Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Shape based alignment of 3-D volume slices

This paper presents a method for the accurate and computationally efficient alignment of 2-D slices that form a 3-D volume. Alignment incorporates object shape information and is achieved by evaluating the forces acting upon pairs of slices whose object outline points are connected by a system of springs under tension. Experimental results on medical and synthetic 3-D images prove, the efficiency of the method.
Genetic Architecture of Highly Complex Chemical Resistance Traits across Four Yeast Strains

Many questions about the genetic basis of complex traits remain unanswered. This is in part due to the low statistical power of traditional genetic mapping studies. We used a statistically powerful approach, extreme QTL mapping (X-QTL), to identify the genetic basis of resistance to 13 chemicals in all 6 pairwise crosses of four ecologically and genetically diverse yeast strains, and we detected a total of more than 800 loci. We found that the number of loci detected in each experiment was primarily a function of the trait (explaining 46% of the variance) rather than the cross (11%), suggesting that the level of genetic complexity is a consistent property of a trait across different genetic backgrounds. Further, we observed that most loci had trait-specific effects, although a small number of loci with effects in many conditions were identified. We used the patterns of resistance and susceptibility alleles in the four parent strains to make inferences about the allele frequency spectrum of functional variants. We also observed evidence of more complex allelic series at a number of loci, as well as strain-specific signatures of selection. These results improve our understanding of complex traits in yeast and have implications for study design in other organisms.
Retinal Vascular Caliber Is Associated with Cardiovascular Biomarkers of Oxidative Stress and Inflammation: The POLA Study

Purpose Retinal vascular caliber has been linked with increased cardiovascular risk and is predictive of cardiovascular pathology, including stroke and coronary heart disease. Oxidative stress, as well as inflammatory mechanisms, plays a major role in the pathogenesis and progression of atherosclerosis, plaque rupture and vascular thrombotic propensity. The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between retinal vascular calibers and biomarkers of oxidative stress and inflammation, in subjects free of cardiovascular pathology. Patients and Methods Cross-sectional analysis from a community-dwelling cohort comprising 1224 individuals aged 60 years and over, without a history of coronary or peripheral artery disease or stroke. Retinal vascular caliber was measured from fundus photographs using semi-automated standardized imaging software. Oxidative stress was evaluated using plasma superoxide dismutase 2 and glutathione peroxidase (GPx-3) activities, and inflammatory state was assessed using plasma high sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP) and orosomucoid. Results In a multivariate model controlling for cardiovascular risk factors, larger retinal arteriolar caliber was independently related to higher level of GPx-3 activity (p = 0.003) whereas larger venular caliber was associated with higher levels of hsCRP (p = 0.0001) and orosomucoid (p = 0.01). Conclusion In the present study, biomarkers of oxidative stress regulation and inflammation were independently associated with retinal vascular calibers. This suggests that an assessment of retinal vessels may offer early and non-invasive detection of subclinical vascular pathology.
Natural Language Questions for the Web of Data

The Linked Data initiative comprises structured databases in the Semantic-Web data model RDF. Exploring this heterogeneous data by structured query languages is tedious and error-prone even for skilled users. To ease the task, this paper presents a methodology for translating natural language questions into structured SPARQL queries over linked-data sources. Our method is based on an integer linear program to solve several disambiguation tasks jointly: the segmentation of questions into phrases; the mapping of phrases to semantic entities, classes, and relations; and the construction of SPARQL triple patterns. Our solution harnesses the rich type system provided by knowledge bases in the web of linked data, to constrain our semantic-coherence objective function. We present experiments on both the question translation and the resulting query answering.
Compensation between Resolved and Unresolved Wave Driving in the Stratosphere: Implications for Downward Control

Perturbations to the orographic gravity wave parameterization scheme in an idealized general circulation model reveal a remarkable degree of compensation between the parameterized and the resolved wave driving: when the orographic gravity wave driving is changed, the resolved wave driving tends to change in the opposite direction, sothere islittleimpactonthe Brewer–Dobson circulation.Buildinguponearlierobservations ofsuch compensation, an analysis based on quasigeostrophic theory suggests that the compensation between the resolved and parameterized waves is inevitable when the stratosphere is driven toward instability by the parameterized gravity wave driving. This instability, however, is quite likely for perturbations of small meridional length scale in comparison with the Rossby radius of deformation. The insight from quasigeostrophic theory is confirmed in a systematic study with an idealized general circulation model and supported by analyses of comprehensivemodels. Thecompensationbetweenresolvedandunresolvedwaves suggeststhat thecommonly used linear separation of the Brewer–Dobson circulation into components (i.e., resolved versus parameterized wave driving) may provide a potentially misleading interpretation of the role of different waves. It may also, in part, explain why comprehensive models tend to agree more on the total strength of the Brewer–Dobson circulation than on the flow associated with individual components. This is of particular relevance to diagnosed changes in the Brewer–Dobson circulation in climate scenario integrations as well.
Normal Incidence of Diabetes in NOD Mice Tolerant to Glutamic Acid Decarboxylase

