Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Conceptual modelling of the public sphere in public libraries

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to construct a conceptual model of the public sphere in public libraries. Various international authors over the past 20 years have associated the public sphere with public libraries, but these associations have yet to be clarified and synthesized in a comprehensive way. Design/methodology/approach – This study used qualitative content analysis to identify the dimensions of the public sphere in public libraries. The study’s scope included annual reports from an urban US public library system from 1900 to 2010. Findings – Six dimensions of the public sphere in public libraries are described with examples. The dimensions are: core criteria; internal public sphere; external public sphere; collect and organize discourse; perform legitimation processes; and facilitate discourse. Three of these dimensions are newly identified. The six total dimensions are synthesized into a comprehensive conceptual model with three discourse arenas: governance and management; legitimation;.
Unsupervised Feature Learning Via Spectral Clustering of Multidimensional Patches for Remotely Sensed Scene Classification

Scene classification plays an important role in the interpretation of remotely sensed high-resolution imagery. However, the performance of scene classification strongly relies on the discriminative power of feature representation, which is generally hand-engineered and requires a huge amount of domain-expert knowledge as well as time-consuming hand tuning. Recently, unsupervised feature learning (UFL) provides an alternative way to automatically learn discriminative feature representation from images. However, the performances achieved by conventional UFL methods are not comparable to the state-of-the-art, mainly due to the neglect of locally substantial image structures. This paper presents an improved UFL algorithm based on spectral clustering, named UFL-SC, which cannot only adaptively learn good local feature representations but also discover intrinsic structures of local image patches. In contrast to the standard UFL pipeline, UFL-SC first maps the original image patches into a low-dimensional and intrinsic feature space by linear manifold analysis techniques, and then learns a dictionary (e.g., using K-means clustering) on the patch manifold for feature encoding. To generate a feature representation for each local patch, an explicit parameterized feature encoding method, i.e., triangle encoding, is applied with the learned dictionary on the same patch manifold. The holistic feature representation of image scenes is finally obtained by building a bag-of-visual-words (BOW) model of the encoded local features. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed UFL-SC algorithm can extract efficient local features for image scenes and show comparable performance to the state-of-the-art approach on open scene classification benchmark.
Gluteal muscle activity and patellofemoral pain syndrome: a systematic review

Objective There is growing evidence to support the association of gluteal muscle strength deficits in individuals with patellofemoral pain syndrome (PFPS) and the effectiveness of gluteal strengthening when treating PFPS. In additiona, an impressive body of work evaluating gluteal electromyography (EMG) has recently emerged, further supporting the importance of gluteal muscle function in PFPS. This systematic review synthesises these EMG findings in order to better understand the role of gluteal muscle activity in the aetiology, presentation and management of PFPS. Methods MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, Web of Knowledge and Google Scholar databases were searched in September 2011 for prospective and case–control studies evaluating the association of gluteal EMG with PFPS. Two independent reviewers assessed each paper for inclusion and quality. Means and SDs were extracted from each included study to allow effect size calculations and comparison of results. Results Ten case–control, but no prospective studies were identified. Moderate-to-strong evidence indicates gluteus medius (GMed) activity is delayed and of shorter duration during stair negotiation in PFPS sufferers. In addition, limited evidence indicates GMed activity is delayed and of shorter duration during running, and gluteus maximus (GMax) activity is increased during stair descent. Conclusions Delayed and shorter duration of GMed EMG may indicate impaired ability to control frontal and transverse plane hip motion. Further research evaluating the value of gluteal muscle activity screening in identifying individuals most likely to develop PFPS, and the effectiveness of interventions targeting changes to gluteal muscle activation patterns is needed.
Aging Out of Care in Ethiopia

