Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Auditory Alterations in Children Infected by Human Immunodeficiency Virus Verified Through Auditory Processing Test

Abstract Introduction The auditory system of HIV-positive children may have deficits at various levels, such as the high incidence of problems in the middle ear that can cause hearing loss. Objective The objective of this study is to characterize the development of children infected by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) in the Simplified Auditory Processing Test (SAPT) and the Staggered Spondaic Word Test. Methods We performed behavioral tests composed of the Simplified Auditory Processing Test and the Portuguese version of the Staggered Spondaic Word Test (SSW). The participants were 15 children infected by HIV, all using antiretroviral medication. Results The children had abnormal auditory processing verified by Simplified Auditory Processing Test and the Portuguese version of SSW. In the Simplified Auditory Processing Test, 60% of the children presented hearing impairment. In the SAPT, the memory test for verbal sounds showed more errors (53.33%); whereas in SSW, 86.67% of the children showed deficiencies indicating deficit in figure-ground, attention, and memory auditory skills. Furthermore, there are more errors in conditions of background noise in both age groups, where most errors were in the left ear in the Group of 8-year-olds, with similar results for the group aged 9 years. Conclusion The high incidence of hearing loss in children with HIV and comorbidity with several biological and environmental factors indicate the need for: 1) familiar and professional awareness of the impact on auditory alteration on the developing and learning of the children with HIV, and 2) access to educational plans and follow-up with multidisciplinary teams as early as possible to minimize the damage caused by auditory deficits.
Trends in Transmission of Drug Resistance and Prevalence of Non-B Subtypes in Patients with Acute or Recent HIV-1 Infection in Barcelona in the Last 16 Years (1997-2012)

Objectives To evaluate the prevalence of transmitted drug resistance (TDR) and non-B subtypes in patients with acute/recent HIV-1 infection in Barcelona during the period 1997-2012. Methods Patients from the “Hospital Clínic Primary HIV-1 Infection Cohort” with a genotyping test performed within 180 days of infection were included. The 2009 WHO List of Mutations for Surveillance of Transmitted HIV-1 Drug Resistance was used for estimating the prevalence of TDR and phylogenetic analysis for subtype determination. Results 189 patients with acute/recent HIV-1 infection were analyzed in 4 time periods (1997-2000, n=28; 2001-4, n=42; 2005-8, n=55 and 2009-12, n=64). The proportion of patients with acute/recent HIV-1 infection with respect to the total of newly HIV-diagnosed patients in our center increased over the time and was 2.18%, 3.82%, 4.15% and 4.55% for the 4 periods, respectively (p=0.005). The global prevalence of TDR was 9%, or 17.9%, 9.5%, 3.6% and 9.4% by study period (p=0.2). The increase in the last period was driven by protease-inhibitor and nucleoside-reverse-transcriptase-inhibitor resistance mutations while non-nucleoside-reverse-transcriptase inhibitor TDR and TDR of more than one family decreased. The overall prevalence of non-B subtypes was 11.1%, or 0%, 4.8%, 9.1% and 20.3 by study period (p=0.01). B/F recombinants, B/G recombinants and subtype F emerged in the last period. We also noticed an increase in the number of immigrant patients (p=0.052). The proportion of men-who-have-sex-with-men (MSM) among patients with acute/recent HIV-1 infection increased over the time (p=0.04). Conclusions The overall prevalence of TDR in patients with acute/recent HIV-1 infection in Barcelona was 9%, and it has stayed relatively stable in recent years. Non-B subtypes and immigrants proportions progressively increased.
On the Cost of Safe Storage for Public Clouds: An Experimental Evaluation

