Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Concanavalin A induces interactions between surface glycoproteins and the platelet cytoskeleton

We have measured the association of platelet surface membrane proteins with Triton X-100 (Triton)-insoluble residues in platelets surface labeled with 125I. In both concanavalin A (Con A)-stimulated and resting platelets, this fraction is composed largely of polypeptides with apparent molecular weights of 45,000, 200,000, and 250,000 which comigrate with authentic actin, myosin heavy chain, and actin binding protein, respectively, as judged by PAGE in SDS. Less than 10% of the two major 125I-labeled surface glycoproteins, GPiib and GPIII, were associated with the Triton residue in resting platelets. Within 45 s after Con A addition, 80-95% of these two glycoproteins became associated with the Triton residue and the amount of sedimentable actin doubled. No cosedimentation of GPIIb and III with the cytoskeletal protein-containing Triton residue was seen when Con A was added to a Triton extract of resting cells, indicating that the sedimentation of GPIIb and III seen in Con A-stimulated platelets was not due to precipitation of the glycoproteins by Con A after detergent lysis. Treatment of Triton extracts of Con A-stimulated platelets with DNase I (deoxyribonucleate 5'-oligonucleotidido-hydrolase [EC 3.1.4.5]) inhibited the sedimentation of actin and the two surface glycoproteins in a dose-dependent manner. This inhibition of cosedimentation was not due to an effect of DNase I on Con A-glycoprotein interactions since these two glycoproteins could be quantitatively recovered by Con A- Sepharose affinity absorption in the presence of DNase I. When the Con A bound to the Triton residue was localized ultrastructurally, it was associated with cell-sized structures containing filamentous material. In intact cells, there was simultaneous immunofluorescent coredistribution of surface-bound Con A and myosin under conditions which induced a redistribution of platelet myosin. These data suggest that Con A can, in the intact platelet, induce physical interactions between certain surface glycoproteins and the internal cytoskeleton.
Radiation pattern measurements in reverberation chamber based on estimation of coherent and diffuse electromagnetic fields

In a recent publication, authors showed that measurements of the maximum directivity of antennas were achievable in a reverberation chamber through extraction of the coherent part of the field. In this communication, we extend the method to the measurement of the radiation pattern within the main lobe of radiation. One is thus able to estimate the 3dB aperture of the antenna without need of an anechoic chamber. Some preliminary results are reported and possible improvements are discussed.
The Politics of Renewable Portfolio Standards and Clean Energy Production in the States

This paper investigates the relationship between state adoption of Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) policies, tax incentives and renewable energy production. The unique contribution of this paper is to analyze renewable energy development from a political perspective by investigating the influence of political and policy variables. Hypotheses relating to explanations based on policy, political and competing resources explanations are tested. The policy explanation investigates the influence of RPS, green power options, public benefits funds, net metering, and emissions caps. The political explanation focuses on the influence of citizen ideology, government ideology, legislative professionalism, as well as the activism of renewable energy interest groups, such as solar energy interest groups and wind energy interest groups. In addition, the effects of competing resources, such as nuclear, coal and hydro power are examined. The results provide substantial support for these hypotheses. Renewable portfolio standards, green power options, net metering and emission caps are each statistically significant and consistent with the expected relationship. The effect of RPS on the development of renewable energy capacity is substantial. We also found that citizen ideology and solar interest groups are important determinants for the deployment of renewable energy. We consider the development of renewable energy as a political process, in addition to a market process. Political mobilization of the renewable interest groups plays an important role in the deployment of renewable energy capacity.
Predicting Mobile Phone User Locations by Exploiting Collective Behavioral Patterns

Location prediction based on cellular network traces has recently spurred lots of interest. However, predicting one's location remains a very challenging task due to the randomness of the human mobility patterns. Our preliminary study included in this paper shows that there is a strong correlation and association among the certain group of users' locations. Through association pattern mining on Reality Mining dataset which involves 32,579 cell tower locations and 350,000 hours of continuous activity information, we observe the highly confident association rules exist among the locations of users, and then we further verify that the associations are indeed caused by the collective behaviors of the mobile phone users. Based on this finding we introduce the collective behavioral patterns (CBP), and then propose CBP-based predictor- a novel prediction schema that aims to forecasting one's locations in next 6 hours based on the locations of other users. Furthermore, we integrate the state-of-the-art i.e., Markov-based predictor with our CBP-based schema to build a hybrid predictor. We evaluate the CBP-based schema and compare the hybrid predictor with the Markov-based predictor through intensive experiments. Experimental results show that CBP-based predictor achieves good precision and the hybrid predictor produces higher prediction accuracy than the state-of-the-art scheme at cell tower level in the forthcoming one to six hours. Finally it is verified that collective behavioral patterns can be used to predict user locations as well as to improve the performance of existing predictors.
Quality of Sleep in an HIV Population on Antiretroviral Therapy at an Urban Tertiary Centre in Lagos, Nigeria