This interpretive study examines the experiences of 54 Ethiopian emerging adults who had aged out of institutional care facilities. Findings are derived from interviews and focus groups in which questions and activities focused on the challenges faced by participants and the supports they relied on throughout the transition process. These young adults reported facing many challenges upon leaving care, including difficulty finding gainful and interesting employment, a lack of many basic life skills, difficulty finding a support network, and significant stigma in the community due to their background in care. These challenges led to problems in creating any security during this life stage, including obtaining both housing and employment. In the midst of these many challenges, participants consistently reported that they turned to other care alumni for both material and emotional support. This article seeks to develop a beginning understanding of the complex dynamics of navigating emerging adulthood following transition from institutional care in Ethiopia.
Personalized manufacturing service recommendation using semantics-based collaborative filtering

With the growing emergence of distributed manufacturing services over the Internet, many efforts have been made to semantically describe the manufacturing services, facilitating accurate retrieval of the required services derived from semantic matchmaking of service capabilities. However, semantic annotation of vast manufacturing services remains an open issue. Most of the efforts have been proposed to semantically annotate the manufacturing services in an inefficient manual manner. This article presents a novel collaborative filtering method for automating the semantic annotation of manufacturing service capabilities and making the personalized manufacturing service recommendation based on the usage data of previous retrievals made for similar annotations. A prototype system is built and validated with an illustrative example from manufacturing industry to demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed approach for automatic service annotation and personalized service recommendation.
Mini‐review: Specificity and expression of CIITA, the master regulator of MHC class II genes

The class II transactivator (CIITA) has been referred to as the "master control factor" for the expression of MHC class II (MHCII) genes. As our knowledge on the specificity and function of CIITA grows, it is becoming increasingly evident that this sobriquet is entirely justified. First, despite extensive investigations, the major target genes of CIITA remain those implicated in the presentation of antigenic peptides by MHCII molecules. Although other putative target genes have been reported, the contribution of CIITA to their expression remains indirect, controversial or comparatively minor relative to its decisive role as a regulator of MHCII and related genes. Second, the most important parameter dictating MHCII expression is by far the expression pattern of the gene encoding CIITA (MHC2TA). The vast majority of signals that activate or repress MHCII expression under physiological and pathological situations converge on one or more of the three alternative promoters that drive transcription of the MHC2TA gene. In short, with respect to its specificity and its exquisitely controlled pattern of expression, CIITA is by a long stretch the single most important transcription factor for the regulation of genes required for MHCII‐restricted antigen‐presentation.
The Roles of Perceived Enjoyment and Price Perception in Determining Acceptance of Multimedia-on-Demand

This research analyzes factors affecting the adoption of multimedia-on-demand (MOD) service by 542 subscribers of Chunghwa Telecom in Taiwan. The study applies the extended technology acceptance model, taking into account the perceived enjoyment and price perceptions of MOD service. Sample descriptive results indicate that the majority of the MOD service market consists of college-educated business customers. The study uses confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and a structural equation model (SEM). The study has two major findings. First, perceived enjoyment is a salient endogenous factor affecting consumer attitudes and intentions toward use. This finding means that, in addition to offering a more humanized and simplified interface than cable TV, MOD service providers should offer more useful and entertaining content to attract customers. Second, lower monthly fees and lower prices for paid channels and movies on demand substantially contribute to customer intention toward MOD service use. The results show that a new relationship from perceived usefulness to perceived enjoyment has statistical significance. The interactive characteristics associated with providing more versatile entertainment to customers yields useful insights for the marketing and development strategies of MOD operators.
Extracellular Acidic Sulfur‐Containing Amino Acids and γ‐Glutamyl Peptides in Global Ischemia: Postischemic Recovery of Neuronal Activity Is Paralleled by a Tetrodotoxin‐Sensitive Increase in Cysteine Sulfinate in the CA1 of the Rat Hippocampus