Cloud-based storage services such as Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive are increasingly popular for storing enterprise data, and they have already become the de facto choice for cloud-based backup of hundreds of millions of regular users. Drawn by the wide range of services they provide, no upfront costs and 24/7 availability across all personal devices, customers are well-aware of the benefits that these solutions can bring. However, most users tend to forget—or worse ignore—some of the main drawbacks of such cloud-based services, namely in terms of privacy. Data entrusted to these providers can be leaked by hackers, disclosed upon request from a governmental agency's subpoena, or even accessed directly by the storage providers (e.g., for commercial benefits). While there exist solutions to prevent or alleviate these problems, they typically require direct intervention from the clients, like encrypting their data before storing it, and reduce the benefits provided such as easily sharing data between users. This practical experience report studies a wide range of security mechanisms that can be used atop standard cloud-based storage services. We present the details of our evaluation testbed and discuss the design choices that have driven its implementation. We evaluate several state-of-the-art techniques with varying security guarantees responding to user-assigned security and privacy criteria. Our results reveal the various trade-offs of the different techniques by means of representative workloads on top of industry-grade storage services.
Admission control scheme for soft handoff in DS-CDMA cellular systems supporting voice and stream-type data services

The soft handoff call requests of real-time services in third-generation (3G) direct-sequence code-division multiple access (DS-CDMA) and first- and second-generation cellular systems are more important than new call requests from the viewpoint of quality of service (QoS). Rejection of soft handoff requests causes forced termination of an ongoing real-time call, which is a severer problem than blocking of new call attempts. An admission control scheme that can guarantee a higher QoS for the soft handoff requests of real-time services in 3G DS-CDMA systems is proposed for delay-sensitive voice and delay-tolerant stream-type data services. The proposed scheme (P-Scheme) accommodates both voice and data services by utilizing the full bandwidth. However, voice soft handoff call requests are given priority over new voice call and stream-type data packet requests by suppressing interference from stream-type data services according to voice soft handoff requests, and by varying interference levels. Performance of the P-Scheme is evaluated using a Markovian model. Results are compared with a conventional reservation scheme (C-Scheme) that reserves resources exclusively for voice soft handoff requests. Numerical results show that system performance can be significantly improved using the proposed P-Scheme, compared with the conventional C-Scheme, when various types of service are supported in third-generation DS-CDMA systems.
Adaptive Brain Interfaces for Communication and Control

This paper describes our work on a portable non-invasive brain-computer interface (BCI), called Adaptive Brain Interfaces (ABI), that analysis online the users spontaneous electroencephalogram (EEG) signals from which a neural classifier recognizes 3 different mental states. The outputs of the classifier are used as mental commands to operate communication and control devices. Although still at a research stage, BCIs offer the possibility to augment human capabilities in a natural way and are particularly relevant as an aid for paralyzed humans.
Error Concealment Aware Error Resilient Video Coding over Wireless Burst-Packet-Loss Network

Error concealment is a well-known technique to improve reproduced picture quality in cases which parts of the coded picture are not available at a decoder for reconstruction. The conventional error concealment methods generally make use of the correlation between a damaged marcoblock and its adjacent macroblocks in the same frame and/or the previous frame. However, performance results of concealment methods are different each other and dependent on how much damaged frames and macroblocks are correlated to surrounding ones temporally and spatially. Moreover, most of them can not conceal effectively the consecutively damaged frames or macro blocks caused by wireless bursty packet loss features, since motion vectors and correlation information between the damaged images are already destroyed. The proposed error concealment aware error resilient video coding is a new method which has an intelligent error concealment selector by using pre-estimation technique of the possibly damaged motion vectors at the encoder. The method recommends the best error concealment per macroblock by transmitting additionally its error concealment selection codes to the decoder. The chosen error concealment helps to conceal the damaged MB at the decoder even when losses of frames are bursty. The experimental results show the substantial effectiveness to improve video quality at the cost of a little bit overhead at the transmitted bit streams.
Spatial Knowledge Acquisition from Maps and Virtual Environments in Complex Architectural Spaces

It has often been suggested that due to its inherent spatial nature, a virtual environment (VE) might be a powerful tool for spatial knowledge acquisition of a real environment, as opposed to the use of maps or some other two-dimensional, symbolic medium. While interesting from a psychological point of view, a study of the use of a VE in lieu of a map seems nonsensical from a practical point of view. Why would the use of a VE preclude the use of a map? The more interesting investigation would be of the value added of the VE when used with a map. If the VE could be shown to substantially improve navigation performance, then there might be a case for its use as a training tool. If not, then we have to assume that maps continue to be the best spatial knowledge acquisition tool available.
Bias in the priming of object decisions: logic, assumption, and data.

