Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Increased brain radioresistance after supralethal irradiation.

Abstract : Clinical symptoms and performance were evaluated after shuttlebox- trained miniature pigs received two 4400-rad doses separated by time intervals of . 0001 to 30 minutes. The doses were delivered to the head by 45 MeV electrons from the AFRRI electron linear accelerator (LINAC). There was no significant difference in neurological symptoms (convulsions, coma, ataxia) or in performance after the second dose between animals that received the two doses . 0001 or 0.3 minute apart. As the time interval between doses was increased from 0.3 to 3 minutes, however, neurological symptoms declined and performance improved markedly after the second dose. When the doses were 30 minutes apart, the pigs showed no decrease in performance within the initial 30 minutes postirradiation. It was concluded that more than physicochemical processes were involved in the increased radioresistance to the second dose of radiation.
ICDAR 2009 Page Segmentation Competition

This paper presents an objective comparative evalua-tion of layout analysis methods in realistic circumstances. It describes the Page Segmentation competition (modus operandi, dataset and evaluation methodology) held in the context of ICDAR2009 and presents the results of the evaluation of four submitted methods. Two state-of-the art methods are also compared as well as the three methods from the ICDA2007 Page Segmentation competition. The results indicate that although methods continue to mature, there is still a considerable need to develop robust methods that deal with everyday documents.
Understanding the workplace culture of a special care nursery.

AIM This paper presents findings from the first phase of a research study focusing on implementation and evaluation of emancipatory practice development strategies. BACKGROUND Understanding the culture of practice is essential to undertaking effective developments in practice. Culture is a dominant feature of discussions about modernizing health care, yet few studies have been undertaken that systematically evaluate the development of effective practice cultures. METHOD The study intervention is that of emancipatory practice development with an integrated evaluation approach based on Realistic Evaluation. The aim of Realistic Evaluation is to evaluate relationships between Context (setting), Mechanism (process characteristics) and Outcome (arising from the context-mechanism configuration). This first phase of the study focuses on uncovering the context (in particular the culture) of the Special Care Nursery in order to evaluate the emancipatory practice development processes and outcomes. Data collection methods included survey, participant observation and interview. Cognitive mapping, constant comparative method and coding were used to analyse the data. Findings. Four key categories were identified: Teamwork, Learning in Practice, Inevitability of Change and Family-Centred Care and collectively these formed a central category of Core Values and Beliefs. A number of themes were identified in each category, and reflected tensions that existed between differing values and beliefs within the culture of the unit. CONCLUSION Understanding values and beliefs is an important part of understanding a workplace culture. Whilst survey methods are capable of outlining espoused workplace characteristics, observation of staff interactions and perceptions gives an understanding of culture as a living entity manifested through interpersonal relationships. Attempts at changing workplace cultures should start from the clarification of values held among staff in that culture.
Managing Supply and Demand of Bandwidth in Peer-to-Peer Communities

On today's Internet, millions of people participate in peer-to-peer communities where they share content such as audio and video files. Contrary to websites such as Youtube, which rely on large and expensive computer servers to store and deliver all of their content, peer-to-peer communities rely on storage and delivery by the PCs of the users themselves. Because of this, a peer-to-peer community can only be successful if there are enough users willing to provide content and bandwidth to others, enabling a balance between supply and demand. This thesis provides practical and theoretical insight into the characteristics of supply and demand in peer-to-peer communities. It contains an analysis of the mechanisms at various layers of the peer-to-peer spectrum from the protocol level to the community level, as well as the design of a new incentive mechanism called BarterCast. Equipped with BarterCast, a user's peer-to-peer software can create an opinion of the past behavior of unknown identities by relying on information that has been 'gossiped' around, just like our sense of reputation in real life.
Sources on the anterior and posterior banks of the central sulcus identified from magnetic somatosensory evoked responses using Multi‐Start Spatio‐Temporal localization

