Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Nephrotic Syndrome in the Elderly

Though the nephrotic syndrome is generally believed to be uncommon in the elderly, patients aged 60 years or more accounted for 25 out of 100 consecutive adult cases. Six (24%) of these had the minimal change lesion, compared with 16% of the younger adults. The incidence of membranous glomerulonephritis was similar in the two age groups, but proliferative glomerulonephritis was more common in the younger (29%) than in the older group (16%). Amyloidosis did not have a higher incidence in the higher age group. Five of the elderly patients with minimal change lesion were treated with prednisone—in four a complete remission from the nephrotic syndrome followed, while the fifth patient's course is unknown. These results suggest that, when the patient's other circumstances allow, the nephrotic syndrome in an elderly patient should be investigated and managed as in younger age groups.
Host Transcriptional Response to Ebola Virus Infection

Ebola virus disease (EVD) is a serious illness that causes severe disease in humans and non-human primates (NHPs) and has mortality rates up to 90%. EVD is caused by the Ebolavirus and currently there are no licensed therapeutics or vaccines to treat EVD. Due to its high mortality rates and potential as a bioterrorist weapon, a better understanding of the disease is of high priority. Multiparametric analysis techniques allow for a more complete understanding of a disease and the host response. Analysis of RNA species present in a sample can lead to a greater understanding of activation or suppression of different states of the immune response. Transcriptomic analyses such as microarrays and RNA-Sequencing (RNA-Seq) have been important tools to better understand the global gene expression response to EVD. In this review, we outline the current knowledge gained by transcriptomic analysis of EVD.
AER EAR: A Matched Silicon Cochlea Pair With Address Event Representation Interface

In this paper, we present an analog integrated circuit containing a matched pair of silicon cochleae and an address event interface. Each section of the cochlea, modeled by a second-order low-pass filter, is followed by a simplified inner hair cell circuit and a spiking neuron circuit. When the neuron spikes, an address event is generated on the asynchronous data bus. We present the results of the chip characterization and the results of an interaural time difference based sound localization experiment using the address event representation (AER) EAR. The chip was fabricated in a 3-metal 2-poly 0.5-mum CMOS process
RGB-D Salient Object Detection Based on Discriminative Cross-modal Transfer Learning

In this work, we propose to utilize Convolutional Neural Networks to boost the performance of depth-induced salient object detection by capturing the high-level representative features for depth modality. We formulate the depth-induced saliency detection as a CNN-based cross-modal transfer problem to bridge the gap between the "data-hungry" nature of CNNs and the unavailability of sufficient labeled training data in depth modality. In the proposed approach, we leverage the auxiliary data from the source modality effectively by training the RGB saliency detection network to obtain the task-specific pre-understanding layers for the target modality. Meanwhile, we exploit the depth-specific information by pre-training a modality classification network that encourages modal-specific representations during the optimizing course. Thus, it could make the feature representations of the RGB and depth modalities as discriminative as possible. These two modules are pre-trained independently and then stitched to initialize and optimize the eventual depth-induced saliency detection model. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed novel pre-training strategy as well as the significant and consistent improvements of the proposed approach over other state-of-the-art methods.
Some mixing properties of conditionally independent processes

ABSTRACT In this paper, we consider conditionally independent processes with respect to some dynamic factor. More precisely, we assume that for all n, random variables (Xi)i ⩽ n are conditionally independent given . We study the mixing properties of the process and we provide an asymptotic result. Our work is motivated by some examples related to risk theory.
The highest fertility in Europe -- for how long? The analysis of fertility change in Albania based on individual data.

Albanias demographic changes have sparked considerable interest in recent years. Much of this attention has arisen due to a general lack of knowledge and unexpected demographic behaviour of the Albanian populations. The country has experienced a high level of life expectancy and relatively high levels of fertility in the recent years. While previous research gives some answers to developing trends and patterns of mortality and fertility change not much is known about the demographic behaviour of Albanians. Though Falkingham and Gjonca (2001) using census data provide useful insights into the fertility transition in Albania from 1950 to 1990 very little is known about fertility behaviour neither during the communist period nor during the nineties. From being one of the most isolated countries of the world Albania has embarked on a remarkable transition which involves dramatic political and economic change. The new and emerging situation is bound to have profound impact on society and the behaviour of individuals within it. Using the Albanian Living Standard and Measurement Survey (ALSMS) surveyed in 2002 we analyse fertility behaviour in terms of the quantum and tempo effects during the period following the collapse of the communist era. We use appropriate survival analysis techniques such as non-parametric Kaplan-Meier (KM) estimation and semiparametric Cox regression. The results on one side support the evidence we know so far on Albania that the reduction of fertility was mainly due to the improvements in the social agenda with particular emphasis on female education as well as the improvement in child mortality. The results also reveal that 1990s saw some strong period effects which mainly affected the higher parities. The persistence of traditional norms and values continue to affect the family formation in Albania while the changes in the social and economic circumstances determine the outcome of childbearing. This paper shows again that similar to its mortality pattern the fertility behaviour of Albanians are affected by both the south European patterns of family formation and the socio-economic changes that occurred in Eastern European countries. (authors)
Facial expression analysis under partial occlusion