Abstract: An excessive activation of the excitatory amino acid system has been proposed as one possible mediator of the ischemia‐induced delayed death of CA1 pyramidal cells in the hippocampus. Using dialytrodes in the CA1 of the rat, we have investigated multiple‐unit activity and extracellular changes in acidic sulfur‐containing amino acids and‐γ‐glutamyl peptides during ischemia (20‐min, four‐vessel occlusion) and during 8 h of reflow. Multiple‐unit activity was abolished during ischemia and for the following 1h, but then recovered, gradually reaching preischemic levels after 8 h of reflow. Extracellular cysteate, cysteine sulfinate, and γ‐glutamyltaurine increased (1.5‐to threefold) during ischemia, and extracellular glutathione and γ‐glutamylaspartate plus γ‐glutamylglutamine increased during early reflow (two‐to threefold). The recovery of neuronal activity at 4–8 h was paralleled by an increase in extracellular cysteine sulfinate (2.5‐fold at 8 h of reflow). Perfusion with 10 μM tetrodotoxin at 8 h of reflow abolished the multiple‐unit activity and reduced extracellular cysteine sulfinate. Considering the glutamate‐like properties of cysteine sulfinate, the observed postischemic increase may be involved in the development of the delayed neuronal death.
Wearable Inertial Sensors for Human Motion Analysis: A Review

This paper reviews the research literature on human motion analysis using inertial sensors with the aim to find out: which configuration of sensors have been used to measure human motion; which algorithms have been implemented to estimate position and orientation of segments and joints of human body; how the performance of the proposed systems has been evaluated; and what is the target population with which the proposed systems have been assessed. These questions were used to revise the current state-of-the-art and suggest future directions in the development of systems to estimate human motion. A search of literature was conducted on eight Internet databases and includes medical literature: PubMed and ScienceDirect; technical literature: IEEE Xplore and ACM Digital Library; and all-science literature: Scopus, Web of Science, Taylor and Francis Online, and Wiley Online Library. A total of 880 studies were reviewed based on the criteria for inclusion/exclusion. After the screening and full review stages, 37 papers were selected for the review analysis. According to the review analysis, most studies focus on calculating the orientation or position of certain joints of the human body, such as elbow or knee. There are only three works that estimate position or orientation of both, upper and lower limbs simultaneously. Regarding the configuration of the experiments, the mean age of the test subjects is 26.2 years (± 3.7), indicating a clear trend to test the systems and methods using mainly young people. Other population groups, such as people with mobility problems, have not been considered in tests so far. Human motion analysis is relevant for obtaining a quantitative assessment of motion parameters of people. This assessment is crucial for, among others, healthcare applications, monitoring of neuromuscular impairments, and activity recognition. There is a growing interest for developing technologies and methods for enabling human motion analysis, ranging from specialized in situ systems to low-cost wearable systems.
systemic sclerosis : correlations with indexes of disease activity and severity , disability , and depressive symptoms

The aim of this study was to evaluate healthrelated quality of life (HR-QOL) in patients with systemic sclerosis (SSc), to compare it with that of patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), and to correlate it with other parameters. HR-QOL was evaluated by the Short Form 36 (SF-36), SSc disease activity and severity by preliminary indexes recently proposed, disability by the Health Assessment Questionnaire (HAQ), and depressive symptoms by the Beck Depression Inventory. HRQOL perception was not statistically different in patients with SSc and RA, except that patients with diffuse cutaneous involvement had worse scores in the general health and mental health dimensions than patients with RA (p=0.03). Compared with RA, patients with SSc tended to perceive less bodily pain (p=0.06) and have less disability (p=0.04) but to report higher depressive symptom scores (p=0.05). SSc patients’ HR-QOL was associated with some disease severity scales (general, kidney and, less significantly, heart), but it was poorly correlated with the other evaluated disease activity and severity indexes. A strong correlation with disability and with depressive symptoms was observed. In conclusion, patients with SSc perceived a reduced HR-QOL similar to that of patients with RA. SF-36 may provide useful information in their evaluation.
An insightful write buffer scheme for improving SSD performance in home cloud server