Aim. To determine the prevalence of sleep disturbance and its associated characteristics in HIV-positive outpatients on HAART using the PSQI. Methods. Using a cross-sectional design, 300 patients attending the outpatient HIV/AIDS clinic at the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital were recruited. Baseline data obtained included the participants' demographic data, educational qualification, and marital status. Their treatment history, including duration since HIV diagnosis, the most recent CD4 cell count, and current antiretroviral therapies, was obtained from their case records. Each participant completed the PSQI questionnaire and those with scores ≥5 were diagnosed with poor sleep quality. Results. The participants were made up of 70.7% females and 29.3% males. Their ages ranged between 18 and 74 years with a mean of 38.9 ± 10.3 years. According to the PSQI, 59.3% reported poor sleep quality. The mean score of those with poor quality sleep (9.2 ± 3.3) was comparable to that of those with good quality sleep (1.26 ± 1.4). P < 0.001. Significant differences were observed in all the individual components of the PSQI (P < 0.001). On multivariate analyses, the independent associations with sleep quality were the duration since HIV diagnosis (P = 0.29), efavirenz based regimen (P < 0.001), and lower CD4 cell count (P < 0.001). Conclusions. Sleep disturbances are quite common in the HIV population even in the era of HAART. Early recognition via routine assessment and effective treatments could prevent the resultant complications and improve quality of life.
Automatic actors detection in musicals

Bollywood movies have become an important part of South Asian culture. Video musical pieces are integral parts of these movies. The growing ease of hosting multimedia contents online is resulting in a huge number of movie video songs available online. A common user usually likes to search a particular music piece, based on different criteria e.g. genre of a video song, or on-screen actor performing on a video song. Such information, in current implementation, is attached manually as a textual caption with the video songs. This textual caption with a video song is highly unreliable, especially when a video song is to be uploaded by an ordinary user, which is usually the case with online video songs. In this paper, we present an automatic approach of detecting the actors vocalizing a video song, who are usually the stars of the movie. Our approach is based on detecting actors faces from different parts of a video song and clustering the faces based on faces similarity. We tested the proposed actors detector on 30 video songs, belonging to different genres. An overall accuracy of 83.34% and 80% has been achieved on first and second main actors, respectively.
New attacks on SARI image authentication system

The image authentication system SARI proposed by Lin and Chang passes JPEG compression and rejects other malicious manipulations. Some vulnerabilities of the system have been reported recently. In this paper, we propose two new attacks that can compromise the SARI system. The first attack is called a histogram attack which modifies DCT coefficients yet maintains the same relationship between any two DCT coefficients and the same mean values of DCT coefficients. Such a modified image can pass the SARI authentication system. The second attack is an oracle attack which uses an oracle to efficiently find the secret pairs used by SARI in its signature generation. A single image plus an oracle is needed to launch the oracle attack. Fixes to thwart the proposed attacks are also proposed in this paper.
Automatic extraction of spatial relations

We present a method to extract semantic relations from text corpora in an unsupervised way and use the output as preprocessed material for the building of a virtual environment. The experiments have been carried out in the context of the Flemish OntoBasis project. We have used two small corpora. The first one has been gathered from the Internet and is describing the megalithic ruin of Stonehenge. The other one, considered as a test case, is composed in order to describe the appearance and content of a shop. Using a shallow parser, we select functional relations, such as the syntactic structure subject-verb-object, from which we extract spatial information, in an unsupervised way on the Stonehenge corpus, and using domain knowledge for the shop corpus. We then compare and discuss the results, considering the differences between both corpora and to what extent the size of the corpus and the presence of domain knowledge influence the results. The adequacy of the relations extracted has been evaluated manually
The game analysis of coal mining enterprises safe-production and government administration re-supervision