Experiments in nonobese diabetic (NOD) mice that lacked expression of glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD) in β cells have suggested that GAD represents an autoantigen essential for initiating and maintaining the diabetogenic immune response. Several attempts of inducing GAD-specific recessive tolerance to support this hypothesis have failed. Here we report on successful tolerance induction by expressing a modified form of GAD under control of the invariant chain promoter resulting in efficient epitope display. In spite of specific tolerance insulitis and diabetes occurred with normal kinetics indicating that GAD is not an essential autoantigen in the pathogenesis of diabetes.
A Framework for Integrating Heterogeneous , Small-Scale Devices into Computational Grids and Clusters

viii Acknowledgments I would like to thank my advisor, Rajive Bagrodia, whose tutelage I had the privilege of being under, for his guidance and support throughout my graduate career. Special thanks to Thomas Phan, my colleague and mentor, for his dedication to LEECH, his knowledge, and all of his help along the way. I would also like to thank Ann, and my family and friends for their support and love. Professor Rajive Bagrodia, Chair Contemporary grid and cluster computing frameworks look to aggregate computational resources from idle computers typically arranged in pre-deployed workstation clusters. However, they do not consider heterogeneous, small-scale devices (such as laptops, PDAs, and other Internet connected consumer devices) to be viable resource contributors because such small-scale devices are well-known to be limited in computational, storage, and bandwidth resources. This thesis introduces a novel architecture and programming model that allows this class of small-scale devices to contribute the ir resources in an integrated, seamless manner with contemporary grid and cluster systems. This architecture uses a clustered, hierarchical design to organize small-scale devices around a proxy node. This proxy abstracts away device heterogeneity and dynamic availability of x devices and aggregates and publishes these devices' collective heterogeneous resources to the rest of the grid or cluster system as one machine's resources. We also describe a new programming model and communication library which comp lement the commonly-used MPI message-passing library. The chief contribution of this thesis is an architecture that seamlessly integrates small-scale devices into grid and cluster computing infrastructures, a domain with which these devices had not previo usly been able to readily and efficiently participate. A set of experiments using a synthetic communication benchmark, an RSA key breaking application, and a numerical integration application has shown that our architecture has good scalability characteristics, is resilient to node disconnectivity, supports a wide range of heterogeneous, small-scale devices, and has a very low communication overhead. Grid and cluster computing aggregate together a large amount of potentially heterogeneous computing resources, such as CPU cycles, storage, and bandwidth, in a scalable and cost-effective manner [24] [2] [3]. Although the resulting combined capabilities would be prohibitively expensive to assemble in a traditional multiprocessor computer, creating an aggregation from a distributed collection of systems can be more cost-effective for use by resource-intensive parallel applications [16] [41]. Many such applications have already benefited from grid and cluster computing technologies. Examples are meteorological simulators, distributed …
Automated synthesis of control algorithms from first principles

A variety of machine learning techniques have been employed to automatically create control algorithms for autonomous vehicles. Much research has focused on various ¿black box¿ approaches, in which the synthesized or learned control algorithms perform well when tested, but are difficult or impossible to analyze and understand. This paper presents the use of the ADATE system to evolve a control algorithm based on a racing car simulator. The system evolved compact and analyzable yet sophisticated control algorithms capable of driving millions of randomly generated tracks at high speeds without ever driving off the road. The approach presented is likely to be applicable to most automatic control problems, given a set of training examples and a suitable software simulator.
A pentagonal slot antenna with two-circle stack patch for WLAN/WiMAX

This paper presents a dual wideband slot antenna for WLAN/WiMAX operation. The proposed antenna consists of a radiating pentagonal slot and an exciting two-circle stack patch with a CPW feed. The input impedance matching has been also improved by inserting two slot stubs at the central feed line. The measurement results show the frequency range from 2.3 to 3.75 GHz of the first band and from 4.8 to 6.5 GHz of the second band, which are adequate wide bandwidths for WLAN/WiMAX operations. The radiation patterns of the proposed antenna are nearly omnidirectional in xz plane for all frequency bands. Therefore, this antenna is a good candidate for various short range wireless communication applications.
Impact of Transmit Antenna Array Geometry on Downlink Data Rates in MIMO Systems