Nowadays, home cloud server uses SSD as its main storage due to the positive characteristics of the SSD such as high performance and low energy consumption. But, the frequent fsync calls generated by software platforms of the home cloud server negatively affect I/O performance and lifespan of the SSD, because it generates massive random-write traffic. This paper introduces a smart SSD model which efficiently reflects write requests to the storage, with process-aware flush operation. Experimental results show that our SSD model reduces response time and the number of writes by up to 12.6% and 17.9%, respectively, compared with conventional SSD.
Increased QT variability index as a marker for a cardiac autonomic dysregulation in schizophrenia

Schizophrenia as severe mental disorder is characterized by a disintegration of the process of thinking and of emotional responsiveness whereas the underlying mechanisms of schizophrenia are complex and still discussed. The objective of this study is to find out if patients with schizophrenia and their healthy first-degree relatives have abnormal autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity by measuring cardiac indices as QT variability index (QTVI). Moreover, it is useful to study if ANS dysfunction could play an important role in schizophrenia and if abnormal functioning could be retrieved by patients' healthy first degree relatives. Also, a parallel experiment monitored QTVI in healthy controls before, during and after a new complex stress test named Mannheim Multicomponent Stress Test (MMST). As QT variability analysis results were not significantly different during MMST versus normal state, we concluded that short-term stress has no fundamental impact on ECG morphology in healthy subjects. However, patients with schizophrenia revealed an increased QTVI that indicates structural changes of ECG morphology in those patients. These findings were obviously independent from the findings regarding to healthy subjects under stress and healthy subjects (basic measurement of 30min).
Vehicle Detection and Tracking in Complex Traffic Circumstances with Roadside LiDAR

The problem of traffic safety has become increasingly prominent owing to the increase in the number of cars. Traffic accidents often occur in an instant, which makes it necessary to obtain traffic data with high resolution. High-resolution micro traffic data (HRMTD) indicates that the spatial resolution reaches the centimeter level and that the temporal resolution reaches the millisecond level. The position, direction, speed, and acceleration of objects on the road can be extracted with HRMTD. In this paper, a LiDAR sensor was installed at the roadside for data collection. An adjacent-frame fusion method for vehicle detection and tracking in complex traffic circumstances is presented. Compared with the previous research, objects can be detected and tracked without object model extraction or a bounding box description. In addition, problems caused by occlusion can be improved using adjacent frames fusion in the vehicle detection and tracking algorithms in this paper. The data processing procedure are as follows: selection of area of interest, ground point removal, vehicle clustering, and vehicle tracking. The algorithm has been tested at different sites (in Reno and Suzhou), and the results demonstrate that the algorithm can perform well in both simple and complex application scenarios.
Detection of Interactions between Proteins by Using Legendre Moments Descriptor to Extract Discriminatory Information Embedded in PSSM

Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) play a very large part in most cellular processes. Although a great deal of research has been devoted to detecting PPIs through high-throughput technologies, these methods are clearly expensive and cumbersome. Compared with the traditional experimental methods, computational methods have attracted much attention because of their good performance in detecting PPIs. In our work, a novel computational method named as PCVM-LM is proposed which combines the probabilistic classification vector machine (PCVM) model and Legendre moments (LMs) to predict PPIs from amino acid sequences. The improvement mainly comes from using the LMs to extract discriminatory information embedded in the position-specific scoring matrix (PSSM) combined with the PCVM classifier to implement prediction. The proposed method was evaluated on Yeast and Helicobacter pylori datasets with five-fold cross-validation experiments. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves high average accuracies of 96.37% and 93.48%, respectively, which are much better than other well-known methods. To further evaluate the proposed method, we also compared the proposed method with the state-of-the-art support vector machine (SVM) classifier and other existing methods on the same datasets. The comparison results clearly show that our method is better than the SVM-based method and other existing methods. The promising experimental results show the reliability and effectiveness of the proposed method, which can be a useful decision support tool for protein research.
Valuation of a Catastrophe Insurance Futures Contract using Compound Poisson Claim Assumptions

