Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Semiconductor Nanorod–Carbon Nanotube Biomimetic Films for Wire-Free Photostimulation of Blind Retinas

We report the development of a semiconductor nanorod-carbon nanotube based platform for wire-free, light induced retina stimulation. A plasma polymerized acrylic acid midlayer was used to achieve covalent conjugation of semiconductor nanorods directly onto neuro-adhesive, three-dimensional carbon nanotube surfaces. Photocurrent, photovoltage, and fluorescence lifetime measurements validate efficient charge transfer between the nanorods and the carbon nanotube films. Successful stimulation of a light-insensitive chick retina suggests the potential use of this novel platform in future artificial retina applications.
Representation of similarity as a goal of early visual processing

We consider the representational capabilities of systems of receptive fields found in early mammalian vision, under the assumption that the successive stages of processing remap the retinal representation space in a manner that makes objectively similar stimuli (such as different views of the same 3D object) closer to each other, and dissimilar stimuli farther apart. We present theoretical analysis and computational experiments that compare the similarity between stimuli as they are represented at the successive levels of the processing hierarchy, from the retina to the nonlinear cortical units. Our results indicate that the representations at the higher levels of the hierarchy are indeed more useful for the classification of natural objects such as human faces.
SEARCHING : AN APPROACH TO INFORMATION RETRIEVAL IN THE AGE OF THE SEMANTIC WEB

Semantic representation of information has some evident advantages from an integration point of view, but there are many situations in which this approach is not directly applicable, as information is stored in several formats without (implicit or explicit) knowledge of its semantics. We present a distributed middleware able to unify the access to any arbitrary information source by doing a semantic translation of its contents.
TLR4, Ethanol, and Lipid Rafts: A New Mechanism of Ethanol Action with Implications for other Receptor-Mediated Effects

Ethanol (EtOH) is the most widely abused substance in the United States, and it contributes to well-documented harmful (at high dosages) and beneficial (at low dosages) changes in inflammatory and immune responses. Lipid rafts have been implicated in the regulation and activation of several important receptor complexes in the immune system, including the TLR4 complex. Many questions remain about the precise mechanisms by which rafts regulate the assembly of these receptor complexes. Results summarized in this review indicate that EtOH acts by altering the LPS-induced redistribution of components of the TLR4 complex within the lipid raft and that this is related to changes in actin cytoskeleton rearrangement, receptor clustering, and subsequent signaling. EtOH provides an example of an immunomodulatory drug that acts at least in part by modifying lipid rafts, and it could represent a model to probe the relationships between rafts, receptor complexes, and signaling.
Data placement for continuous media in multimedia DBMS

Advances in computing power and the development of high-speed networks have enabled research on interactive and real-time multimedia computing. Nevertheless, the video server in MMDBMS suffers from the limitation of current magnetic disk technology for supporting large amounts of interactive requests simultaneously. We study the problem of data placement in MMDBMS consisting of multiple disks to provide natural retrieval of different portions of video concurrently. Our approach is to disperse video segments onto distributed disks in a restricted round-robin manner. The prime round-robin placement scheme provides uniform load-balance of disks at any rate. In addition, we have shown that the CM server with efficient placement provides appropriate retrieval operations during the execution of other operations.
Motivation and personality: Power motivation revisited

THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL BACKGROUND Definition The power motive is the desire to have impact on other people, to affect their behavior or emotions. This broad and general definition includes a whole family of overlapping concepts such as influence, inspiration, nurturance, authority, leadership, control, dominance, coercion, and aggression. Although these concepts have varying connotations of legitimacy, morality, and implied reaction of the other person (the “target” of power), they share a core meaning of one person's capacity to affect the behavior or feelings of another person (see D. G. Winter, 1973, chapter 1). As a class of goal striving, the power motive is to be distinguished from other power-related psychological and sociological concepts, such as roles and statuses permitting power, skill at using power, feelings of power, and values and beliefs about the exercise of power – ranging from authoritarianism to Gandhi's nonviolent satyagraha or “leverage of truth” (see Erikson, 1969, pp. 410–440). For all of its conceptual and empirical distinctiveness, the power motive does not exist in isolation. These other concepts determine how it is channeled into specific behaviors and are thereby essential to a complete understanding of the striving for power. Conceptual framework The idea that humans have a drive for power or “will to power” is prominent in many cultural and intellectual traditions.
Betacellulin protects from pancreatitis by activating stress-activated protein kinase.

