Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MRF's forMRI's: Bayesian Reconstruction of MR Images via Graph Cuts

Markov Random Fields (MRFs) are an effective way to impose spatial smoothness in computer vision. We describe an application of MRFs to a non-traditional but important problem in medical imaging: the reconstruction of MR images from raw fourier data. This can be formulated as a linear inverse problem, where the goal is to find a spatially smooth solution while permitting discontinuities. Although it is easy to apply MRFs to the MR reconstruction problem, the resulting energy minimization problem poses some interesting challenges. It lies outside of the class of energy functions that can be straightforwardlyminimized with graph cuts. We show how graph cuts can nonetheless be adapted to solve this problem, and provide some theoretical analysis of the properties of our algorithm. Experimentally, our method gives very strong performance, with a substantial improvement in SNR when compared with widely-used methods for MR reconstruction.
Factors Affecting the Weaning from Nasal CPAP in Preterm Neonates

Objective. Identification of the weight and postmenstrual age (PMA) at successful weaning of NCPAP in preterm neonates and the factors influencing the successful wean. Study Design. Retrospective review of 454 neonates ≤32 weeks of gestational age (GA) who were placed on NCPAP and successfully weaned to room air was performed. Results. Neonates had a mean birth weight (BW) of 1357 ± 392 grams with a mean GA of 29.3 ± 2.2 weeks. Neonates were weaned off NCPAP at mean weight of 1611 ± 432 grams and mean PMA of 32.9 ± 2.4 weeks. Univariate analysis showed that chorioamnionitis, intubation, surfactant use, PDA, sepsis/NEC, anemia, apnea, GER and IVH were significantly associated with the time to NCPAP wean. On multivariate analysis, among neonates that were intubated, BW was the only significant factor (P < 0.001) that was inversely related to time to successful NCPAP wean. Amongst non-intubated neonates, along with BW (P < 0.01), chorioamnionitis (P < 0.01), anemia (P < 0.0001), and GER (P < 0.02) played a significant role in weaning from NCPAP. Conclusion. Neonates were weaned off NCPAP at mean weight of 1611 ± 432 grams and mean PMA of 32.9 ± 2.4 weeks. BW significantly affects weaning among intubated and non-intubated neonates, though in neonates who were never intubated chorioamnionitis, anemia and GER also significantly affected the duration on NCPAP.
Molecular Epidemiology and Genetic Characteristics of Various blaPER Genes in Shanghai, China

ABSTRACT We describe the genetic characteristics and possible transmission mechanism of blaPER in 25 clinical Gram-negative bacilli in Shanghai. blaPER, including blaPER-1, blaPER-3, and blaPER-4, was located chromosomally or in different plasmids. Tn1213 harboring blaPER-1 was first identified in two Proteus mirabilis isolates in China. The other blaPER variants were preceded by an ISCR1 element inside the complex class 1 integron associated with IS26, Tn21, Tn1696, and a miniature inverted-repeat transposable element.
UPV-PRHLT English–Spanish System for WMT10

In this paper, the system submitted by the PRHLT group for the Fifth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation of ACL2010 is presented. On this evaluation campaign, we have worked on the English--Spanish language pair, putting special emphasis on two problems derived from the large amount of data available. The first one, how to optimize the use of the monolingual data within the language model, and the second one, how to make good use of all the bilingual data provided without making use of unnecessary computational resources.
Blind Adaptive Kalman Filter-Based Multiuser Detector in Multipath CDMA Channels

A blind adaptive multiuser detector for signal demodulation in multipath code-division multiple-access (CDMA) communication channels is proposed. This detector is based on a modified constrained Kalman filtering Algorithm. In order to facilitate the application of a blind linear filter-optimization technique to robust inference suppression, a new canonical representation for Kalman filter is developed first, and then an efficient iterative implementation that provides very fast convergence under this representation is proposed. The proposed algorithm is low in computation complexity, especially suitable for fast optimization of filter vector with short data samples. And also it has a better tracking capability under a dynamic environment where the number of users will change frequently with time. Computer simulation results, along with some analytical convergence results, confirm that the proposed algorithm is effective in multipath fading channels and achieves very satisfactory performance.
A Piaget Primer: How a Child Thinks

Offers a fascinating and understandable account of childhood development for anyone education and psychology students, day care center workers and nursery school teachers, and parents. Jean Piaget is arguably the most important figure of the twentieth century in the field of child psychology. Over more than six decades of studying and working with children, he brilliantly and insightfully charted the stages of a child's intellectual maturation from the first years to adulthood, and in doing so pioneered a new mode of understanding the changing ways in which a child comes to grasp the world. The purpose of"A Piaget Primer"is to make Piaget's vital work readily accessible to teachers, therapists, students, and of course, parents. Two noted American psychologists distill Piaget's complex findings into wonderfully clear formulations without sacrificing either subtlety or significance. To accomplish this, they employ not only lucid language but such fascinating illuminations of a child's world and vision as"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"and"Winnie-the-Pooh," as well as media manifestations like"Barney"and"Sesame Street. " This completely revised edition of this classic work is as enjoyable as it is invaluable an essential guide to comprehending and communicating with children better than we ever have before. "
A multi-standard channel-decoder for base-station applications

