently low cost for ad hoc networks.
Closed-Form Delay-Optimal Power Control for Energy Harvesting Wireless System With Finite Energy Storage

In this paper, we consider delay-optimal power control for an energy harvesting wireless system with finite energy storage. The wireless system is powered solely by a renewable energy source with bursty data arrivals, and is characterized by a data queue and an energy queue. We consider a delay-optimal power control problem and formulate an infinite horizon average cost Markov decision process (MDP). To deal with the curse of dimensionality, we introduce a virtual continuous time system and derive closed-form approximate priority functions for the discrete time MDP at various operating regimes. Based on the approximation, we obtain an online power control solution which is adaptive to the channel state information as well as the data and energy queue state information. The derived power control solution has a multi-level water-filling structure, where the water level is determined jointly by the data and energy queue lengths. In the simulations, we show that the proposed scheme has significant performance gain compared with various baselines.
Improved sensibility of the foot after temporary cutaneous anesthesia of the lower leg

Cutaneous anesthesia (EMLA_cream) of the forearm results in rapid improvement of hand sensibility, and here we applied this concept in the lower extremity. This double-blind study with 40 volunteers randomized to cutaneous application of anesthetic cream to the lower leg showed a significant improvement 2 h after treatment in touch thresholds in the EMLA group as compared with the placebo group. In 12 volunteers, fMRI examination was performed before and after treatment. Improvement was not associated with a visible cortical expansion of the cortical foot area. This novel finding may have considerable therapeutic potential in the treatment of foot sensibility disturbances in various neuropathies, such as diabetic neuropathy.
Motion Segmentation by EM Clustering of Good Features

We present a new algorithm that does motion segmentation by tracking small textured patches and then clustering them using EM. A small patch has the advantage that its motion is well modeled by uniform flow and runs a lower risk of boundary inclusion. Inherently, a small patch has less data so it is more susceptible to noise and it is not well suited to fit locally higher order flow models. To overcome these difficulties, we introduce a motion coherence detector to select only the best features and an efficient statistical technique to compute segment-wise affine flow from the EM clustering parameters. We incorporate a residual noise model without any statistical independence assumption and an efficient χ^2 test for the noise model to obtain dense segmentation. Computational efficiency is striven for within a rigorous mathematical framework. Experiments with real image sequences show good segments under a variety of conditions.
Pixel based Symmetry Analysis of an Axial T2 Weighted Brain MRI

In this paper, we have tried to encapsulate the recent developments in the field of Symmetry based approaches to detect tumor and then came up with a new parameter which plays a crucial role in proving that a high degree of Symmetry is present in an axial normal human brain MRI (Magnetic resonance Imaging) and this symmetry get affected or not present in abnormal cases highlighting the fact that tumor might be present. This paper also reveals one of the major technical flaw or loophole that is present in almost all Symmetry based approaches to detect tumor. As Symmetry is one of the most important properties of a human brain that can be utilized to detect the presence of tumor and other anomalies present in the human Brain. This paper tried to provide the proof of symmetry in human brain through a pixel based analysis using a number of neuro images cases. For the pixel based analysis T2 weighted MRI modality images are used. In this paper we are using T2 MRI images because in it an anomaly appears Hyper intense (brighter than the normal brain tissue).
Cortical activity evoked by an acute painful tissue-damaging stimulus in healthy adult volunteers

Everyday painful experiences are usually single events accompanied by tissue damage, and yet most experimental studies of cutaneous nociceptive processing in the brain use repeated laser, thermal, or electrical stimulations that do not damage the skin. In this study the nociceptive activity in the brain evoked by tissue-damaging skin lance was analyzed with electroencephalography (EEG) in 20 healthy adult volunteers (13 men and 7 women) aged 21–40 yr. Time-frequency analysis of the evoked activity revealed a distinct late event-related vertex potential (lance event-related potential, LERP) at 100–300 ms consisting of a phase-locked energy increase between 1 and 20 Hz (delta-beta bands). A pairwise comparison between lance and sham control stimulation also revealed a period of ultralate stronger desynchronization after lance in the delta band (1–5 Hz). Skin application of mustard oil before lancing, which sensitizes a subpopulation of nociceptors expressing the cation channel TRPA1, did not affect the ultralate desynchronization but reduced the phase-locked energy increase in delta and beta bands, suggesting a central interaction between different modalities of nociceptive inputs. Verbal descriptor screening of individual pain experience revealed that lance pain is predominantly due to Aδ fiber activation, but when individuals describe lances as C fiber mediated, an ultralate delta band event-related desynchronization occurs in the brain-evoked activity. We conclude that pain evoked by acute tissue damage is associated with distinct Aδ and C fiber-mediated patterns of synchronization and desynchronization of EEG oscillations in the brain.