BACKGROUND & AIMS Acute pancreatitis (AP) is a serious, unpredictable clinical problem, the pathophysiology of which is poorly understood. Here, we evaluate whether betacellulin (BTC), a ligand of the epidermal growth factor receptor also able to activate the proapoptotic ERBB4 receptor, can protect against experimental AP. METHODS AP was induced in transgenic mice overexpressing BTC (BTC-tg), control mice, or control mice after administration of recombinant BTC. The severity of pancreatitis was assessed by measurements of serum amylase and lipase and histologic grading. The involvement of the stress-activated protein kinase (SAPK) was evaluated by treating BTC-tg mice with an SAPK inhibitor before induction of AP. RESULTS BTC-tg mice showed increased apoptosis and proliferation in the exocrine pancreas, indicating an increased cell turnover. There was a marked, epidermal growth factor receptor-independent decrease in pancreas weight. After induction of AP by cerulein injection, BTC-tg mice showed a significantly lower increase in serum amylase and lipase levels as well as less pronounced tissue necrosis, edema, and inflammation, as compared to nontransgenic littermates. This protective effect, also confirmed in the L-arginine AP model, was associated with increased phosphorylation of SAPK and abrogated after treatment of BTC-tg mice with a SAPK inhibitor. Finally, the protective effect of BTC against AP was confirmed by treating nontransgenic mice with recombinant BTC. CONCLUSIONS These findings indicate a potential application of the BTC/ERBB4 pathway for modulating the course of AP.
Attitudes and Persuasion: Classic and Contemporary Approaches

* Introduction to Attitudes and Persuasion * Conditioning and Modeling Approaches * The Message-learning Approach * Judgmental Approaches * Motivational Approaches * Attributional Approaches * Combinatory Approaches * Self-persuasion Approaches * Epilog: A General Framework for Understanding Attitude Change Processes
Security evaluation of bistable ring PUFs on FPGAs using differential and linear analysis

Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) is expected to be an innovation for anti-counterfeiting devices for secure ID generation, authentication, etc. In this paper, we propose novel methods of evaluating the difficulty of predicting PUF responses (i.e. PUF outputs), inspired by well-known differential and linear cryptanalysis. According to the proposed methods, we perform a first third-party evaluation for Bistable Ring PUF (BR-PUF), proposed in 2011. The BR-PUFs have been claimed that they have a resistance against the response predictions. Through our experiments using FPGAs, we demonstrate, however, that BR-PUFs have two types of correlations between challenges and responses, which may cause the easy prediction of PUF responses. First, the same responses are frequently generated for two challenges (i.e. PUF inputs) with small Hamming distance. A number of randomly-generated challenges and their variants with Hamming distance of one generate the same responses with the probability of 0.88, much larger than 0.5 in ideal PUFs. Second, particular bits of challenges in BR-PUFs have a great impact on the responses. The value of responses becomes `1' with the high probability of 0.71 (> 0.5) when just particular 5 bits of 64-bit random challenges are forced to be zero or one. In conclusion, the proposed evaluation methods reveal that BR-PUFs on FPGAs have some correlations of challenge-response pairs, which helps an attacker to predict the responses.
End-to-end DASH platform including a network-based and client-based adaptive quality switching module