Six basic facial expressions are investigated when the human face is partially occluded, i.e. when the eyes and eyebrows or the mouth regions are occluded. Such occlusions occur when a person wears glasses (e.g. in VR application) or a mouth mask (e.g. in medical application). More specifically, we are interested in finding the part of the face that contains sufficient information in order to correctly classify these six expressions. Two facial image databases are employed in our experiments. Each image from the database is convolved with a set of Gabor filters having various orientations and frequencies. The new feature vectors are classified by using a maximum correlation classifier and the cosine similarity measure approaches. We find that, overall, the facial expression recognition method provides robustness against partial occlusion, the classification accuracy only decreasing from 89.7% (no occlusion) to 84% (eyes region occlusion) and 83.5% (mouth region occlusion) for the first database and from 94.5% (no occlusion) to 91.5% (eyes region occlusion) and 87.2% (mouth region occlusion) for the second database, respectively.
Application of Self-Adaptive techniques to federated authorization models

Authorization infrastructures are an integral part of any network where resources need to be protected. As organisations start to federate access to their resources, authorization infrastructures become increasingly difficult to manage, to a point where relying only on human resources becomes unfeasible. In our work, we propose a Self-Adaptive Authorization Framework (SAAF) that is capable of monitoring the usage of resources, and controlling access to resources through the manipulation of authorization assets (e.g., authorization policies, access rights and sessions), due to the identification of abnormal usage. As part of this work, we explore the use of models for facilitating the autonomic management of federated authorization infrastructures by 1) classifying access behaviour exhibited by users, 2) modelling authorization assets, including usage, for identifying abnormal behaviour, and 3) managing authorization through the adaptation and reflection of modelled authorization assets. SAAF will be evaluated by integrating it into an existing authorization infrastructure that would allow the simulation of abnormal usage scenarios.
Development of functionally-graded reservoir of PCL/PG by selective laser sintering for drug delivery devices

Drug delivery devices are systems employed to conduct a drug to a specific site of the body, where it should be released and absorbed. Reservoir-type systems are devices in which the drug is contained within a nucleus isolated from the outside environment by a thin polymeric layer, which regulates a diffusion process driven by a functional concentration gradient. In this study two reservoir-type drug delivery devices based on polycaprolactone (PCL) were developed for the release of progesterone (PG) using the Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) technique, in order to investigate the influence of the concentration gradient promoted during manufacturing on the drug delivery profile. Two types of controlled-drug-release devices were fabricated; the first containing only the polycaprolactone polymer in the reservoir wall (system R) and the second containing PLC and 15% of progesterone in the wall (system R*). The cores of both reservoirs were filled with 40 mg of progesterone. A study on the degradation was conducted to assess the release process of the two systems. The drug delivery results showed that for both reservoirs the amount of drug released was linear over time, featuring zero-order release kinetics. The higher mass loss with the incorporation of the drug into the wall of the reservoir was associated with faster release of the drug to the medium. The feasibility of building three-dimensional parts using the SLS technique allowed the construction of reservoir-type devices based on a functional gradient for the controlled-release of the drug.
Morphology and optical study of dye-doped TiO2-SiO2 thin films

In the present work, we have prepared functional dye doped TiO2-SiO2 thin films by vertical sedimentation technique. Thin film samples are annealed at different temperature from 50oC to 850oC. Morphology and chemical bonding information is analysed using atomic force microscopy (AFM), and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) respectively. Optical properties are characterized by using UV-visible spectroscopy. Effect of annealing temperature on the photonic forbidden band gap is also presented. The experimental measured values are compared with theoretical estimated results.
Parallax-Robust Surveillance Video Stitching

This paper presents a parallax-robust video stitching technique for timely synchronized surveillance video. An efficient two-stage video stitching procedure is proposed in this paper to build wide Field-of-View (FOV) videos for surveillance applications. In the stitching model calculation stage, we develop a layered warping algorithm to align the background scenes, which is location-dependent and turned out to be more robust to parallax than the traditional global projective warping methods. On the selective seam updating stage, we propose a change-detection based optimal seam selection approach to avert ghosting and artifacts caused by moving foregrounds. Experimental results demonstrate that our procedure can efficiently stitch multi-view videos into a wide FOV video output without ghosting and noticeable seams.
Independent Component Analysis Based Seeding Method for K-Means Clustering

