Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prospective evaluation of the threat related to the use of seminal fractions from hepatitis C virus-infected men in assisted reproductive techniques.

BACKGROUND The risk of hepatitis C virus (HCV) transmission during assisted reproductive techniques (ARTs) is still disputed and no report concerning its prospective evaluation is available. METHODS The aim of this 4-year follow-up multicentre study that enrolled 86 HCV-serodiscordant couples was to determine whether a sperm-processing method was able to reduce levels of HCV in semen and the risk of HCV transmission to the newborn. All the men were chronically infected by HCV and 10 of them by human immunodeficiency virus. A total of 181 seminal plasmas and 153 sperm fractions were tested for the presence of HCV RNA. RESULTS HCV RNA tested positive in 20.4% of the seminal samples. All of the 153 final sperm fractions tested negative for HCV. The detection of HCV RNA in semen was significantly correlated with a high viral load in blood (P < 0.05). The presence of HCV RNA in seminal plasma impaired neither semen parameters nor ART issue. From the 58 couples enrolled effectively in an ART programme, 24 pregnancies and 28 newborns were obtained. All of them tested negative for HCV RNA in blood. CONCLUSION These results emphasize the safety of the semen-processing method. The negligible risk of transmitting HCV reduces the value of the systematic analysis of HCV RNA in seminal fractions prior to ART. Since use of this analytical procedure involves the freezing of semen, its avoidance would result in an increase in sperm quality and reduce the need to perform intracytoplasmic sperm injection techniques.
A simple approach to nonlinear tensile stiffness for accurate cloth simulation

Recent mechanical models for cloth simulation have evolved toward accurate representation of elastic stiffness based on continuum mechanics, converging to formulations that are largely analogous to fast finite element methods. In the context of tensile deformations, these formulations usually involve the linearization of tensors, so as to express linear elasticity in a simple way. However, this approach needs significant adaptations and approximations for dealing with the nonlinearities resulting from large cloth deformations. Toward our objective of accurately simulating the nonlinear properties of cloth, we show that this linearization can indeed be avoided and replaced by adapted strain-stress laws that precisely describe the nonlinear behavior of the material. This leads to highly streamlined computations that are particularly efficient for simulating the nonlinear anisotropic tensile elasticity of highly deformable surfaces. We demonstrate the efficiency of this method with examples related to accurate garment simulation from experimental tensile curves measured on actual materials.
The prevalence of, and risk factors for, loneliness in later life: a survey of older people in Great Britain

This study examines the prevalence of loneliness amongst older people in Great Britain, and makes comparisons with the findings of studies undertaken during the last five decades. In addition, the risk factors for loneliness are examined using a conceptual model of vulnerability and protective factors derived from a model of depression. Loneliness was measured using a self-rating scale, and measures of socio-demographic status and health/social resources were included. Interviews were undertaken with 999 people aged 65 or more years living in their own homes, and the sample was broadly representative of the population in 2001. Among them the prevalence of ‘severe loneliness’ was seven per cent, indicating little change over five decades. Six independent vulnerability factors for loneliness were identified: marital status, increases in loneliness over the previous decade, increases in time alone over the previous decade; elevated mental morbidity; poor current health; and poorer health in old age than expected. Advanced age and possession of post-basic education were independently protective of loneliness. From this evidence we propose that there are three loneliness pathways in later life: continuation of a long-established attribute, late-onset loneliness, and decreasing loneliness. Confirmation of the different trajectories suggests that policies and interventions should reflect the variability of loneliness in later life, for undifferentiated responses may be neither appropriate nor effective.
New Trends on Ubiquitous Mobile Multimedia Applications

Mobile devices present the opportunity to enhance our fast-growing and globally connected society, improving user-experience through novel approaches for information dissemination through mobile communication. The research community is developing new technologies, services, and applications to enable ubiquitous environments based on mobile technology. This paper tackles several important challenges such as communication cost and device limitations for development of ubiquitous multimedia applications. And we propose a system for news delivery using a set of wireless multimedia applications. For this purpose, we have performed a case study with Apple iPhone's platform, featuring two multimedia application contexts, namely, Web and native applications. The multimedia mobile applications draw on iPhone's assets, enabling context-awareness to distribute news, improving communication efficiency and setting-up viewing optimizations, thus enhancing user-experience. The proposed system is evaluated and validated through a series of real-life experiments on real devices, with online full availability. Moreover, due to the Web application availability, the system is not restrained to Apple's iPhone platform, but can also benefit users with other devices.
Hierarchical Motion Organization in Random-Dot Configurations