As we all know, coal is an important basic resource which accounts for about 70% in the primary energy structure. Coal mining enterprises have the primary responsibility of the mine accident. Therefore, it is a great significance with researching the production strategy of coal mining enterprises. In this paper, we use the game theory to analyze the interest between safe-production of the coal mining enterprises and the government administration re-supervision. And we also analyze the cause of coal mine safety accidents. Through analyzing, a conclusion comes out that the innovation of supervision system is the key to improve the situation of coal mining production, we should establish including the media, associations and other third-party monitoring mechanism and government and enterprises should strengthen the training of miners safety education.
Robust intrinsically motivated exploration and active learning

IAC was initially introduced as a developmental mechanism allowing a robot to self-organize developmental trajectories of increasing complexity without pre-programming the particular developmental stages. In this paper, we argue that IAC and other intrinsically motivated learning heuristics could be viewed as active learning algorithms that are particularly suited for learning forward models in unprepared sensorimotor spaces with large unlearnable subspaces. Then, we introduce a novel formulation of IAC, called R-IAC, and show that its performances as an intrinsically motivated active learning algorithm are far superior to IAC in a complex sensorimotor space where only a small subspace is neither unlearnable nor trivial. We also show results in which the learnt forward model is reused in a control scheme.
One database pass algorithms of mining top-k frequent closed itemsets

The FP-growth algorithm is a powerful algorithm to mine frequent patterns and it is non-candidate generation algorithm using a special structure FP-tree. Many algorithms proposed recently are based on FP-tree. These algorithms include all frequent itemsets mining, closed frequent itemsets mining and top-k closed frequent itemsets mining. However, it still requires two database scans, Although it is not a problem for static database, it is not efficient for frequent pattern mining, interactive and incremental mining. In order to enhance the efficiency of FP-tree based algorithms, propose a novel algorithm called QFPC which can create FP-tree with one database pass. Also propose a novel algorithm PFPTC to create FP-tree parallelly.
A ROS Implementation of the Mono-Slam Algorithm

Computer vision approaches are increasingly used in mobile robotic systems, since they allow to obtain a very good representation of the environment by using low-power and cheap sensors. In particular it has been shown that they can compete with standard solutions based on laser range scanners when dealing with the problem of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), where the robot has to explore an unknown environment while building a map of it and localizing in the same map. We present a package for simultaneous localization and mapping in ROS (Robot Operating System) using a monocular camera sensor only. Experimental results in real scenarios as well as on standard datasets show that the algorithm is able to track the trajectory of the robot and build a consistent map of small environments, while running in near real-time on a standard PC.
Out-of-Core Surface Reconstruction from Large Point Sets for Infrastructure Inspection

This paper presents a simple, effective, yet fast out-of-core method for surface reconstruction based on the vector field surface representation. The algorithm is designed to handle massive amount of real-world point clouds representing large infrastructures (e.g. underwater hydroelectric structure) acquired by LiDAR, sonar or laser scanning system using out-of-core techniques. Our method allows performing seamless surface reconstruction from unorganized, unrented, non-uniform and highly noisy data that include outliers. The applicability of the method has been evaluated in the context of hydroelectric infrastructure inspection, and its performance has been tested using synthetically produced data and field data captured on different Hydro-Quebec's sites by laser line scanning, LiDAR and sonar measurement systems.
Human robot cooperation based on human intention inference

In many human robot cooperation tasks, robotic agents are usually controlled by commands which are explicitly input by human. Although the explicit control method is straightforward and easy to implement, it will decrease the efficiency, fluency and adaptiveness of human robot cooperation. In this paper, we proposed an implicit control method that recognizes human intention and facilitates human robot cooperation. A finite state machine approach was used to implement human intention recognition algorithm. Four assembly configurations were designed and intention recognition experiments were carried out by using simulation and real data respectively. We have shown that our method can flexibly adapt to human intention even if the human operator retracts some assembly parts and changes mind during the tasks. Furthermore, the robustness of our method has also been demonstrated in noisy situations.
Psychopathological changes and quality of life in hepatitis C virus-infected, opioid-dependent patients during maintenance therapy.