A Multi‐Start Spatio‐Temporal (MSST) multidipole localization algorithm was used to study sources on the anterior and posterior banks of the central sulcus localized from early somatosensory magnetoencephalography (MEG) responses. Electrical stimulation was applied to the right and left median nerves of 8 normal subjects. Two sources, one on the anterior and one on the posterior bank of the central sulcus, were localized from 16 data sets (8 subjects, 2 hemispheres). Compared with the more traditional practice of single‐dipole fits to peak latencies, MSST provided more reliable source locations. The temporal dynamics of the anterior and posterior central sulcus sources, obtained using MSST, showed considerable temporal overlap. In some cases, the two sources appeared synchronous. On the other hand, in the traditional single‐dipole peak‐latency fit approach, there is no time course other than a focal dipole moment activated only at the selected peak latency. The same group of subjects also performed a motor task involving index‐finger lifting; the anterior central sulcus source obtained from electrical median nerve stimulation localized to the same or similar region in the primary motor area identified from the finger‐lift task. The physiological significance of the anterior central sulcus source is discussed. The findings suggest that one can test the integrity of cortical tissue in the region of primary motor cortex using electrical somatosensory stimulation. Hum. Brain Mapping 11:59–76, 2000. © 2000 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Retinex theory-based shadow detection and removal in single outdoor image

Purpose – Shadows, the common phenomena in most outdoor scenes, bring many problems in practical image processing. Shadow detection and removal, especial in uncalibrated outdoor image, is still a difficult problem. The purpose of this paper is to detect and to remove shadows in single outdoor image based on retinex theory.Design/methodology/approach – The shadow extraction algorithm originates from a simple idea that the human‐vision‐based retinex has the natural ability to enhance the shadow regions of an image no matter it is penumbrae or umbrae. Shadows are detected by comparing the retinex‐enhanced images with original images in the paper. The shadow removal algorithm in the paper deals with the shadow regions and non‐shadow regions in the images separately using the retinex enhancement algorithm. Through adding smooth light forcibly to shadow edges and introducing shadow edge masks, the authors reduce the effects of shadow edges in shadow removal processing.Findings – Some real single outdoor images .
Responses of dairy cows to additions of distillers dried grains with solubles in alfalfa-based diets.

Twenty-four Holstein cows in wk 3 through 12 of lactation were used to evaluate distillers dried grains with solubles as a protein source for alfalfa-based diets. Diets were formulated containing 0, 10.1, 20.8, or 31.5% distillers dried grains with solubles. Crude protein in these diets was 13.9, 16.0, 18.1, and 20.3%. Milk yield increased linearly with increasing dietary CP, whereas DMI was not affected. Dry matter intake averaged over 4% of BW for all treatments. Intake of undegraded intake protein was . 93, 1.27, 1.63, and 1.97 kg/d. Yields of milk protein, casein, and lactose all increased linearly with increasing dietary CP. The proportion of milk N as whey N decreased, whereas N as NPN increased, with increasing dietary CP. Plasma urea N and essential and branched-chain AA increased linearly, and nonessential AA decreased linearly, with increasing dietary CP. Increasing the concentration of CP in the diet from 13.9 to 18.1% by the addition of distillers dried grains with solubles was beneficial to cows fed alfalfa-based diets in early lactation. Little additional benefit was observed by feeding greater than 18.1% dietary CP.
The chairman's statements and annual reports: Are they reporting the same company performance to investors?

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the chairman's statements of the top 50 and bottom 50 companies listed on the JSE ranked by percentage change in profit before taxation. The research examines whether companies with improving and declining performance report good and bad news in different ways. The findings are in line with expectations and both groups of companies show a preference to emphasise the positive aspects of their performance. Furthermore, both groups prefer to take credit for good news themselves, while blaming the external environment for bad news. Managers use accounting narratives in a self-serving manner, rather than reporting performance objectively. The research in this paper has implications for the current state of financial reporting whereby auditors do not formally audit but instead review the chairman's statement to ascertain its consistency with the financial statements.
Comparing four technologies for measuring postural micromovements during monitor engagement