The k-means clustering method is a widely used clustering technique for the Web because of its simplicity and speed. However, the clustering result depends heavily on the chosen initial clustering centers, which are chosen uniformly at random from the data points. We propose a seeding method based on the independent component analysis for the k-means clustering method. We evaluate the performance of our proposed method and compare it with other seeding methods by using benchmark datasets. We applied our proposed method to a Web corpus, which is provided by ODP. The experiments show that the normalized mutual information of our proposed method is better than the normalized mutual information of k-means clustering method and k-means++ clustering method. Therefore, the proposed method is useful for Web corpus.
Metrology of Nail Clippings as Trace Element Biomarkers

For the identification of human exposure to one of the most toxic compounds, which is methyl mercury (MeHg+), fingernail clippings were selected as the matrix of interest. Within this pilot study, six samples from different origins and from people with different food consumption patterns were chosen. Species-analysis of MeHg+ was performed according to the following procedure: dissolution of the sample material in tetramethylammonium hydroxide (TMAH), derivatisation of MeHg+ with sodium tetraethylborate (NaBEt4), extraction into isooctane and measurement with gas chromatography hyphenated to inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (GC-ICPMS) for the quantification MeHg+. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. APPENDIX ___________________________________________________________________
Polishing Glass-Ceramic Based Rigid Disk

In this study, experiments were conducted to reveal effects of polishing parameters on surface characteristics and removal rate when polishing glass-ceramic based rigid disk. The parameters studied including rotational speed, applied pressure, and abrasive concentration. Experimental results show that surface roughness, waviness and removal rate could be improved by adjusting the levels of polishing parameters.
Automated Sample Exchange Robots for the Structural Biology Beam Lines at the Photon Factory

We are now developing automated sample exchange robots for high‐throughput protein crystallographic experiments for onsite use at synchrotron beam lines. It is part of the fully automated robotics systems being developed at the Photon Factory, for the purposes of protein crystallization, monitoring crystal growth, harvesting and freezing crystals, mounting the crystals inside a hutch and for data collection. We have already installed the sample exchange robots based on the SSRL automated mounting system at our insertion device beam lines BL‐5A and AR‐NW12A at the Photon Factory. In order to reduce the time required for sample exchange further, a prototype of a double‐tonged system was developed. As a result of preliminary experiments with double‐tonged robots, the sample exchange time was successfully reduced from 70 seconds to 10 seconds with the exception of the time required for pre‐cooling and warming up the tongs.
A 128-tap complex FIR filter Processing 20 giga-samples/s in a single FPGA

To enable 40Gb/s data transmission over optical fibres using QPSK modulation, the first step of the receiver signal-processing pipeline is a 128-tap FIR filter that compensates the chromatic dispersion due to the medium. We present an implementation of this FIR filter in the largest Stratix-IV GX device that is able to process 20 giga-samples per second, where each sample is a complex number with 5+5 bits resolution. This FFT-based architecture processes 128 complex samples per cycles at a frequency of 156MHz. The FFT and inverse FFT pipelines use ad-hoc memory-based constant multipliers well suited to the FPGA features, while the multiplications in the Fourier domain use the FPGA embedded DSP blocks. This FPGA is thus able to perform more than 2 tera-operations per second. The precision of the intermediate signals is chosen to ensure that the error of the output signal with respect to the Matlab reference is never more than one least significant bit.
Video scene categorization by 3D hierarchical histogram matching

In this paper we present a new method for categorizing video sequences capturing different scene classes. This can be seen as a generalization of previous work on scene classification from single images. A scene is represented by a collection of 3D points with an appearance based codeword attached to each point. The cloud of points is recovered by using a robust SFM algorithm applied on the video sequence. A hierarchical structure of histograms located at different locations and at different scales is used to capture the typical spatial distribution of 3D points and codewords in the working volume. The scene is classified by SVM equipped with a histogram matching kernel, similar to [21, 10, 16]. Results on a challenging dataset of 5 scene categories show competitive classification accuracy and superior performance with respect to a state-of-the-art 2D pyramid matching methods [16] applied to individual image frames.
NARROW RADIATIVE RECOMBINATION CONTINUA: A SIGNATURE OF IONS CROSSING THE CONTACT DISCONTINUITY OF ASTROPHYSICAL SHOCKS