AIMS To examine among maintenance patients (methadone or buprenorphine) with and without hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection (i) the frequency of psychopathological symptoms at baseline and 1-year follow-up; (ii) the association between antiviral interferon (IFN) treatment and psychopathological symptoms; and (iii) to explore whether IFN therapy has an effect on 1-year outcome of maintenance treatment. DESIGN Naturalistic prospective longitudinal cohort design. SETTING A total of 223 substitution centres in Germany. PARTICIPANTS A nationally representative sample of 2414 maintenance patients, namely 800 without and 1614 with HCV infection, of whom 122 received IFN therapy. MEASURES HCV infection (HCV+/HCV-), IFN (IFN+/IFN-) treatment status and clinical measures. Diagnostic status and severity (rated by clinician), psychopathology (BSI--Brief Symptom Inventory) and quality of life (EQ-5D--EuroQol Group questionnaire). FINDINGS HCV+ patients revealed indications for a moderately increased psychopathological burden and poorer quality of life at baseline and follow-up compared to HCV- patients. HCV+ patients showed a marked deterioration over time only in the BSI subscale somatization (P = 0.002), and the frequency of sleep disorders almost doubled over time (12.8% at baseline; 24.1% at follow-up; P < 0.01). IFN treatment, received by 10% of HCV+ patients, did not impair efficacy or tolerability of maintenance therapy and was associated overall with neither increased psychopathological burden nor reduced quality of life. CONCLUSIONS Findings suggest no increased risk among HCV+ patients on maintenance therapy for depressive or other psychopathological syndromes. In our patient sample, IFN treatment was not associated with increased psychopathological burden, reduced quality of life or poorer tolerability and efficacy of maintenance treatment.
Combined use of tractography-integrated functional neuronavigation and direct fiber stimulation.

OBJECT The aim of this study was better preoperative planning and direct application to intraoperative procedures through accurate coregistration of diffusion-tensor (DT) imaging-based tractography results and anatomical three-dimensional magnetic resonance images and subsequent importation of the combined images to a neuronavigation system (functional neuronavigation). METHODS Six patients with brain lesions adjacent to the corticospinal tract (CST) were studied. During surgery, direct fiber stimulation was used to evoke motor responses to confirm the accuracy of CST depicted on functional neuronavigation. In three patients, stimulation of the supposed CST elicited the expected motor evoked potentials. In the other three, stimulation at the resection borders more than 1 cm away from the supposed CST showed no motor response. All patients underwent appropriate tumor resection with preservation of the CST. CONCLUSIONS Integration of the DT imaging-based tractography information into a traditional neuronavigation system demonstrated spatial relationships between lesions and the CST, allowing for the avoidance of tract injury during lesion resection. Direct fiber stimulation was used for real-time reliable white matter mapping, which served to adjust for any discrepancy between the neuronavigation system data and potentially shifted positions of the brain structures. The combination of these techniques enabled the authors to identify accurate positions of the CST during surgery and to accomplish optimal tumor resections.
Cultural differences and design methods for user experience research: Dutch and Korean participants compared

As business competition globalizes, understanding user experience from various cultures plays a crucial role in design process. However, because most user research methods were developed in Western area, one may question if the expected result can be obtained when applying them to totally different culture. The paper explores cultural effects on the feedback collected in the process and result of user experience research conducted in two countries, the Netherlands and Korea. We presumed four factors which influence user research process: spontaneity of participation, uncertainty avoidance, tendency of problem criticism, and attitude within a group. After the two sets of user research in two countries, actual differences of results were revealed. Consequently, guidelines of user experience research in Korea were suggested based on discovered differences.
Banks and Economic Growth: Implications from Japanese History

In the 1950s and 60s, Alexander Gerschenkron claimed that banks facilitate economic growth among "backward" countries. In 1990s and 2000s, many theorists similarly claim that banks promote growth. Banks do so by their superior monitoring and screening capabilities, they reason. Through those capabilities, banks reduce informational asymmetries and the attendent moral hazard and adverse selection, and thereby improve the allocation of credit. As a fast-growth but allegedly bank-centered economy, Japan plays an important part in these discussions of finance and growth. In early 20th century Japan firms relied heavily on bank debt, observers argue. Those firms with preferential access to debt outperformed the others, and those that were part of the zaibatsu corporate groups obtained that preferential access through their affiliated banks. With data from the first half of the century, we ask whether Japanese banks performed the roles Gerschenkron and modern theorists assign them. Notwithstanding the usual accounts, we find that they did not. Japan was not a bank-centered economy; instead, firms relied overwhelmingly on equity finance. It was not an economy where firms with access to bank credit outperformed their rivals; instead, firms earned no advantage from such access. And it was not a world where the zaibatsu manipulated their banks to favor affiliated firms; instead, zaibatsu banks loaned affiliated firms little more (if any) than the deposits those firms had made with the banks. During the first half of the last century, Japanese firms obtained almost all their funds through decentralized, competitive capital markets.