In this paper, a VLSI implementation of a multi-standard channel-decoder for EDGE, WCDMA, and CDMA2k convolutional-codes is presented. The new architecture employs the MAP algorithm for convolutional decoding to support soft-outputs. The decoder is designed for base-station applications. The maximum throughput of the decoder is 16 Mbps for WCDMA and CDMA2k, and 70 Mbps for EDGE, at a clock frequency of 200 MHz.
Social Adaptive Navigation Support for Open-Corpus E-Learning

Adaptive hypermedia is an alternative approach to the traditional approach "one size fits all". Adaptive Navigation Support (ANS) is one of the adaptation techniques used to help users find their way in hyperspace. ANS has created interesting opportunities in e-learning applications to address users with different learning goals and different knowledge level. However, adaptive hypermedia techniques are well designed for closed-corpus that could be manually tagged by an expert and are not easily applicable in an open-corpus such as collection of online resources. In this paper, we are presenting a new approach for supporting ANS through social navigation and footprint of other users in an educational application. The new approach is called Social Adaptive Navigation Support (SANS). We have developed a C programming tutorial called KnowledgeSea that supports SANS. We have evaluated KnowledgeSea with two semesters of classroom studies. The result of studies supports the idea of SANS and suggests more powerful navigation support for future work.
Learning using Local Membership Queries under Smooth Distributions

We introduce a new model of membership query (MQ) learning, where the learning algorithm is restricted to query points that are close to random examples drawn from the underlying distribution. The learning model is intermediate between the PAC model (Valiant, 1984) and the PAC+MQ model (where the queries are allowed to be arbitrary points). Membership query algorithms are not popular among machine learning practitioners. Apart from the obvious difficulty of adaptively querying labellers, it has also been observed that querying unnatural points leads to increased noise from human labellers (Lang and Baum, 1992). This motivates our study of learning algorithms that make queries that are close to examples generated from the data distribution. We restrict our attention to functions defined on the n-dimensional Boolean hypercube and say that a membership query is local if its Hamming distance from some example in the (random) training data is at most O(log(n)). We show three positive learning results in this model: (i) The class of O(log(n))-depth decision trees is learnable under a large class of smooth distributions using O(log(n))-local queries. (ii) The class of polynomial-sized decision trees is learnable under product distributions using O(log(n))-local queries. (iii) The class of sparse polynomials (with coefficients in R) over {0, 1}n is learnable under smooth distributions using O(log(n))-local queries. The author is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grants CCF-1116892 and IIS-1065251. Part of this work was done when the author was visiting Microsoft Research, New England. The author is supported by a Simons Postdoctoral Fellowship. Part of this work was performed while the author was at Harvard University supported by grant NSF-CCF-09-64401
Playcentre Parents-as-Educators: Links between 
Background Experiences and Teaching Practice

Playcentres are unique Aotearoa/New Zealand sessional early childhood education services which are run as parent cooperatives, where the parents take on the role of educators in the centre. This study investigated the way parents-as-educators used their life experiences, skills and knowledges in their teaching practice. Case studies were completed for four parents-as-educators in one urban Playcentre during one 10 week school term, using observations of teaching practice and document analysis, a short questionnaire and individual interviews. Teaching practice was then described using a framework based on McWilliam, de Kruif and Zulli's (2002) four contexts of teaching. Results were analysed using Rogoff's (2003) personal, interpersonal and cultural planes of analysis and Reid and Stover's (2005) model of individual agency. The parents-as-educators primarily drew on their parenting experiences to inform their teaching practice, and were selective in applying other prior skills and knowledges, based on their current interests and passions and on specific choices about their future life paths. The utilisation of their background in their teaching practice was also influenced by their individual agency. This depended on their changing sense of belonging within the centre, on the context of the sessions which included interactions between adults and responses from the children, and on their perception of, and alignment with, Playcentre philosophy. Implications of the findings suggest that Playcentres should look for ways of empowering parents-as-educators to use their background skills and knowledges whilst respecting their choices, so that the children in the centres experience as rich a curriculum as possible. To do this Playcentre philosophy should be more openly debated. This is because the philosophy of parents and children learning together added to group cohesiveness and empowered the parents-as-educators, yet other philosophical tenets, such as child-centredness and the approach to teaching art, created tension and constrained the parents-as-educators from fully using their background in their teaching practice.
Optical Cluster Finding with an Adaptive Matched-Filter Technique: Algorithm and Comparison with Simulations

