Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
High-Pressure Inactivation of Hepatitis A Virus within Oysters

ABSTRACT Previous results demonstrated that hepatitis A virus (HAV) could be inactivated by high hydrostatic pressure (HHP) (D. H. Kingsley, D. Hoover, E. Papafragkou, and G. P. Richards, J. Food Prot. 65:1605-1609, 2002); however, direct evaluation of HAV inactivation within contaminated oysters was not performed. In this study, we report confirmation that HAV within contaminated shellfish is inactivated by HHP. Shellfish were initially contaminated with HAV by using a flowthrough system. PFU reductions of >1, >2, and >3 log10 were observed for 1-min treatments at 350, 375, and 400 megapascals, respectively, within a temperature range of 8.7 to 10.3°C. Bioconcentration of nearly 6 log10 PFU of HAV per oyster was achieved under simulated natural conditions. These results suggest that HHP treatment of raw shellfish will be a viable strategy for the reduction of infectious HAV.
Sweet Chestnut (Castanea sativa Mill.) Bark Extract: Cardiovascular Activity and Myocyte Protection against Oxidative Damage

This work was aimed at evaluating the cardioprotective effects of Castanea sativa Mill. (CSM) bark extract characterized in its phenolic composition by HPLC-DAD-MS analysis. The study was performed using primary cultures of neonatal rat cardiomyocytes to investigate the antioxidant and cytoprotective effects of CSM bark extract and isolated guinea pig left and right atria, left papillary muscle, and aorta to evaluate its direct effect on cholinergic and adrenergic response. In cultured cardiomyocytes the CSM bark extract reduced intracellular reactive oxygen species formation and improved cell viability following oxidative stress in dose-dependent manner. Moreover, the extract decreased the contraction induced by noradrenaline (1 μM) in guinea pig aortic strips and induced transient negative chronotropic and positive inotropic effects without involvement of cholinergic or adrenergic receptors in the guinea pig atria. Our results indicate that CSM bark extract exhibits antioxidant activity and might induce cardioprotective effect.
Face Segmentation Based on Skin Color in Complicated Background and Its Sex Recognition

Human skin color distribution is relatively compact in a color space, and it changes from frame to frame following illumination variations, also it is subject to camouflage interruption in complicated background for skin segmentation. This paper mainly talks about face detection based on skin color feature in complicated background. We assume that skin pixels in each frame are closed together as a “dot cloud” in a color space, its shape evolution from frame to frame is modeled as the mixture of translation, scaling and rotation. We introduce linear combination of forecasts to predict these parameters related to the above shape evolutions, so that skin distribution of next frame to be segmented can be predicted and skin segmentation for face detection can be improved against illumination variations. Additionally human skin biological feature is then introduced to remove camouflage noise. For face gender recognition we adopt 2-D Gabor transform for feature extraction and SVM for recognition. Extensive tests prove that this algorithm is quite sensitive to human color, and more accurate for human skin segmentation with Bayes classifier; Good performance of gender classification test is also achieved on a relative large scale and low-resolution video database.
Longitudinal Locomotor and Postural Control Following Mild Traumatic Brain Injury

Millions of people sustain a mild traumatic brain injury (concussion) each year. While most clinical signs and symptoms resolve within 7-10 days for the majority of typical concussions, some gait and balance tasks have shown abnormalities lasting beyond the resolution of clinical symptoms. These abnormalities can persist after athletes have been medically cleared for competition, yet the implications of such changes are unclear. Most prior research has examined straight gait and standard measures of balance, yet there is a lack of knowledge regarding potential persistent effects on non-straight maneuvers or on indicators of motor control variability or complexity. To expand the knowledge of post-concussion locomotor and postural changes, this investigation examined the recovery of recently concussed athletes longitudinally, over the course of one year, in three domains: 1) path selection and body kinematics during turning gait, 2) non-linear local dynamic stability during straight gait, and 3) postural control complexity during quiet standing. Compared to matched health controls, concussed athletes exhibited significant and persistent differences in turning kinematics, local dynamic stability, and postural complexity over the initial six weeks following injury. These motor differences may increase the risk of injury to concussed athletes who are cleared to return to play. Given the persistent nature of these effects, future clinical tests may benefit from incorporating gait assessments before returning athletes to competition. Future research should prospectively and longitudinally monitor locomotor and postural control in conjunction with structural and functional changes within the brain to better understand the pathophysiology of concussions and potential rehabilitation strategies.
Artificial Immune System for Intrusion Detection