Motion fields differ in the degree to which they can serve as hierarchical frames of reference. To assess the strength of hierarchical motion organisation, we measured the ability of human observers to extract the motion of a target dot relative to a background of moving dots. The task was to discriminate circular from elliptical relative motions for the target dot (2AFC). Observers performed above chance for translational and divergence backgrounds, but were at chance level for rotational backgrounds. This finding, however, was based on random configurations of dots, where locations and trajectories were unrelated. When spatial constraints were introduced, observers used a different strategy and performed above chance also for rotational backgrounds. Both the effect of motion transformations and the effect of spatial information can be understood if we assume that the task is to find the most likely mechanical description of an object in a three-dimensional environment.
An Assessment of µ-Czochralski, Single-Grain Silicon Thin-Film Transistor Technology for Large-Area, Sensor and 3-D Electronic Integration

Single-grain (SG) thin-film transistors (TFTs) fabricated inside location-controlled silicon grains using the mu-Czochralski method are benchmarked for analog and RF applications. Each silicon grain is defined by excimer laser recrystallization of polysilicon. Thin-film transistors may be fabricated in this manner on silicon or low-cost flexible plastic substrates as processing temperatures remain below 350degC, making the SG-TFT a potential enabling technology for large-area highly integrated electronic systems or systems-in-package with low manufacturing cost. Operational amplifier and voltage reference circuits of varying complexity were designed and measured in order to evaluate the effects of channel position and processing variation on analog circuits. A two-stage telescopic cascode operational amplifier fabricated in an experimental 1.5 mum SG-TFT technology demonstrates a DC gain of 55 dB (unity-gain bandwidth of 6.3 MHz), while a prototype CMOS voltage reference with a power supply rejection ratio (PSRR) of 50 dB is also demonstrated. With fT comparable to single-crystal MOSFETs of comparable gate length, the SG-TFT can also enable RF circuits for wireless applications. A 12 dB gain RF cascode amplifier with on-chip inductors and operating in the 433 MHz ISM band is demonstrated. Excellent agreement with simulations is attained using a modified BSIM-SOI model extracted from measurements of experimental SG-TFT devices.
Diversity and Partitioning of Bacterial Populations within the Accessory Nidamental Gland of the Squid Euprymna scolopes

ABSTRACT Microbial consortia confer important benefits to animal and plant hosts, and model associations are necessary to examine these types of host/microbe interactions. The accessory nidamental gland (ANG) is a female reproductive organ found among cephalopod mollusks that contains a consortium of bacteria, the exact function of which is unknown. To begin to understand the role of this organ, the bacterial consortium was characterized in the Hawaiian bobtail squid, Euprymna scolopes, a well-studied model organism for symbiosis research. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) analysis of the ANG revealed dense bacterial assemblages of rod- and coccus-shaped cells segregated by morphology into separate, epithelium-lined tubules. The host epithelium was morphologically heterogeneous, containing ciliated and nonciliated cells with various brush border thicknesses. Hemocytes of the host's innate immune system were also found in close proximity to the bacteria within the tubules. A census of 16S rRNA genes suggested that Rhodobacterales, Rhizobiales, and Verrucomicrobia bacteria were prevalent, with members of the genus Phaeobacter dominating the consortium. Analysis of 454-shotgun sequencing data confirmed the presence of members of these taxa and revealed members of a fourth, Flavobacteria of the Bacteroidetes phylum. 16S rRNA fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) revealed that many ANG tubules were dominated by members of specific taxa, namely, Rhodobacterales, Verrucomicrobia, or Cytophaga-Flavobacteria-Bacteroidetes, suggesting symbiont partitioning to specific host tubules. In addition, FISH revealed that bacteria, including Phaeobacter species from the ANG, are likely deposited into the jelly coat of freshly laid eggs. This report establishes the ANG of the invertebrate E. scolopes as a model to examine interactions between a bacterial consortium and its host.
From design to analysis models: a kernel language for performance and reliability analysis of component-based systems