We present a modified adaptive matched-filter algorithm designed to identify clusters of galaxies in wide-field imaging surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The cluster-finding technique is fully adaptive to imaging surveys with spectroscopic coverage, multicolor photometric redshifts, no redshift information at all, and any combination of these within one survey. It works with high efficiency in multiband imaging surveys for which photometric redshifts can be estimated with well-understood error distributions. Tests of the algorithm on realistic mock SDSS catalogs suggest that the detected sample is ~85% complete and over 90% pure for clusters with masses above 1.0 × 1014 h−1 M☉ and redshifts up to z = 0.45. The errors of estimated cluster redshifts from a maximum likelihood method are shown to be small (typically less than 0.01) over the whole redshift range, with photometric redshift errors typical of those found in the SDSS. Inside the spherical radius corresponding to a galaxy overdensity of Δ = 200, we find the derived cluster richness Λ200 to be a roughly linear indicator of its virial mass M200, which well recovers the relation between total luminosity and cluster mass of the input simulation.
Detection and biologic characterization of infectious HIV-1 in semen of seropositive men

Objective:Factors that influence the infectivity of an individual and the impact of antiviral treatment on infectivity are not well defined. This study investigated the value of a sensitive method for detecting infectious HIV in semen for use as a marker for infectivity. Design:A cross-sectional study of infectious HIV in the semen of 33 HIV-positive men. Methods:A sensitive method for detecting infectious HIV in semen was used. The correlation of culture in semen with clinical and laboratory data was investigated. Biological phenotypes of isolates from blood and semen were tested using an MT-2 assay. Results:HIV cultures from seminal cells were positive in 18 patients (55%) and in one patient from seminal plasma. Higher recovery rates of HIV from semen correlated with a low CD4 count (80% in patients with a CD4 count > 100×106/l versus 33% in patients with a CD4 count < 100×106 cells; P<0.025) and symptomatic disease (78 versus 27% in asymptomatic patients; P<0.01). Recovery of HIV from semen was independent of presence or absence of plasma viremia and the biological phenotype of blood isolates. Ten patients with syncytium-inducing (SI) isolates in their blood had positive semen cultures for HIV. Seven of the 10 patients had SI isolates recovered from their semen, whereas three had non-SI isolates only. Conclusion:Data from partner studies show higher rates of HIV transmission for patients with low CD4 counts and symptomatic disease. The compatibility of epidemiologic data with our finding that significantly more HIV is recovered in semen from patients with advanced disease, suggests that HIV culture of semen samples may provide a useful surrogate marker to measure infectivity in clinical studies. Further studies are needed to define the inoculum required to transmit HIV and to study the impact of sexually transmitted diseases and HIV-1 phenotype on semen infectivity.
Integrating Structure to Protein-Protein Interaction Networks That Drive Metastasis to Brain and Lung in Breast Cancer

Blocking specific protein interactions can lead to human diseases. Accordingly, protein interactions and the structural knowledge on interacting surfaces of proteins (interfaces) have an important role in predicting the genotype-phenotype relationship. We have built the phenotype specific sub-networks of protein-protein interactions (PPIs) involving the relevant genes responsible for lung and brain metastasis from primary tumor in breast cancer. First, we selected the PPIs most relevant to metastasis causing genes (seed genes), by using the “guilt-by-association” principle. Then, we modeled structures of the interactions whose complex forms are not available in Protein Databank (PDB). Finally, we mapped mutations to interface structures (real and modeled), in order to spot the interactions that might be manipulated by these mutations. Functional analyses performed on these sub-networks revealed the potential relationship between immune system-infectious diseases and lung metastasis progression, but this connection was not observed significantly in the brain metastasis. Besides, structural analyses showed that some PPI interfaces in both metastasis sub-networks are originating from microbial proteins, which in turn were mostly related with cell adhesion. Cell adhesion is a key mechanism in metastasis, therefore these PPIs may be involved in similar molecular pathways that are shared by infectious disease and metastasis. Finally, by mapping the mutations and amino acid variations on the interface regions of the proteins in the metastasis sub-networks we found evidence for some mutations to be involved in the mechanisms differentiating the type of the metastasis.
N-Acetyltransferase-2 (NAT2) genotype frequency among Jordanian volunteers.