This paper presents an end-to-end Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) platform, developed by using open-source components. It includes and allows the configuration of all the required steps along the end-to-end media delivery chain, from the encoding, segmentation and storage of the media content at the server side, to the delivery and adaptive consumption of the media content at the client side. A key component of this platform is the DASH client, developed using the GStreamer framework. It includes a module with a novel adaptive algorithm for switching between the available representations (i.e., qualities) of the media content at the server side, based on the available bandwidth and on internal conditions and features of the client (such as the buffer occupancy level, the battery level, its charging state and the CPU load). It also includes different modules to simulate specific values for these parameters, and to visualize their values and the value of the selected quality in real-time. A preliminary evaluation has proved the satisfactory performance of the overall platform. Finally, links to demo videos are provided to demonstrate the satisfactory performance and capabilities of this platform.
Error-Correcting output coding for chagasic patients characterization

The Chagas¿ disease is endemic in all Latin America, affecting millions of people in the continent. In order to diagnose and treat the Chagas¿ disease, it is important to detect and measure the coronary damage of the patient. In this paper, we analyze and categorize patients into different groups based on the coronary damage produced by the disease. Based on the features of the heart cycle extracted using high resolution ECG, a multi-class scheme of error-correcting output codes (ECOC) is formulated and successfully applied. The results show that the proposed scheme obtains significant performance improvements compared to previous works and state-of-the-art ECOC designs.
An Ultra-Low Power Dry-Electrode ECG Amplifier Having Optimized Low-Frequency Response and CMRR

This paper presents the design of an ultra-low power bio-potential amplifier having optimized lowfrequency response and common-mode rejection ratio (CMRR) for use in long-term ambulatory recording of the electrocardiogram (ECG) employing dry electrodes. The amplifier provides a gain of 40dB in a 3dB frequency bandwidth of 0.04 1250Hz. Impulse response measurements return a maximum undershoot of 0.09mV and a maximum recovery slope after the impulse of 0.04mVs -1 , which are within the specification limits issued in international standards. The CMRR is better than 95dB at a mains frequency of 50 Hz. The circuit has a power consumption of 45μW operating from a 3V battery. Key-Words: electrocardiogram, ECG, dry-electrode, instrumentation amplifier, low-power, CMRR.
Automatically Extracting Information Needs from Ad Hoc Clinical Questions

Automatically extracting information needs from ad hoc clinical questions is an important step towards medical question answering. In this work, we first explored supervised machine-learning approaches to automatically classify an ad hoc clinical question into general topics. We then evaluated different methods for automatically extracting keywords from an ad hoc clinical question. Our methods were evaluated on the 4,654 clinical questions maintained by the National Library of Medicine. Our best systems or methods showed F-score of 76% for the task of question-topic classification and an average F-score of 56% for extracting keywords from ad hoc clinical questions.
El método dialógico: una experiencia interdisciplinaria desde la antropología

El metodo dialogico nace con la aplicacion interdisciplinaria de los criterios de Mijail Bajtin (2003) y su “lectura en profundidad”, metodo con el cual este filosofo del lenguaje analizaba obras literarias. Esta experiencia se gesta desde la antropologia, en conjunto con la historia y la geografia, en una tesis desarrollada en Paso Canoas, comunidad binacional de Costa Rica y Panama.
Full Circle: Spiritual Therapy for the Elderly

Contents Preface * Introduction * Definitions * Rationale * Format of the Sessions * Qualities of Full Circle Staff * A Guide to Using the Themes * Themes * Feelings * Anger * Confidence * Confusion * Depression * Encouragement and Support * Envy and Jealousy * Faith * Fear * Forgiveness * Freedom * Joy * Memories and Memories Lost * Orphaned/Lonely/Abandoned * Reconciliation * Shame * Sorrow/Grief * Togetherness and Unity * Life Review * Aging * Birth * Celebration * Change * Children * Death/Loss * Dreams and Aspirations * Friendship * Good News/Bad News * Home * Life's Storms and Trials * Name * Saying Good-Bye * Siblings * Spouses/Partners * Teacher * Transitions/Moves * Work * Sensory * Arms * Clothing * Darkness * Faces * Gardening * Hair * Hands/Touch * Hearing (Ears) * Heart * Legs and Feet * Light * Meals * Music * Pain * Rest * Scent/Smell (Nose) * Sight (Eyes) * Voice (Mouth) * Weariness/Fatigue * Special Occasions * Communion * Easter * Father (Father's Day) * Gifts (Second Advent) * Hope/Waiting (Third Advent) * Love (Fourth Advent) * Memories of Christmas * Mother (Mother's Day) * Promises (First Advent) * Renewal/New Year's Day * Thanksgiving * Veterans Day/ Remembrance Day * Spiritual * Angels * Creation/Nature * The Cross * Healing * Heaven * Life After Death * Peace * Prayer * Appendixes * Blank Theme Pages * Hymnal Sources * Bibliography * Hymns/Secular Songs Index * Topic Index
Contextual framing for school leadership training: Empirical findings from the Commonwealth Project on Leadership Assessment and Development (Co‐LEAD)