To facilitate the use of non-functional analysis results in the selection and assembly of components for component-based systems, automatic prediction tools should be devised, to predict some overall quality attribute of the application without requiring extensive knowledge of analysis methodologies to the application designer. To achieve this goal, a key idea is to define a model transformation that takes as input some "design-oriented" model of the component assembly and produces as a result an "analysis-oriented" model that lends itself to the application of some analysis methodology. However, to actually devise such a transformation, we must face both the heterogeneous design level notations for component-based systems, and the variety of non-functional attributes and related analysis methodologies we could be interested in. In this perspective, we define a kernel language whose aim is to capture the relevant information for the analysis of non-functional attributes of component-based systems, with a focus on performance and reliability. Using this kernel language as a bridge between design-oriented and analysis-oriented notations we reduce the burden of defining a variety of direct transformations from the former to the latter to the less complex problem of defining transformations to/from the kernel language. The proposed kernel language is defined within the MOF (Meta-Object Facility) framework, to allow the exploitation of MOF-based model transformation facilities.
Reliability of measures of work engagement and psychological well-being among South African state security forces

This study reports on the psychometric properties of measures of work engagement and psychological well-being in the South African state security forces. The research sample consisted of a combined sample of 178 soldiers and 57 police officers (34% females). They completed a battery of measures of work engagement and psychological well-being. Results following exploratory and reliability analysis suggest the scores from the measures to be reliable for research use with the South African security services.
Interactive Displays through Mobile Projection

Projectors shrink in size, are embedded in some mobile devices, and the next generation of mobile projections: drone-carried or wearable projectors are graspable. The technology may be ready for a radical change in mobile interaction towards personal projected displays that are (in contrast to the milestone work of Pinhanez [7]) not limited to static setups, but the applications and interactions for such novel and exciting technologies are not designed yet. In the proposed workshop, we raise the question to what extend mobile projections will change mobile interactions. In a hands-on workshop the participants will sketch interactions with mobile projectors. The ideated interaction concepts will be structured, analyzed, and discussed regarding their potential to extend the current limitations of mobile interaction, i.e. displaying content only on the embedded screen.
Modified LBG Clustering Algorithm in Corpus-based TT

Corpus-based Text-To-Speech has been actively studied for the improvement of synthesized speech heading to human-like naturalness. However, the application of TTS is very restricted due to its large database size. In this paper, to solve this problem, we propose two modified algorithms of LBG clustering algorithm (split k-means). We introduce a terminating threshold of total cost in the first modification. The number of selected inventories becomes less than target cluster number if total cost reduction is enough to end iteration process. Considering frequency information of unit instances, which is obtained during synthesizing large text corpus, makes the second modification. To consider frequency information we proposed modified cost function of MinMax commonly used in selecting centroids. The perceptual test results show that our algorithm achieves the successful performance with reducing most the DB size and maintaining good speech quality.
Environment Perception in the Presence of Kinesthetic or Tactile Guidance Virtual Fixtures

During multi-lateral collaborative teleoperation, where multiple human or autonomous agents share control of a teleoperation system, it is important to be able to convey individual user intent. One option for conveying the actions and intent of users or autonomous agents is to provide force guidance from one user to another. Under this paradigm, forces would be transmitted from one user to another in order to guide motions and actions. However, the use of force guidance to convey intent can mask environmental force feedback. In this paper we explore the possibility of using tactile feedback, in particular skin deformation feedback, skin deformation feedback to convey collaborative intent while preserving environmental force perception. An experiment was performed to test the ability of participants to use force guidance and skin deformation guidance to follow a path while interacting with a virtual environment. In addition, we tested the ability of participants to discriminate virtual environment stiffness when receiving either force guidance or skin deformation guidance. We found that skin deformation guidance resulted in a reduction of path-following accuracy, but increased the ability to discriminate environment stiffness when compared with force feedback guidance. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.1. 2 [Models and Principles]: User/Machine Systems-Human information processing; H.5. 2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces-Haptic I/O
Hybrid visual and inertial RANSAC for real-time motion estimation

We present a real-time, online motion estimation algorithm combining inertial and visual measurements. The approach is built upon the preemptive RANSAC, a real-time motion estimation algorithm. Our algorithm extends the preemptive RANSAC with inertial sensors data, introducing a lagrangian hybrid scoring of the motion models. We also improve the system using a pure inertial model that is scored as the visual ones, and a dynamic computation of the lagrangian to make the approach adaptive to various image and motion contents. The algorithm is run frame to frame to avoid error accumulation. All these improvements are made with little computational cost, keeping the complexity of the algorithm low enough for embedded platforms. The approach is compared with pure inertial and pure visual procedures.
Challenges to be addressed for realising an Ephemeral Cloud Federation