R. Ratcliff and G. McKoon (1995) describe 7 experiments that led them to conclude that priming of possible but not impossible objects on the object decision task introduced by D.L. Schacter, L.A. Cooper, & S.M. Delaney (1990) is attributable to explicit memory processes that offset a bias to call studied objects "possible. " On the basis of this point, Ratcliff and McKoon (1995) claim to have undermined our hypothesis that a structural description system plays an important role in object decision priming. Ratcliff and McKoon (1995) also offer a general critique of multiple memory systems accounts of priming and explicit memory. Ratcliff and McKoon's (1995) arguments are based on an inaccurate characterization of Schacter et al.'s theoretical position; the evidence for Ratcliff and McKoon's (1995) idea that explicit memory offsets bias is weak, and the central assumptions that underlie both Ratcliff and McKoon's (1995) specific experimental manipulations and their general conclusions are questionable.
Towards Multimodal Content Representation

Multimodal interfaces, combining the use of speech, graphics, gestures, and facial expressions in input and output, promise to provide new possibilities to deal with information in more effective and efficient ways, supporting for instance: - the understanding of possibly imprecise, partial or ambiguous multimodal input; - the generation of coordinated, cohesive, and coherent multimodal presentations; - the management of multimodal interaction (e.g., task completion, adapting the interface, error prevention) by representing and exploiting models of the user, the domain, the task, the interactive context, and the media (e.g. text, audio, video). The present document is intended to support the discussion on multimodal content representation, its possible objectives and basic constraints, and how the definition of a generic representation framework for multimodal content representation may be approached. It takes into account the results of the Dagstuhl workshop, in particular those of the informal working group on multimodal meaning representation that was active during the workshop (see http://www.dfki.de/~wahlster/Dagstuhl_Multi_Modality, Working Group 4).
LIDAR-based change detection of buildings in dense urban areas

An automatic method for LIDAR-based (Light Detection And Ranging) change detection is proposed. Highly dense LIDAR point clouds are recommended as the most suitable gathered data for dense urban areas. The main goal is to develop an up-to-date building inventory database, which is in great demand for the earthquake-prone areas like Japan, using LIDAR as primary data. Two LIDAR surveying flights in 1999 and 2004 provide the test data over Roppongi, Tokyo, Japan. Detected results are visual evaluation using orthophoto produced by LIDAR surveying flights. The highly automated processing proved the efficiency of using LIDAR for a quick and reliable updating. Moreover, it also implies the feasibility for detection of damaged buildings due to earthquake.
Reliability and Validity of the Malay Version of Brief COPE Scale: A Study on Malaysian Women Treated with Adjuvant Chemotherapy for Breast Cancer

This paper validates the Malay Version of Brief COPE Scale. Reliability was assessed using the test-retest method meanwhile internal consistency was indicated by the Cronbach’s alpha value. Sensitivity of the scale was expressed as the mean differences (and the Effect Size Index) from the evaluation taken at two/three weeks and ten weeks following surgery. Discriminant validity was evaluated by comparing two groups of women i.e. mastectomy and lumpectomy. Internal consistencies ranged from 0.51 to 0.99. In the meantime, the test-retest Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC) ranged from <0.00 to 0.98. Sensitivity of the scale was observed in nearly all of the domains with Effect Size Index (ESI) ranged from 0.00 to 0.49. Significant differences between two groups of women (mastectomy and lumpectomy) were detected for Active coping, Planning, Positive Reframing, Religion and Self-distraction. Brief COPE Scale (Malay Version) confirms fairly good reliability and validity.
Semi-automatic Building Method for a Multidimensional Affect Dictionary for a New Language