For a cellular system with a fixed number of transmit antennas at each base station, we investigate how t he data rate on the downlink varies as a function of the geometryof the transmit array and as a function of the linear precoding that precedes the transmit array. The maximum average data rate that can be reliably transmitted over the downlink channel (i.e. the ergodic capacity of the downlink channel) is used in thispaper to compare various configurations of transmit antennas at the base stations. We show that the 3GPP Spatial Channel Model [7 ] can be used to semi-analytically evaluate the ergodic capac ity for any configuration of transmit antennas. Based on the evaluat ion of ergodic capacity, we will compare several configurationsof transmit antennas for a total of 2, 4, and 8 transmit antennasin a typical macro cellular environment.
The detection and visualization of brain tumors on T2-weighted MRI images using multiparameter feature blocks

The objective of this paper is to present an analytical method to detect lesions or tumors in digitized medical images for 3D visualization. The authors developed a tumor detection method using three parameters; edge (E), gray (G), and contrast (H) values. The method proposed here studied the EGH parameters in a supervised block of input images. These feature blocks were compared with standardized parameters (derived from normal template block) to detect abnormal occurrences, e.g. image block which contain lesions or tumor cells. The abnormal blocks were transformed into three-dimension space for visualization and studies of robustness. Experiments were performed on different brain disease based on single and multiple slices of the MRI dataset. The experiments results have illustrated that our proposed conceptually simple technique is able to effectively detect tumor blocks while being computationally efficient. In this paper, we present a prototype system to evaluate the performance of the proposed methods, comparing detection accuracy and robustness with 3D visualization
Asking the right questions: the key to discovering what works in home care.

1 Discovering what works in home care begins with asking the right questions. Two principles from the evaluation research field are useful in understanding what results should be expected of home care: First, examination of program activities may be the key to discovering program objectives (Deutscher, 1977); second, evidence of immediate effects of programs is much more likely to be found than evidence of less proximate effects (Rossi, Freeman, & Lipsey, 1999). Therefore, to understand what home care is likely to accomplish, we should start by examining the specific tasks involved in home care and focus on immediately achievable program objectives. The core set of home care activities consists of personal assistance services intended to compensate for self-care limitations largely as reflected in activities of daily living (ADL) and instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) measures. Home care does for those with self-care limitations what they cannot do for themselves. More specifically, home care provides assistance with bathing, dressing, meal preparation, shopping, and so on for those who cannot perform these tasks independently. The immediate aim of personal assistance , therefore, is to assure that recipients have adequate solutions to challenges of daily living (Caro, 1981). I have come to use the term " quality of circumstances " to describe largely objective measures of the adequacy of solutions to problems of daily living. (I avoid the term " quality of life " because it is typically conceived of as an entirely subjective construct.) Some examples of quality-of-circumstance content may be helpful. In the quality-of-circumstance framework, a highly favorable outcome for assistance with mobility is evidence that the recipient moves around in the living environment at will day and night with full access to all rooms in the residence and does so without experiencing injury. For those whose home care addresses inability to prepare meals, the quality-of-circumstance framework documents eating experiences from both a nutritional and enjoyment perspective. The nutritional aspect includes weight gain or loss, dietary balance, quantity of food available, and frequency of eating opportunities. Enjoyment of the eating experience includes the social context, satisfaction with the types and variety of food available, and satisfaction with the eating environment. For those who are unable to shop, the adequacy of assistance with shopping is measured by how fully the household is supplied with regularly needed items and how rapidly missing items are obtained. The quality-of-circumstance framework has content that corresponds …
Conditional information and information loss for flexible feature extraction

In this paper, we propose a new information-theoretic approach to competitive learning and self-organizing maps. We use several information-theoretic measures such as conditional information and information losses to extract main features in input patterns. First, conditional information content is used to show how much information is contained in a competitive unit or an input pattern. Then, information content in each variable is detected by information losses. The information loss is defined by difference between information with all input units and information without an input unit. We applied the method to an artificial data, the Iris problem, a student survey, a CPU classification problem and a company survey. In all cases, experimental results showed that main features in input patterns were clearly detected.
GAUSS' LINKING NUMBER REVISITED

In this paper we provide a mathematical reconstruction of what might have been Gauss' own derivation of the linking number of 1833, providing also an alternative, explicit proof of its modern interpretation in terms of degree, signed crossings and intersection number. The reconstruction presented here is entirely based on an accurate study of Gauss' own work on terrestrial magnetism. A brief discussion of a possibly independent derivation made by Maxwell in 1867 completes this reconstruction. Since the linking number interpretations in terms of degree, signed crossings and intersection index play such an important role in modern mathematical physics, we offer a direct proof of their equivalence. Explicit examples of its interpretation in terms of oriented area are also provided.
Diagnosis methods of stator short circuit faults of BLDC Motor Using Adaptive Neuro-fuzzy Inference ( ANFIS ) system and Wavelet