This paper sketches the challenges to address to realise a support able to achieve an Ephemeral Cloud Federation, an innovative cloud computing paradigm that enables the exploitation of a dynamic, personalised and context-aware set of resources. The aim of the Ephemeral Federation is to answer to the need of combining private data-centres with both federation of cloud providers and the resource on the edge of the network. The goal of the Ephemeral Federation is to deliver a context-aware and personalised federations of computational, data and network resources, able to manage their heterogeneity in a highly distributed deployment, which can dynamically bring data and computation close to the final user.
Distributed computing and the multicore revolution

Changes in technology can have far-reaching effects on theory. For example, while Turing's work on computability predated the first electronic computers, complexity theory flowered only after computers became a reality. After all, an algorithm's complexity may not matter much in a mathematics journal, but matters quite a bit in a FORTRAN program. We argue that something similar is going on with parallel and concurrent computation: after decades of being respected but not taken seriously, research on multiprocessor algorithms and data structures is going mainstream.
ERP Simulation Effects on Knowledge and Attitudes of Experienced Users

ABSTRACT Best-in-class organizations recognize that knowledge management provides a competitive advantage. Opportunities to share knowledge enhance knowledge sharing attitudes. Organizations use training to facilitate knowledge and acclimate novice employees to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. Most ERP functional training leverages explicit codified knowledge. Without collaborative opportunities between departments, allowing users to interact and exchange internalized knowledge and skills, information remains untapped. Prior research explored the impact of ERPsim on knowledge, skills, and attitudes, but failed to model construct relationships. This work assesses if a business simulation can be used to mimic Social Cognition Theory and enhance knowledge and attitude among experienced employees. Paired sample T-tests confirmed significant differences in means across constructs. Additionally, PLS Path Modeling investigated and confirmed a relationship between knowledge and skills constructs with attitude. Findings suggest ERPsim might be beneficial to diffuse knowledge and skills among experienced users in the workplace, while positively influencing attitudes.
Novel Ubiquitin Neuropathology in Frontotemporal Dementia With Valosin-Containing Protein Gene Mutations

Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) with inclusion body myopathy and Paget disease of bone (IBMPFD) is a rare, autosomal-dominant disorder caused by mutations in the valosin-containing protein (VCP) gene, a member of the AAA-ATPase gene superfamily. The neuropathology associated with sporadic FTD is heterogeneous and includes tauopathies and frontotemporal lobar degeneration with ubiquitin-positive inclusions (FTLD-U). However, there is limited information on the neuropathology in IBMPFD. We performed a detailed, systematic analysis of the neuropathologic changes in 8 patients with VCP mutations. A novel pattern of ubiquitin pathology was identified in IBMPFD that was distinct from sporadic and familial FTLD-U without VCP gene mutations. This was characterized by ubiquitin-positive neuronal intranuclear inclusions and dystrophic neurites. In contrast to FTLD-U, only rare intracytoplasmic inclusions were identified. The ubiquitin pathology was abundant in the neocortex, less robust in limbic and subcortical nuclei, and absent in the dentate gyrus. Only rare inclusions were detected with antibodies to VCP and there was no biochemical alteration in the VCP protein. VCP is associated with a variety of cellular activities, including regulation of the ubiquitin-proteasome system. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the pathology associated with VCP gene mutations is the result of impairment of ubiquitin-based degradation pathways.
An fMRI investigation of moral cognition in healthcare decision making

This study used fMRI to investigate the neural substrates of moral cognition in health resource allocation decision problems. In particular, it investigated the cognitive and emotional processes that underpin utilitarian approaches to health care rationing such as Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs). Participants viewed hypothetical medical and nonmedical resource allocation scenarios which described equal or unequal allocation of resources to different groups. In addition, participants were assigned to 1 of 2 treatments in which they either did or did not receive advanced instructions about the principles of utilitarianism. In all cases, participants were asked to judged the proposed allocations as “fair” or “unfair. ” More brain activity was observed within the superior parietal lobe, angular gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, and bilateral caudate nucleus when participants viewed scenarios depicting equal divisions of resources. Conversely, unequal resource divisions were associated with more activity in the inferior frontal gyrus and insula cortex. Furthermore, instructions about the principles of utilitarianism led to significant activation differences within the inferior frontal gyrus and the middle frontal gyrus. Significant differences in activity were also found within the inferior frontal cortex and anterior insula between medical and nonmedical scenarios. The implications for cognitive control mechanisms and the cognitive and neural bases of utilitarian ethical judgment are discussed.