Detecting the tone or emotive content of a text message is increasingly important in many natural language processing applications. While for the English language there exists a number of affect, emotive, opinion, or affect computer-usable lexicons for automatically processing text, other languages rarely possess these primary resources. Here we present a semi-automatic technique for quickly building a multidimensional affect lexicon for a new language. Most of the work consists of defining 44 paired affect directions (e.g. love-hate, courage-fear, etc.) and choosing a small number of seed words for each dimension. From this initial investment, we show how a first pass affect lexicon can be created for new language, using a SVM classifier trained on a feature space produced from Latent Semantic Analysis over a large corpus in the new language. We evaluate the accuracy of placing newly found emotive words in one or more of the defined semantic dimensions. We illustrate this technique by creating an affect lexicon for French, but the techniques can be applied to any language found on the Web and for which a large quantity of text exists.
Temporal logic with predicate /spl lambda/-abstraction

A predicate linear temporal logic LTL/sub /spl lambda/=/ without quantifiers but with predicate /spl lambda/-abstraction mechanism and equality is considered. The models of LTL/sub /spl lambda/=/ can be naturally seen as the systems of pebbles (flexible constants) moving over the elements of some (possibly infinite) domain. This allows to use LTL/sub /spl lambda/=/ for the specification of dynamic systems using some resources, such as processes using memory locations, mobile agents occupying some sites, etc. On the other hand we show that LTL/sub /spl lambda/=/ is not recursively axiomatizable and, therefore, fully automated verification of LTL/sub /spl lambda/=/ specifications via validity checking is not, in general, possible. The result is based on computational universality of the above abstract computational model of pebble systems, which is of independent interest due to the range of possible interpretations of such systems.
PpCBF3 from Cold-Tolerant Kentucky Bluegrass Involved in Freezing Tolerance Associated with Up-Regulation of Cold-Related Genes in Transgenic Arabidopsis thaliana

Dehydration-Responsive Element Binding proteins (DREB)/C-repeat (CRT) Binding Factors (CBF) have been identified as transcriptional activators during plant responses to cold stress. The objective of this study was to determine the physiological roles of a CBF gene isolated from a cold-tolerant perennial grass species, Kentucky bluegrass (Poa pratensis L.), which designated as PpCBF3, in regulating plant tolerance to freezing stress. Transient transformation of Arabidopsis thaliana mesophyll protoplast with PpCBF3-eGFP fused protein showed that PpCBF3 was localized to the nucleus. RT-PCR analysis showed that PpCBF3 was specifically induced by cold stress (4°C) but not by drought stress [induced by 20% polyethylene glycol 6000 solution (PEG-6000)] or salt stress (150 mM NaCl). Transgenic Arabidopsis overexpressing PpCBF3 showed significant improvement in freezing (-20°C) tolerance demonstrated by a lower percentage of chlorotic leaves, lower cellular electrolyte leakage (EL) and H2O2 and O2 . - content, and higher chlorophyll content and photochemical efficiency compared to the wild type. Relative mRNA expression level analysis by qRT-PCR indicated that the improved freezing tolerance of transgenic Arabidopsis plants overexpressing PpCBF3 was conferred by sustained activation of downstream cold responsive (COR) genes. Other interesting phenotypic changes in the PpCBF3-transgenic Arabidopsis plants included late flowering and slow growth or ‘dwarfism’, both of which are desirable phenotypic traits for perennial turfgrasses. Therefore, PpCBF3 has potential to be used in genetic engineering for improvement of turfgrass freezing tolerance and other desirable traits.
K-Extractor: Automatic Knowledge Extraction for Hybrid Question Answering

This paper describes an approach to integrate unstructured and structured data and provide a natural language query interface to the consolidated knowledge base. The approach is based on deep semantic representation expressed in RDF triples. Natural language questions are automatically converted into SPARQL queries executed against the RDF store. The approach is implemented in K-Extractor platform. Two domain collections are shown: antibiotic resistant bacteria and illicit drugs.
Measuring minority stress: invariance of a discrimination and vigilance scale across transgender and cisgender LGBQ individuals