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of (Co‐LEAD) (Commonwealth project on leadership in education assessment and development), the overall purpose of which was to find out school leaders' training needs around the Commonwealth in order to provide some answers with regards to the professional development needs of school principals.Design/methodology/approach – A mixed methods approach (e.g. both qualitative as well as quantitative) was utilized in order to carry out this study. The questionnaire consisted of 46 statements which make reference to the main functions of school leadership, such as, School Climate and School Improvement, Instructional Leadership and Human Resource Management, as well as Relations with Parents and the Community. The gap analysis method was used for the questionnaire items. Finally, complimentary to the questionnaires, it was decided to have on‐site visitations and interviews with “real people” on the ground.Findings – Based on the authors' analyses and.
Application of Lifting in Partial Design Analysis

In the past, we have investigated satisfiability-based combinational equivalence checking and bounded model checking of partial circuit designs, i.e., circuit designs where one or more components of the design are not implemented yet. Especially for satisfiability-based bounded model checking, typically a counterexample is generated in case that the specification property is violated. Minimizing the number of assigned variables in the satisfying assignment that corresponds to such a counterexample is the objective of lifting. In this work we show that lifting is also feasible and profitable for counterexamples obtained via satisfiability-based bounded model checking of partial designs. We provide first experimental results on this issue that show its feasibility. Furthermore, we present a novel application scenario for lifting in the context of automated blackbox synthesis. This is a useful concept that can be applied during combinational equivalence checking of partial circuit designs, where realizability of the missing components was already proven, but the functionality of the missing components is still unknown. As a summary, this work provides first experimental results as well as a novel concept regarding the application of lifting for the analysis of partial designs.
Extracting Information from Multiplex Networks

Multiplex networks are generalized network structures that are able to describe networks in which the same set of nodes are connected by links that have different connotations. Multiplex networks are ubiquitous since they describe social, financial, engineering, and biological networks as well. Extending our ability to analyze complex networks to multiplex network structures increases greatly the level of information that is possible to extract from big data. For these reasons, characterizing the centrality of nodes in multiplex networks and finding new ways to solve challenging inference problems defined on multiplex networks are fundamental questions of network science. In this paper, we discuss the relevance of the Multiplex PageRank algorithm for measuring the centrality of nodes in multilayer networks and we characterize the utility of the recently introduced indicator function Θ̃(S) for describing their mesoscale organization and community structure. As working examples for studying these measures, we consider three multiplex network datasets coming for social science.
Multifractal analysis of some multiple ergodic averages for the systems with non-constant Lyapunov exponents

We study certain multiple ergodic averages of an iterated functions system generated by two contractions on the unit interval. By using the dynamical coding ${0,1}^{\mathbb{N}}$ of the attractor, we compute the Hausdorff dimension of the set of points with a given frequency of the pattern 11 in positions $k, 2k$.
Proposals for optimization of the international phage typing system for Listeria monocytogenes: combined analysis of phage lytic spectrum and variability of typing results