OBJECTIVE To determine the frequency of major NAT2 alleles and genotypes among the Jordanian population. METHODS DNA samples from 150 healthy Jordanian volunteers were analyzed by polymerase chain reaction followed by restriction fragment length polymorphism assays (PCR-RFLP) to determine the frequency of four major alleles: NAT2*4, NAT2*5, NAT2*6 and NAT2*7. RESULTS The frequency (95% confidence interval) of NAT2*4, NAT2*5, NAT2*6 and NAT2*7 alleles was 0.247 (0.198 - 0.296), 0.373 (0.318 - 0.428), 0.347. 0.293 - 0.401) and 0.033 (0.013 - 0.053), respectively. The most prevalent genotypes are those which encode slow acetylation phenotype. Around 58.7%, 33.3% and 8% of volunteers carried the slow, the intermediate and the fast-encoding genotypes, respectively. CONCLUSION NAT2 genotype profile among Jordanians is similar to Caucasians. However, NAT2*6 allele is slightly high in comparison with Arab Middle Eastern populations.
Nitric oxide depresses connexin 43 after myocardial infarction in mice

Aims: Heart failure (HF) is a major cause of death and morbidity. Connexin 43 (Cx43) content is reduced in the failing myocardium, but regulating factors have not been identified. In HF, inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS)‐induced high levels of nitric oxide (NO) cause apoptosis and cardiac dysfunction. However, a direct iNOS–Cx43 link has not been demonstrated. We investigated this relationship in mice after myocardial infarction.
An Orchestrated Multi-view Software Architecture Reconstruction Environment

Most approaches in reverse engineering literature generate a single view of a software system that restricts the scope of the reconstruction process. We propose an orchestrated set of techniques and a multi-view toolkit to reconstruct three views of a software system such as design, behavior, and structure. Scenarios are central in generating design and behavior views. The design view is reconstructed by transforming a number of scenarios into design diagrams using a novel scenario schema and generating an objectbase of actors and actions and their dependencies. The behavior view is represented by different sets of functions that implement different features of the software system corresponding to a set of feature-specific scenarios that are derived from the design view. Finally, the structure view is reconstructed using modules and interconnections that are resulted by growing the core functions related to the software features that are extracted during the behavior recovery. This orchestrated view reconstruction technique provides a more accurate and comprehensive means for reverse engineering of a software system than a single view reconstruction approach. As case studies we applied the proposed multi-view approach on two systems, Xfig drawing tool and Pine email system
Deep-Reinforcement Learning Multiple Access for Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

This paper investigates the use of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in the design of a "universal" MAC protocol referred to as Deep-reinforcement Learning Multiple Access (DLMA). The design framework is partially inspired by the vision of DARPA SC2, a 3-year competition whereby competitors are to come up with a clean-slate design that "best share spectrum with any network(s), in any environment, without prior knowledge, leveraging on machine-learning technique". While the scope of DARPA SC2 is broad and involves the redesign of PHY, MAC, and Network layers, this paper's focus is narrower and only involves the MAC design. In particular, we consider the problem of sharing time slots among a multiple of time-slotted networks that adopt different MAC protocols. One of the MAC protocols is DLMA. The other two are TDMA and ALOHA. The DRL agents of DLMA do not know that the other two MAC protocols are TDMA and ALOHA. Yet, by a series of observations of the environment, its own actions, and the rewards - in accordance with the DRL algorithmic framework - a DRL agent can learn the optimal MAC strategy for harmonious co-existence with TDMA and ALOHA nodes. In particular, the use of neural networks in DRL (as opposed to traditional reinforcement learning) allows for fast convergence to optimal solutions and robustness against perturbation in hyper- parameter settings, two essential properties for practical deployment of DLMA in real wireless networks.
A randomized clinical trial of a Therapeutic Workplace for chronically unemployed, homeless, alcohol-dependent adults.

AIMS To assess the efficacy of the Therapeutic Workplace, a substance abuse intervention that promotes abstinence while simultaneously addressing the issues of poverty and lack of job skills, in promoting abstinence from alcohol among homeless alcoholics. METHODS Participants (n = 124) were randomly assigned to conditions either requiring abstinence from alcohol to engage in paid job skills training (Contingent Paid Training group), offering paid job skills training with no abstinence contingencies (Paid Training group) or offering unpaid job skill training with no abstinence contingencies (Unpaid Training group). RESULTS Participants in the Contingent Paid Training group had significantly fewer positive (blood alcohol level ≥ 0.004 g/dl) breath samples than the Paid Training group in both randomly scheduled breath samples collected in the community and breath samples collected during monthly assessments. The breath sample results from the Unpaid Training group were similar in absolute terms to the Contingent Paid Training group, which may have been influenced by a lower breath sample collection rate in this group and fewer reported drinks per day consumed at intake. CONCLUSION Overall, the results support the utility of the Therapeutic Workplace intervention to promote abstinence from alcohol among homeless alcoholics, and support paid training as a way of increasing engagement in training programs.