In 1993, the Chicago Board of Trade introduced a futures contract on a financial index that reflects the insurance claims emerging from catastrophes in a portfolio of policies. This article presents a valuation formula for the contract, under the assumption that catastrophes emerge as a Poisson process over time and that the claims from each catastrophe emerge as a Compound Poisson process. The formula is developed by taking conditional expectations with respect to a history of information that includes knowledge about the time of the catastrophes.
Long-term observations and salvage operations on patients with T2N0M0 squamous cell carcinoma of the glottic larynx treated with radiation therapy alone

Abstract Conclusion: A long-term study was carried out on 57 patients treated with radiation alone who had T2N0M0 squamous cell carcinoma of the glottic larynx. The response and survival rates were satisfactory, but the complete response (CR) and the larynx preservation rates showed a need for improvement. Thirty-four patients underwent salvage operations and a safe margin for the partial laryngectomy was evaluated by histopathological examination of serial sections of the surgical specimen. Objective: Although the effectiveness of combined chemoradiation therapy in the treatment of head and neck cancer has been reported, the facts remain unclear. The purpose of this study was to analyze the long-term outcomes of radiation therapy alone for T2N0M0 squamous cell carcinoma of the glottic larynx, i.e. the survival rate, the larynx preservation rate, and the reality of salvage operations. This is expected to contribute to an understanding of the synergistic effects of anticancer drugs used in combined chemoradiation therapy, the use of which will be expanded in the future. The reason for this is that the radiation source, radiation field, and radiation dose are nearly identical for patients with T2N0M0 squamous cell carcinoma of the glottic larynx. Methods: The subjects were 57 patients with untreated T2N0M0 squamous cell carcinoma of the glottic larynx. There were 55 males and 2 females. Their ages ranged from 31 to 86 years. The 4 MV Liniac X-ray external beam radiation therapy was carried out via two-dimensional horizontal opposing ports, 2 Gy per dose, five times a week with a total of 66 Gy. Results: In 57 patients, we observed CR in 33 patients, partial response (PR) in 20 patients, no change (NC) in 4 patients, and progression disease (PD) in none of the patients. The response rate was 93.0% and the CR rate was 57.9%. The survival rates (Kaplan–Meier method) were: 5-year survival rate of 88.5% and 10-year survival rate of 73.5%. The larynx preservation rates (Kaplan–Meier method) were: 5-year larynx preservation rate of 60.4% and 10-year larynx preservation rate of 50.1%. The main side effect of grade 3 or more was only stomatitis in four patients, all of which were reversible changes (CTCAT v3.0 JCOG/JSCO). Salvage operation was required in 34 (59.6%) of 57 patients, 10 patients underwent partial laryngectomy, total laryngectomy was performed in 3 of the 10 patients following the partial laryngectomy, and 27 patients (47.4%) underwent total laryngectomy. The surgical specimens were serially sectioned at a thickness of 4 μm and examined histopathologically and compared to the macroscopic findings at surgery. The safe margin for partial laryngectomy was considered grossly to be 5 mm from the edge of the tumor.
Stratospheric N(2)O mixing ratio profile from high-resolution balloon-borne solar absorption spectra and laboratory spectra near 1880 cm(-1).

A nonlinear least-squares fitting procedure has been used to derive the stratospheric N(2)O mixing ratio profile from balloon-borne solar absorption spectra and laboratory spectra near 1880 cm(-1). The atmospheric spectra were recorded during sunset from a float altitude of 33 km with the University of Denver 0.02-cm(-1) resolution interferometer near Alamogordo, N.M. (33 degrees N), on 10 Oct. 1979. The laboratory data were used to determine the N(2)O line intensities. The measurements indicate an N(2)O mixing ratio of 264 ppbv near 15 km decreasing to 155 ppbv near 28 km.