One of the central challenges with computer security is determining the difference between normal and potentially harmful activity. For decades, developers have protected their systems using classical methods. However, the growth and complexity of computer systems or networks to protect require the development of automated and adaptive defensives tools. Promising solutions are emerging with biological inspired computing, and in particular, artificial immune systems. In this paper, we propose two artificial immune systems for intrusion detection using the KDD Cup'99 database. The first one is based on the danger theory using the dendritic cells algorithm and the second is based on negative selection. The obtained results are promising. MOTS-CLÉS : Systèmes immunitaires artificiels, Détection d’intrusion, Détection d’anomalies, Théorie du danger, Algorithme des cellules dendritiques, Algorithme de la sélection négative.
Snippet Search: a Single Phrase Approach to Text Access

Due to the ever increasing aaordability and accessibility of very large, online, text collections , processing natural language texts for search and retrieval has recently been the focus of heightened attention, although researchers have been active in the eld since the early sixties. Numerous approaches have been attempted, but they all suuer from the obvious diiculty that search and retrieval is quintessentially a cognitive task; the degree of automatic language understanding required for a completely automatic solution is clearly beyond the bounds of current technology. Instead, heuristic search techniques attempt to match an admittedly incomplete query description with an admittedly incomplete set of features extracted from the texts of interest. The challenge therefore lies in the development of procedures that more eeectively bridge the gap between an individual's partially stated desires and a universe of text, which typically appears, computationally, as a sequence of uninterpreted words. Many of these procedures are statistical in nature; they take advantage of repeated occurrences of the same word to infer relations between documents, and between queries and documents. 1 For example, similarity search induces a \relevance" ordering on the text collection by scoring each document with a normalized sum of importance weights assigned to each word in common between it and the query, where the importance weights depend upon document and collection, or corpus, frequencies 28]. A more formal approach scores documents with their estimated probability of relevance to the query by adopting a text model which assumes word occurrences are sequentially uncorrelated and training on a set of known relevant documents 3, 30]. In contrast, polysemy (one word having multiple senses) and word correlation is directly addressed by Latent Semantic Indexing, which attempts to exact characteristic linear combinations through a singular value decomposition of a word co-occurrence matrix 12]. The availability of interdocument similarity measures suggests clustering, which has been pursued both as an accelerator for conventional search and as a query broadening tool 31]. Finally, linear discriminant analysis has been deployed to 1 Here \document" need not correspond to any particular organization. It might be a chapter within a book, a section within a chapter, or an individual paragraph. In the following we will assume that the set of documents forming a corpus is an exhaustive and disjoint partition of that corpus.
The effect of experience, coaching and technical post, on the coping strategies solicited by the U15 elites affiliated to the regional centers of the Tunisian Football Federation (TFF)

Today, the training center represents an unavoidable passage in the career of the high-level footballer. Training centers are among the mechanisms of National Technical Direction, to develop Tunisian football, and to improve performance in youth categories. The objective of our study is to examine the coping strategies of the competition, solicited by the elites affiliated to the regional training centers of the Tunisian Football Federation (TFF) and evaluate the interaction effects of coaching, experience, and the technical position. 76 U15 football players regularly evaluated through high-stakes competitions are invited in one hour after the competition, to settle against the Arabic version of the inventory of coping strategies of the sporting competition. Data were collected and analyzed by SPSS IBM and AMOS version 21.0. 0. The results suggest that mental distraction is the coping strategy most solicited by our participants, the MANOVA analysis, only disclosed the effect of the coaching factor on mental imagery, thought control, Effort expenditure and Relaxation, but regression analysis revealed no strong explanatory relationship. Overall, this study allowed us to deepen our knowledge about the coping strategies of the competition used in the preformation process in the different training centers of the TFF. In addition, the impact of experience, coaching and the specificity of the technical position, on the choice of these strategies in competitive contexts.
Can the staff recognition ensure planned process of organizational change