X-rays from planetary nebulae (PNs) are believed to originate from a shock driven into the fast stellar wind (v ∼ 1000 km s−1) as it collides with an earlier circumstellar slow wind (v∼ 10 km s−1). In theory, the shocked fast wind (hot bubble) and the ambient cold nebula can remain separated by magnetic fields along a surface referred to as the contact discontinuity (CD) that inhibits diffusion and heat conduction. The CD region is extremely difficult to probe directly owing to its small size and faint emission. This has largely left the study of CDs, stellar-shocks, and the associated microphysics in the realm of theory. This paper presents spectroscopic evidence of ions from the hot bubble (kT ≈ 100 eV) crossing the CD and penetrating the cold nebular gas (kT ≈ 1 eV). Specifically, a narrow radiative recombination continuum (RRC) emission feature is identified in the high resolution X-ray spectrum of the PN BD+30°3639 indicating bare C vii ions recombine with cool electrons at kTe = 1.7 ± 1.3 eV. An upper limit to the flux of the narrow RRC of H-like C vi is obtained as well. The RRCs are interpreted as due to C ions from the hot bubble of BD+30°3639 crossing the CD into the cold nebula, where they ultimately recombine with its cool electrons. The RRC flux ratio of C vii to C vi constrains the temperature jump across the CD to ΔkT > 80 eV, providing for the first time direct evidence of the stark temperature disparity between the two sides of an astrophysical CD and constraining the role of magnetic fields and heat conduction accordingly. Two colliding-wind binaries are noted to have similar RRCs suggesting a temperature jump, and CD crossing by ions may be a common feature of stellar-wind shocks.
Reconciling Classical and Individual‐Based Approaches in Theoretical Population Ecology: A Protocol for Extracting Population Parameters from Individual‐Based Models

The two main approaches in theoretical population ecology—the classical approach using differential equations and the approach using individual‐based modeling—seem to be incompatible. Linked to these two approaches are two different timescales: population dynamics and behavior or physiology. Thus, the question of the relationship between classical and individual‐based approaches is related to the question of the mutual relationship between processes on the population and the behavioral timescales. We present a simple protocol that allows the two different approaches to be reconciled by making explicit use of the fact that processes operating on two different timescales can be treated separately. Using an individual‐based model of nomadic populabirds as an example, we extract the population growth rate by deactivating all demographic processes—in other words, the individuals behave but do not age, die, or reproduce. The growth rate closely matches the logistic growth rate for a wide range of parameters. The implications of this result and the conditions for applying the protocol to other individual‐based models are discussed. Since in physics the technique of separating timescales is linked to some concepts of self‐organization, we believe that the protocol will also help to develop concepts of self‐organization in ecology.
A Comparison of EMR Children in Special Classes with EMR Children Who Have Been Reintegrated Into Regular Classes

In order to compare the academic and social growth of ENR children in regular classes, special class students were randomly assigned to regular classes (N 17) or retained in special class (N 14) and Studied at three time intervals: prior to, two months after assignment, and at the conclusion of the school year. There were no significant differences batmen the reintegrated and /segregated children after two months. After one school year, the reintegrated children were more internally controlled, had more positive attitudes toward school, and were more reflective in their behavior. The hypothesis that more able students by the learning potential (LP) criterion would benefit from regular and special class placements was partially supported. The high able (LP) children expressed more positive feelings and behaved more reflectively in the integrated placement. The high able (LP) students performed more competently cognitively than the low LP students. A COMPARISON OF EMR CHILDREN IN SPECIAL CLASSES WITH EAR CHILDREN WHO HAVE BEEN REINTEGRATED INTO REGULAR CLASSES1 Milton Budoff and Jay Gottlieb Considerable attention has been directed recently toward the inadequacies of special classes as a primary educational system for educable mentally retarded (ENR) children (Budoff, 1972; Christoplos B Rena, 1969; Dunn, 1968; Lilly, 1970; MacMillan, 1972). Dissatisfaction with segregated facilities for mildly retarded children has occurred for a variety of reasons. First, the efficacy studies have failed to demonstrate that special classes provide \S superior education than regular grade placement for these children. Second, there has been an increasing concern with theeffects of labeling and, concomitantly, with the misclassification of children from low income and/or minority group backgrounds as mentally retarded. Concurrently, the school's increased capability to deliver individualized programs for children with special needs, coupled with *its socializing value as a source of normalizing experiences, has resulted in a rapid move away from the special classes in favor of integrated educational placements as a primary delivery system for special education services. Many school administrxtrxs have abandoned their special class programs and replaced them with resource rooms, learning centers, itinerant tutors, diagnostic-prescriptive teachers, etc. Children are being removed from segregated classes and placed into regular grades, most often with specialized eduCational support. However, there is relatively little evidence available to attest to the effects of reintegrating PAR Children