Objective metrics of engagement are valuable for estimating user experience or progression through interactional narratives. Postural micromovements of seated individuals during computer engagement have been previously measured with magnetic field sensors and chair-mounted force matrix detection mats. Here we compare readings from a head-mounted accelerometer, single camera sagittal motion tracking, and force distribution changes using floor-mounted force plates against a Vicon 8-camera motion capture system. Measurements were recorded on five participants who were watching or interacting with a computer monitor. Our results show that sagittal and coronal plane measurements for Vicon, the accelerometer and the single camera produced nearly identical data, were precisely synchronized in time, and in many cases proportional in amplitude. None of the systems tested were able to match the Vicon's measurement of yaw.
Bedarfsgesteuerte Bildübertragung mit Regions of Interest und Levels of Detail für mobile Umgebungen

Mit der zunehmenden Verbreitung portabler Rechner und GSM-basierter Datenfunkeinrichtungen erlangt die Ubertragung und Darstellung von Rasterbildern auch in mobilen Umgebungen eine wachsende Bedeutung. In solchen Umgebungen stellen geringe Ubertragungsbandbreite und eingeschrankte Displayflache begrenzende Faktoren fur den Transfer und die Anzeige groser Bilder dar. In dieser Arbeit wurde ein formales Modell der bedarfsgesteuerten Bildubertragung entwickelt, das es erlaubt, vor und wahrend der Ubertragung fur wahlbare Regionen im Bild (so genannte Regions of Interest - Rol) die benotigte Detaillierungsstufe (Level of Detail - LoD) festzulegen und redundanzfrei eine Verfeinerung von Bereichen bereits ubertragender Bilder vorzunehmen. Auf der Grundlage des Modells wurde ein waveletbasiertes Kodierungs- und Ubertragungsverfahren realisiert, bei dem ein neuartiges Wavelet-Zerlegungsschema zum Einsatz kommt. Es werden verschiedene Anwendungen der bedarfsgesteuerten Bildubertragung exemplarisch vorgestellt. Neben Systemen zur Unterstutzung der Benutzerrollen Bildautor und Bildbetrachter wurde die neue Fokus-und-Kontext-Technik RECHTECKIGER FISHEYE-VIEW zur kombinierten Ubertragung und Anzeige groser Bilder entwickelt, die Bildschirmflache und Netzbandbreite effzient ausnutzt. Fur die spezielle Bildklasse Farbtabellenbilder wurde ein Kodierungsverfahren entworfen und umgesetzt, das sich durch eine progressive Verfeinerung der Farbtiefe auszeichnet. Es ermoglicht dadurch im Vergleich zu den Standardverfahren interlaced PNG und interlaced GIF eine fruhere Erkennbarkeit feiner Details im Ubertragungsverlauf und erzielt trotzdem uberlegene bzw. gleichwertige Kompressionsraten.
Text sentiment computation for online forums hotspot detection

The user generated content on the web grows rapidly in this emergent information age. The tremendous growth of content available in forums, blogs, news reports, etc., are having large volume of public opinion information, it is essential to analyse in time and understands the trends of their opinion correctly. The evolutionary changes in technology make use of such information to capture only the user's essence and finally the useful information are exposed to information seekers. Most of the existing research on text information processing, focus on the factual domain rather than the opinion domain. In this paper, we detect online hotspot forums by computing sentiment analysis for text data available in each forum. This approach analyses the forum text data and computes value for each word of text. The proposed approach combines K-means clustering and support vector machine with PSO SVM-PSO classification algorithm that can be used to group the forums into two clusters forming hotspot forums and non-hotspot forums within the current time span. The proposed system accuracy is compared with the other classification algorithms such as Naive Bayes, decision tree and SVM. The experiment helps to identify that K-means and SVM-PSO together achieve highly consistent results.
Factors affecting patient adherence to DOTS in urban Kathmandu, Nepal.