Purpose Employee recognition is presented in the literature as a mean to achieve change according to a schedule already established by the management of the enterprise (planning process). Such an approach overlooks the fact that organizational change can be explained by other processes such as the political process, the interpretive process, the incremental process and the complex process. Each of these processes offers specific characteristics of change. Through this research, the author tries to answer the following question, while driving an organizational change project does employee recognition favour a change according to the planned process? The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach To answer the research question, a qualitative research case study is conducted within Basic Bank, a banking leader institution on the Tunisian market. The author analysed a proposed change induced by the implementation of a Global Banking System. Findings The results show that monetary recognition helps develop employee motivation to change, thus, ensuring a planned change. However, its variability has encouraged the emergence of conflicts between the actors resulting in an increase of change according to the political process. Originality/value Found results enrich the previous work on the role of the staff recognition in the change process. Its originality lies in the study of the relationship between employee recognition and explanatory process of change in a dynamic perspective which enables having an overall view on the evolution of this relationship throughout the implementation of the change.
Embodied Evolution : A Response toChallenges in Evolutionary

We introduce Embodied Evolution (EE), a new methodology for conducting evolutionary robotics (ER). Embodied evolution uses a population of physical robots that evolve by reproducing with one another in the task environment. EE addresses several issues identiied by researchers in the evolutionary robotics community as problematic for the development of ER. We review results from our rst experiments and discuss the advantages and limitations of the EE methodology.
Electrically Small Resonators for Planar Metamaterial, Microwave Circuit and Antenna Design: A Comparative Analysis

Planar metamaterials and many microwave circuits and antennas are designed by means of resonators with dimensions much smaller than the wavelength at their resonance frequency. There are many types of such electrically small resonators, and the main purpose of this paper is to compare them as building blocks for the implementation of microwave components. Aspects such as resonator size, bandwidth, their circuit models when they are coupled to transmission lines (as is usually required), as well as key applications, will be considered.
A structural model for binaural sound synthesis

A structural model is presented for synthesizing binaural sound from a monaural source. The model produces well-controlled vertical as well as horizontal effects. The model is based on a simplified time-domain description of the physics of wave propagation and diffraction. The components of the model have a one-to-one correspondence with the physical sources of sound diffraction, delay, and reflection. The simplicity of the model permits efficient implementation in DSP hardware, and thus facilitates real-time operation. Additionally, the parameters in the model can be adjusted to fit a particular individual's characteristics, thereby producing individualized head-related transfer functions. Experimental tests verify the perceptual effectiveness of the approach.
Comparison of Schistosoma mansoni Prevalence and Intensity of Infection, as Determined by the Circulating Cathodic Antigen Urine Assay or by the Kato-Katz Fecal Assay: A Systematic Review

The relationship between results from Kato-Katz (KK) fecal microscopy and urine-based point-of-care circulating cathodic antigen (POC-CCA) assays for Schistosoma mansoni infection remains a critical issue. This systematic literature review of 25 published papers compares prevalence of S. mansoni infection by KK with that by the POC-CCA assay. Nineteen published studies met our inclusion criteria for data extraction and analysis. Above a prevalence of 50% by KK, KK and POC-CCA results yielded essentially the same prevalence. Below 50% prevalence by KK, the prevalence by the POC-CCA assay was between 1.5- and 6-fold higher and increased as prevalence by KK decreased. Five of nine publications met inclusion criteria for extractable data on intensity of S. mansoni infection by KK assay and visual band density using the POC-CCA assay. A clear positive relationship exists between intensity by the KK and POC-CCA assays. This systematic review indicates that below 50% prevalence, the POC-CCA assay is much more sensitive than the KK assay. However, the existing data are inadequate to precisely define the relationship between POC-CCA and KK at lower levels of KK prevalence. More studies directly comparing the two assays in low-prevalence areas are essential to inform decision-making by national schistosomiasis control programs.
Canonical statistical modeling and capacity analysis of correlated MIMO fading channels

We introduce canonical statistical models for spatially correlated, multi-input multi-output (MIMO) channels with Rayleigh fading, based on canonical decompositions of the channel matrix. The proposed models encompass a large family of channels having structured covariances and generalize existing models like the Kronecker model and the virtual representation. An important property of these models is their characterization of MIMO channels as interactions among transmit and receive eigen spaces, which provides a structured framework and new insights to understand the complexities of correlated MIMO channels. The analysis points to the fundamental differences of correlated and i.i. d. MIMO channels, that unlike i.i. d channels, correlated channels have unequal degrees of freedom and parallel eigen-channels, and invite optimal design of the transmitted signal. We derive the optimal input covariance matrix which achieves coherent capacity assuming knowledge of only the channel covariance matrix at the transmitter and show that its eigenvectors are identical to the transmit eigenvectors. The optimal power assignment can be obtained numerically and it is shown that at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) all transmit eigen subspaces get equal power while at low SNR beamforming is optimal. Numerical results show a nontrivial gain in capacity due to efficient use of covariance feedback. Since the proposed models unify and extend many existing channel models, our results generalize many recent results. Index Terms Correlated MIMO fading channels, coherent capacity, optimal signal design, beamforming, canonical statistical models.
Using Sensor Technology to Assess Health and Sport Benefits of Trail Bike Riding and Other Off-Road Motorcycling Activities : A Research Proposal