Combined analysis of 5,179 serial phage reactions of 20 Listeria monocytogenes propagating strains over 14 years and phage typing results from 2,659 further L. monocytogenes strains allowed us to estimate lytic spectrum specificity and the variability of the lytic reactions of 35 phages. These included the 26 phages recommended for the international method for phage typing defined in 1985 by Rocourt et al. (J. Rocourt, A. Audurier, A. L. Courtieu, J. Durst, S. Ortel, A. Schrettenbrunner, and A. G. Taylor, Zentralbl. Bakteriol. Abt. 1 Orig. A 259:489-497, 1985). The results are discussed individually for each phage. Proposals for modifying the present system are made with the aim of producing an optimal bacteriophage set for routine use.
Evidences Behind Skype Outage

Skype is one of the most successful VoIP application in the current Internet spectrum. One of the most peculiar characteristics of Skype is that it relies on a P2P infrastructure for the exchange of signaling information amongst active peers. During August 2007, an unexpected outage hit the Skype overlay, yielding to a service blackout that lasted for more than two days: this paper aims at throwing light to this event. Leveraging on the use of an accurate Skype classification engine, we carry on an experimental study of Skype signaling during the outage. In particular, we focus on the signaling traffic before, during and after the outage, in the attempt to quantify interesting properties of the event. While it is very difficult to gather clear insights concerning the root causes of the breakdown itself, the collected measurement allow nevertheless to quantify several interesting aspects of the outage: for instance, measurements show that the outage caused, on average, a 3-fold increase of signaling traffic and a 10-fold increase of number of contacted peers, topping to more than 11 million connections for the most active node in our network - which immediately gives the feeling of the extent of the phenomenon.
Inhibition by hypertonic solutions of Ca-dependent electrogenesis in single crab muscle fibers

This study describes the effect of hypertonic solutions on isolated muscle fibers of Callinectes danae. Solutions of twice normal tonicity (2.0 T) inhibit both the normal graded membrane responses and the spikes induced by procaine, tetraethylammonium, or barium. The inhibition is maintained throughout exposure to hypertonic solutions prepared by addition of impermeant solutes such as NaCl, sucrose, or Tris-propionate, but is reversible on their withdrawal. In the presence of permeant solutes such as glycerol or acetamide, the inhibition is transient. In both cases the onset of inhibition of the depolarizing Ca electrogenesis is correlated with shrinkage of the fiber. In the case of permeant solutes, the time course of recovery of the graded responses or the spikes follows the recovery of the fiber volume. Changes in the passive electrical characteristics of the fibers due to hypertonic solutions were unrelated to the blockade of membrane Ca activation. The current-voltage relationship in hypertonic sollution revealed no increase in depolarizing K activation. Inhibition of the graded membrane responses and spikes appears to be associated with depression of Ca conductance. Hypertonic solutions might affect the activation of Ca conductance through reduction of the electric field generated by fixed negative surface charges and/or morphological changes in the T tubules. Membrane depolarization elicited little or no tension in 2.0 T solutions while caffeine contracture (10 mM) with an ampliture of 76% of the maximal contractile ability could still be elicited. This indicates that direct effects of hypertonic solutions on the contractile apparatus were not responsible for loss of tension. The latter is attributed to the inhibition of the transmembrane Ca currents.
MUSTER: Adaptive Energy-Aware Multisink Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are increasingly proposed for applications characterized by many-to-many communication, where multiple sources report their data to multiple sinks. Unfortunately, mainstream WSN collection protocols are generally designed to account for a single sink and, dually, WSN multicast protocols optimize communication from a single source. In this paper, we present MUSTER, a routing protocol expressly designed for many-to-many communication. First, we devise an analytical model to compute, in a centralized manner, the optimal solution to the problem of simultaneously routing from multiple sources to multiple sinks. Next, we illustrate heuristics approximating the optimal solution in a distributed setting, and their implementation in MUSTER. To increase network lifetime, MUSTER minimizes the number of nodes involved in many-to-many routing and balances their forwarding load. We evaluate MUSTER in emulation and in a real WSN testbed. Results indicate that our protocol builds near-optimal routing paths, doubles the WSN lifetime, and overall delivers to the user 2.5 times the amount of raw data w.r. t. mainstream protocols. Moreover, MUSTER is intrinsically amenable to in-network aggregation, pushing the improvements up to a 180 percent increase in lifetime and a four-time increase in data yield.