SETTING The urban area of Kathmandu has a population of one million, with an annual risk of tuberculosis (TB) infection of 4%. It is estimated that up to 200 people default from treatment in Kathmandu annually, giving a defaulter rate of 10%. OBJECTIVES To identify the socio-demographic factors, availability and accessibility of DOTS services and behavioural factors affecting patient adherence to DOTS. METHODS Structured questionnaire of a random sample of 234 new smear-positive TB patients enrolled on treatment. Analysis of socio-demographic, psychosocial factors and availability and accessibility of DOTS services. Sub-analysis of non-adherent (missed >7 consecutive treatment days) vs. adherent patients. RESULTS Reasons given by non-adherent patients included 61% who claimed insufficient knowledge about the need to take daily treatment, especially after they felt better. Directly observed treatment, younger age, knowledge of TB and availability of daily health education were associated with increased adherence. Daily health education and knowledge of TB and its treatment were independently associated with adherence on multivariate analysis (OR 6.27, 95%CI 2.88-13.64, P < 0.001). CONCLUSION Daily health education delivered at DOTS centres is strongly associated with improved adherence. Adherence throughout treatment needs emphasis.
Bispectrum analysis of visually evoked potentials

This article presents results obtained from single-set analysis, and an increase in the SNR is derived and demonstrated by real data. In addition, some aspects of practical signal analysis and detection are discussed. It is concluded that, being a relatively simple method for analyzing biosignals, the bispectrum turns out to be very efficient for the detection of phase-coupled harmonics in background noise. The results obtained so far for steady-state visually evoked potentials suggest that there are nonlinearities of at least seventh order in the conduction and processing of the stimuli. Therefore, future research will be carried out to detect this phenomenon. A necessary condition for using conventional detectors is the whiteness of noise. Since higher-order spectra are used in the analysis of biosignals, an appropriate prewhitening algorithm for higher-order moments needs to be developed.
Asset Prices, Financial Fragility, and Central Banking

The paper reviews the current literature on the subject in both the New Consensus and the Post Keynesian framework. It shows that both approaches give to central banks a wrong goal (inflation, distribution, curbing speculation, etc.) and a wrong instrument (interest rate rule). The paper claims that central banks should focus their attention on maintaining financial stability and leave other problems to public institutions better suited for this task. In doing so they should develop new tools of intervention and leave policy interest rates unchanged, close to or at zero percent. Central banks have been created to deal with financial matters (government finance and financial stability) and should stick to this. Central banks, then, have a large amount of improvements to make, both as reformers and as guides for the financial community. Their main instrument should be an analysis of the financial fragility of the financial system and of the different economic sectors. In this context, it is shown that the notion of ObubbleO does not matter for policy purposes, and that the current regulatory system lacks an institution that is able to deal effectively with solvency crisis.
Issues in building mobile-aware applications with the Rover Toolkit