In cricket, bat and limb mounted miniature movement sensors could be useful for the assessment and understanding of effective batting. Literature shows that the interaction between the batter’s limbs and the bat is an important issue for batter performance in cricket [1-3]. The correct grip and coupling between the hand and bat play a vital role in ball control. An understanding of hand-bat coupling before, at and after contact enables a coach to prepare the batters for improved stroke play. This work examined the use of small, low-cost, three dimensional motion sensors to assess the coupling of the top and bottom hand with the bat in a defensive stroke. Triaxial inertial sensors can be used for cricket bat swing interpretation [4]. Using sensors on the bat, the left and the right wrists of five novices, the ball-contacts in defensive strokes were recorded. The players were asked to hit the incoming ball along the ground. The ball was delivered using an underarm throw at slow speed and without swing. The bat swing was in the x-z plane of the sensor placed on the reverse face of the bat (the bat face was in the z direction). The velocity of the wrists and bat was derived by integrating the acceleration data. The total acceleration was calculated one second before and after of ballcontact. Large spikes in the total acceleration indicated the ball-contact. Three novice data sets revealed that the top hand (left hand for a right handed batter) was more strongly coupled with the bat before and after contact having a smaller acceleration difference with bat than the bottom hand. The other batters showed neither hand was coupled properly with the bat. A second deflection showed inferior quality of ball-contact caused by the jarring. The velocities were calculated from the acceleration data using the method described in [5]. The wrist velocities were plotted against bat velocity for each novice. A linear relationship (slope > 0.64) was found for
SIGNAL-TO-SYMBOL MAPPING FOR LASER RANGEFINDERS

A new approach for computing qualitative part-based descriptions of 3D objects is presented. The object descriptions are obtained in two steps: Object segmenta-tion into parts and part model identiication. Beginning with single-or multi-view range data of a 3D object, we simulate the charge density distribution over an object's surface which has been tessellated by a triangular mesh. We detect the deep surface concavities by tracing local charge density minima and then decompose the object into parts at these points. The individual parts are then modelled by parametric geons. The latter are seven qualitative shapes, each of which is formulated by a restricted globally deformed superellipsoid. Model recovery is performed by tting all parametric geons to a part and selecting the best model for the part, based on the minimum tting residual. A newly deened objective function and a fast global optimisation technique are employed to obtain robust model tting results. Experiments demonstrate that this approach can successfully recover qualitative shape models from input data, especially when part shapes are not fully consistent with model shapes. The resultant object descriptions are well suited for symbolic reasoning and fast object recognition.
Remarks on the Atiyah-Hitchin Metric

We outline the construction of the Atiyah-Hitchin metric on the moduli space of SU(2) BPS monopoles with charge 2, first as an algebraic curve in C3 following Donaldson and then as a solution of the Toda field equations in the continual large N limit. We adopt twistor methods to solve the underlying uniformization problem, which by the generalized Legendre transformation yield the Kahler coordinates and the Kahler potential of the metric. We also comment on the connection between twistors and the Seiberg-Witten construction of quantum moduli spaces, as they arise in three dimensional supersymmetric gauge theories, and briefly address the uniformization of algebraic curves in C3 in the context of large N Toda theory.
A ug 2 00 8 Three-flavour neutrino oscillation update

We review the present status of three-flavour neutrino oscillations, taking into account the latest available neutrino oscillation data presented at the Neutrino 2008 Conference. This includes the data released this summer by the MINOS collaboration, the data of the neutral current counter phase of the SNO solar neutrino experiment, as well as the latest KamLAND and Borexino data. We give the updated determinations of the leading ’solar’ and ’atmospheric’ oscillation parameters. We find from global data that the mixing angle θ13 is consistent with zero within 0. 9σ and we derive an upper bound of sin θ13 ≤ 0.035 (0.056) at 90% CL (3σ).