ABSTRACT The Minority Stress Model posits that experiences of proximal and distal stress increase gender and sexual minority risk for poor mental and physical health outcomes. Psychological researchers of minority stress have utilised a variety of measures to capture these stressors, but currently no measures have been assessed for invariance across transgender and LGBQ individuals. The present study assessed the measurement invariance of the Everyday Discrimination Scale (EDS) and the Discrimination-Related Vigilance Scale (DRVS) across transgender (n = 460) and cisgender LGBQ (n = 523) individuals. The EDS demonstrated partial metric invariance across transgender and cisgender, and within gender identities of transgender individuals. While the DRVS demonstrated complete metric invariance across transgender and cisgender, and partial metric invariance within gender identities among transgender respondents. In general, transgender individuals reported more discrimination and vigilance than cisgender LGBQ individuals. This research is the first to compare the structure of measures of LGBTQ-related minority stress. Uncovered non-invariance provides evidence for difference in minority stress patterns for transgender women and men. Results suggest invariance testing may help identify differences in minority stress experiences across LGBTQ identities and increase the validity of analyses that compare multi-item measures across groups.
Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms in IL1B and the Risk of Acute Coronary Syndrome: A Danish Case-Cohort Study

Background Interleukin-1B (IL-1B) is a key pro-inflammatory cytokine that has been associated with the development of atherosclerosis and myocardial infarction. However, the prospective associations between functional single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in IL1B and incident acute coronary syndrome (ACS) have not been thoroughly investigated. The aims of this study were to examine the associations between individual SNPs in and SNP haplotypes of the promoter region of IL1B and incident ACS in a prospective study. Furthermore, we wanted to explore potential interactions with other risk factors for ACS on an additive scale. Methodology/Principal Findings The present study was based on the Danish prospective study Diet, Cancer and Health comprising more than 57 000 participants aged 50–64 at baseline. During a median follow-up of 7.2 years we identified 989 cases of incident ACS (755 men and 234 women). All cases were validated by review of medical records, and information on covariates was collected by study technicians. The study was conducted according to a case-cohort study design including ACS cases and a sex-stratified sub cohort of 1663 participants drawn randomly from the entire cohort. Weighted Cox proportional hazard models with age as time axis were used in the statistical analyses. Individual IL1B SNPs, SNP haplotypes, or haplotype combinations were not significantly associated with incident ACS, and, likewise, we found no evidence of interaction on an additive scale between IL1B haplotypes and risk factors, respectively. Conclusions/Significance Genetic variation in the promoter region of IL1B may not be associated with incident ACS in men or women above the age of 50 years.
In Silico Structural Modeling and Analysis of Elongation Factor-1 Alpha and Elongation Factor-like Protein

Translation elongation factor-1alpha (EF-1α) or its paralog elongation factor-like proteins (EFL) interact with an aminoacyl-transfer RNA (aa-tRNA) to play its essential role in elongation of peptide-chain during protein synthesis. Species usually have either an EF-1α or EFL protein; however, some species have both EF-1α and EFL (dual-EF-containing species). In the dual-EF-containing species, EF-1α appeared to be highly divergent in the sequence. Homology modeling and surface analysis of EF-1α and EFL were performed to examine the hypothesis that the divergent EF-1α in the dual-EF-containing eukaryotes does not strongly interact with aa-tRNA compared to the canonical EF-1α and EFL. The subsequent molecular dynamics simulations were carried out to confirm the validity of modeled structures and to analyze their stability. It was found that the molecular surfaces of the divergent EF-1α proteins were negatively charged partly, and thus they might not interact with negatively charged aa-tRNA as strongly as the canonical ones. The molecular docking simulations between EF-1α/EFL and aa-tRNA also support the hypothesis.
A UWB Pulse Shapes Modulation Scheme Based on Modified Hermite Polynomials

Considering ultra wide band (UWB) system which transmits data information using ultra-short pulses, a pulse shape modulation UWB system based on orthogonal UWB pulse is proposed, which is on the basis of the orthogonality and non- direct component of modified Hermite polynomial function. The simulation result shows that the method can not only improve the performance, but also decrease the bit error rate.