To excel under the harsh conditions of a mobile computing environment, applications must be designed to be aware of and take an active part in mitigating those conditions. The Rover Mobile Application Toolkit supports a set of programming and communication abstractions that enable mobile-aware applications to cooperate actively with the user and the underlying Rover runtime system to achieve increased availability, concurrency, resource allocation efficiency, fault tolerance, consistency, and adaptation. Analysis and experimental evaluation of a calendar tool redesigned to be mobile-aware demonstrate that such application-level control allows correct operation, increases interactive performance by up to a factor of 1000, and dramatically reduces network utilization, under intermittently connected conditions. Thesis Supervisor: M. Frans Kaashoek Title: Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering
Diffusion-weighted imaging of the spine with a non-carr-purcell-meiboom-gill single-shot fast spin-echo sequence: initial experience.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE To prospectively evaluate the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvement in diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) of the spine with the use of a newly developed non-Carr-Purcell-Meiboom-Gill (non-CPMG) single-shot fast spin-echo (SS-FSE) sequence and its effect on apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) measurements. MATERIALS AND METHODS Twenty-four patients were enrolled after written informed consent. DWI of the spine was obtained with an echo-planar imaging (EPI)-based sequence followed by a non-CPMG SS-FSE technique. SNR and ADC values were measured over a lesion-free vertebral corpus. A quality score was assigned for each set of images to assess the image quality. When a spinal lesion was present, contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) and ADC were also measured. Student t tests were used for statistical analysis. RESULTS Mean SNR values were 5.83 +/- 2.2 and 11.68 +/- 2.87 for EPI and non-CPMG SS-FSE DWI, respectively. SNR values measured in DWI using parallel imaging were found to be significantly higher (P < .01). Mean ADCs of the spine were 0.53 +/- 0.15 and 0.35 +/- 0.15 x 10(-3) mm(2)/s for EPI and non-CPMG SS-FSE DWI, respectively. Quality scores were found to be higher for the non-CPMG SS-FSE DWI technique (P < .05). Overall lesion CNR was found to be higher in DWI with non-CPMG SS-FSE. CONCLUSION The non-CPMG SS-FSE technique provides a significant improvement to current EPI-based DWI of the spine. A study including a larger number of patients is required to determine the use of this DWI sequence as a supplementary tool to conventional MR imaging for increasing diagnostic confidence in spinal pathologic conditions.
Combined X-ray and NMR Analysis of the Stability of the Cyclotide Cystine Knot Fold That Underpins Its Insecticidal Activity and Potential Use as a Drug Scaffold*

Cyclotides are a family of plant defense proteins that are highly resistant to adverse chemical, thermal, and enzymatic treatment. Here, we present the first crystal structure of a cyclotide, varv F, from the European field pansy, Viola arvensis, determined at a resolution of 1.8 Å. The solution state NMR structure was also determined and, combined with measurements of biophysical parameters for several cyclotides, provided an insight into the structural features that account for the remarkable stability of the cyclotide family. The x-ray data confirm the cystine knot topology and the circular backbone, and delineate a conserved network of hydrogen bonds that contribute to the stability of the cyclotide fold. The structural role of a highly conserved Glu residue that has been shown to regulate cyclotide function was also determined, verifying its involvement in a stabilizing hydrogen bond network. We also demonstrate that varv F binds to dodecylphosphocholine micelles, defining the binding orientation and showing that its structure remains unchanged upon binding, further demonstrating that the cyclotide fold is rigid. This study provides a biological insight into the mechanism by which cyclotides maintain their native activity in the unfavorable environment of predator insect guts. It also provides a structural basis for explaining how a cluster of residues important for bioactivity may be involved in self-association interactions in membranes. As well as being important for their bioactivity, the structural rigidity of cyclotides makes them very suitable as a stable template for peptide-based drug design.
Fast incremental updates for pipelined forwarding engines

Pipelined ASIC architectures are increasingly being used in forwarding engines for high speed IP routers. We explore optimization issues in the design of memory-efficient data structures that support fast incremental updates in such forwarding engines. Our solution aims to balance the memory utilization across the multiple pipeline stages. We also propose a series of optimizations that minimize the disruption to the forwarding process caused by route updates. These optimizations reduce the update overheads by a factor of 2-5 for a variety of different core routing tables and update traces.
Explorative Study of SQL Injection Attacks and Mechanisms to Secure Web Application Database- A Review

The increasing innovations in web development technologies direct the augmentation of user friendly web applications. With activities like - online banking, shopping, booking, trading etc. these applications have become an integral part of everyone’s daily routine. The profit driven online business industry has also acknowledged this growth because a thriving application provides the global platform to an organization. Database of web application is the most valuable asset which stores sensitive information of an individual and of an organization. SQLIA is the topmost threat as it targets the database on web application. It allows the attacker to gain control over the application ensuing financial fraud, leak of confidential data and even deleting the database. The exhaustive survey of SQL injection attacks presented in this paper is based on empirical analysis. This comprises the deployment of injection mechanism for each attack with respective types on various websites, dummy databases and web applications. The paramount security mechanism for web application database is also discussed to mitigate SQL injection attacks.