the fault in a Brushless DC (BLDC) Motors can lead to excessive downtimes that can lead to huge losses in terms of maintenance and production. This paper discusses the diagnosis of stator winding faults, which is one of the common faults in a Brushless DC Motors. Several diagnostics techniques have been presented in the literature. Fault detection using traditional analytical methods are not always possible as this requires prior knowledge of the exact motor model. The motor models are also susceptible to inaccuracy due to parameter variations. This paper presents Adaptive Neuro-fuzzy Inference system (ANFIS) based, and wavelet based fault diagnosis methods to diagnoses the fault. The dynamic characteristics of the brushless DC motor is observed and analyzed using the developed MATLAB/ simulink model. Control system response parameter such as, recovery time is observed and compared for the above controllers. In order to validate the performance of the proposed controller under realistic working environment, simulation result has been obtained and analyzed for varying load and varying set speed conditions.
A Design Approach for Compressor Based Approximate Multipliers

Approximate computing is best suited for error resilient applications, such as signal processing and multimedia. Approximate computing reduces accuracy, but it still provides meaningful and faster results with usually lower power consumption, this is particularly attractive for arithmetic circuits. In this paper, a new design approach is proposed to exploit the partitions of partial products using recursive multiplication for compressor-based approximate multipliers. Four multiplier designs are proposed using 4:2 approximate compressors. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed designs achieve significant accuracy improvement together with power and delay reductions compared to previous approximate designs. An image processing application is also presented to show the efficiency of the proposed designs.
Brief report: Description of feasibility and satisfaction findings from an innovative online family problem-solving intervention for adolescents following traumatic brain injury.

OBJECTIVE To describe feasibility and satisfaction findings from an innovative online family problem-solving intervention for adolescents with traumatic brain injury (TBI). METHODS Nine adolescents who sustained a moderate to severe TBI in the previous 24 months and their families participated in a novel, online, manualized treatment program (Teen Online Problem Solving, TOPS) consisting of 10 web-based sessions providing information and interactive exercises on cognitive, social, and behavioral skills typically affected by TBI. Web-based sessions were followed by synchronous video conferences with a therapist to review target skills and apply the problem-solving process to family goals. RESULTS All teens and consenting parents completed at least 10 sessions. The website and videoconferences received moderate to high ratings on helpfulness and ease of use. Parents and teens reported increased knowledge regarding targeted knowledge and skills. CONCLUSIONS Findings support the acceptability of TOPS for adolescent TBI.
Codimension-two geodesic active contours for the segmentation of tubular structures

Curve evolution schemes for segmentation, implemented with level set methods, have become an important approach in computer vision. Previous work has modeled evolving contours which are curves in 2D or surfaces in 3D. Our objective is to explore recent mathematical work enabling the evolution of manifolds of higher co-dimension. We consider 1D curves in 3D (codimension-two) for the application of automatically, segmenting blood vessels in volumetric magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) images. This paper describes the theoretical foundations of our system, CURVES, then provides segmentation results compared against segmentation obtained interactively by a neurosurgeon. Segmentation of bronchi in lung computed tomography (CT) scans are also presented. The new experiments, comparisons to manual segmentation, and sample comparison to the use of a codimension-one regularization force are the primary contributions of this report.
South Africa (A): Stuck in the Middle?

15 years after ending apartheid, formal unemployment in South Africa was still at 24%. While the country had grown at 4 to 5% annually during the 2000s, the financial crisis set it back by 1 million more unemployed. Moreover, it seemed as if the nation were stuck between low wage and fully developed competitors. The government of Jacob Zuma has just adopted a "New Growth Path," hoping to create several million jobs over the next few years. Both the Finance Minister and the head of the Central Bank support the initiative, but worry how they can sustain fiscal discipline and control inflation, in light of these stimulative policies. Organized labor, meanwhile, has little sympathy for any sort of sacrifice.Learning Objective: Introduces national economic strategy and the concept of unit labor costs.
PARAOXONASE ACTIVITY AND PON 1 ( Q / R 192 ) GENE POLYMORPHISM IN ISCHEMIC STROKE PATIENTS

Background: Paraoxonase (PON1) has two polymorphisms Q/R192 and L/M 55 associated with ischemic stroke. The effect of Q/R192 PON1 variants, its activity, and lipid profile in ischemic stroke were studied in South Indians. Design and Methods: The PON1-Q192R polymorphism, serum PON1-ARE activity and lipid profile were analyzed in 308 ischemic stroke patients and in 330 age and sex matched controls. Results: R allele frequency of the codon 192 polymorphism was higher in ischemic stroke cases when compared with controls. Odds ratio of the cases with RR + QR genotype versus QQ genotype was 1.67 (P < 0.01). Patients with ischemic stroke cases with QQ, QR, RR genotypes had highly significant LDL (P < 0.01) and HDL cholesterol (P < 0.01). Conclusion: Our data suggested that there was a significant association between PON1 activity, and PON1-Q192R genotypes in ischemic stroke in South Indians.