Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Computational Methods for Intelligent Information Access

Currently, most approaches to retrieving textual materials from scientific databases depend on a lexical match between words in users’ requests and those in or assigned to documents in a database. Because of the tremendous diversity in the words people use to describe the same document, lexical methods are necessarily incomplete and imprecise. Using the singular value decomposition (SVD), one can take advantage of the implicit higher-order structure in the association of terms with documents by determining the SVD of large sparse term by document matrices. Terms and documents represented by 200-300 of the largest singular vectors are then matched against user queries. We call this retrieval method Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) because the subspace represents important associative relationships between terms and documents that are not evident in individual documents. LSI is a completely automatic yet intelligent indexing method, widely applicable, and a promising way to improve users’ access to many kinds of textual materials, or to documents and services for which textual descriptions are available. A survey of the computational requirements for managing LSI-encoded databases as well as current and future applications of LSI is presented.
Optogenetics as a neuromodulation tool in cognitive neuroscience

Optogenetics may be the answer to a search for temporal and spatial specificity in neuroscience. The well-known trade-off between temporal and spatial specificity might be resolved with this “combination of genetic and optical methods to achieve gain or loss of function of well-defined events in specific cells of living tissue” (Deisseroth, 2011). It is a technology that enables researchers to stimulate cells with light, thereby allowing for the direct control of behavior. Until now, this technique has been applied in animal research only but, as we argue, it holds promise for research in humans as well. The idea of using light to control cells is not a recent one. Already in 1979, Francis Crick anticipated the struggle of neuroscience to target individual cells in vivo without affecting others, and he suggested light as a tool to achieve that. Around that time it became clear that certain microorganisms possess proteins that respond to light. Oesterhelt and Stoeckenius (1971) discovered bacteriorhodopsin, an ion-pump that can be activated by light photons. Other members of this family were identified soon after, including halorhodopsin (Matsuno-Yagi and Mukohata, 1977) and channelrhodopsin (Nagel et al., 2002). In 2005, researchers at Karl Deisseroth's laboratory first demonstrated a single-component optogenetic system (Boyden et al., 2005), and in 2006 the term “optogenetics” was born. It is beyond the scope of this article to provide an exhaustive discussion of all discoveries that led to what optogenetics is today, or of all the impressive and sophisticated advances to improve the technique. Instead, we will restrict ourselves to briefly introducing the general concept of optogenetics and discussing its potential for cognitive neuroscience.
‘Some records manager will take care of it’ – Records management in the context of mobile work

Mobile work challenges organizational records management. This paper reports the results of a study in three case organizations on how the organizations’ records management meets and adapts to the increasing role of mobile work. Data was collected by interviewing mobile workers and record management professionals. Documentary materials were used to analyse official records management policies. The findings revealed that documented organizational policies do not take into account mobile work, and cannot effectively support personal or corporate records management in mobile work. Records management professionals were poorly informed of the extent of mobile work in the organization, and of the special problems related to managing records in mobile work. The overall conclusion is that organizations should pay more attention to the new requirements for records management caused by mobile work.
A Novel Method for the Recognition of Isolated Handwritten Arabic Characters

There are many difficulties facing a handwritten Arabic recognition system such as unlimited variation in human handwriting, similarities of distinct character shapes, interconnections of neighbouring characters and their position in the word. The typical Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems are based mainly on three stages, preprocessing, features extraction and recognition. This paper proposes new methods for handwritten Arabic character recognition which is based on novel preprocessing operations including different kinds of noise removal also different kind of features like structural, Statistical and Morphological features from the main body of the character and also from the secondary components. Evaluation of the accuracy of the selected features is made. The system was trained and tested by back propagation neural network with CENPRMI dataset. The proposed algorithm obtained promising results as it is able to recognize 88% of our test set accurately. In Comparable with other related works we find that our result is the highest among other published works.
Tag Recommendation based on User's Behavior in Collaborative Tagging Systems

Social bookmarking Web sites allow users submitting their resources and labeling them with arbitrary keywords, called tags, to create folksonomies. Tag recommendation is an important element of collaborative tagging systems which aims at providing relevant information to users by proposing a set of tags to each newly posted resource. In this paper, we focus on the task of tag recommendation when a user examines a document based on the user’s tagging behavior. We explore the use of this semantic relationship in modeling the user tagging behavior. The experiments are performed on the data set obtained from a social bookmarking site. Our experimental result show that our method is efficient in modeling users’ tagging behavior and it can be used to recommend tags for resources.
Synthesis of Pencil Beam Linear Antenna Arrays using Simple FFT / CF / GA Based Technique

Many applications such as satellite communications and radar systems where the antenna array weight and size are limiting factors favor compact antenna arrays. In this paper, a new approach for the synthesis of linear arrays featuring a minimum number of antenna elements is presented. The method is based on the combination between Fourier transform technique, curve fitting technique, and the genetic algorithm to derive the optimum element spacing and elements excitations required to synthesize a prescribed array factor. The effectiveness and simplicity of the proposed algorithm will be demonstrated by comparison with other analytical and optimization techniques. Index TermAntenna arrays, fast Fourier transform (FFT), curve fitting (CF), and genetic algorithm (GA).
A Java fork/join framework

This paper describes the design, implementation, and performance of a Java framework for supporting a style of parallel programming in which problems are solved by (recursively) splitting them into subtasks that are solved in parallel, waiting for them to complete, and then composing results. The general design is a variant of the work-stealing framework devised for Cilk. The main implementation techniques surround efficient construction and management of tasks queues and worker threads. The measured performance shows good parallel speedups for most programs, but also suggests possible improvements.
Analysis of the degree distribution

Each member of the group works independently from other members but is allowed to compare results with other members of the group. Each of the files contains the degree sequences from global syntactic dependency networks (undirected degree sequences, in-degree sequences or out-degree sequences from various languages). A degree sequence is sequence k1, . , ki, . , kN , where ki is the degree of the i-th node. Download your . tar.gz and uncompress it, e.g. using the command
There are non homotopic framed homotopies of long knots

AbstractLet M be the space of all, including singular, long knots in 3-space and for which a ﬁxed projection into the plane is an immersion.Let cl(Σ (1)iness ) be the closure of the union of all singular knots in Mwith exactly one ordinary double point and such that the two reso-lutions represent the same (non singular) knot type. We call Σ (1)iness the inessential walls and we call M ess = M \ cl(Σ (1)iness ) the essentialdiagram space.We construct a non trivial class in H 1 (M ess ;Z[A,A −1 ]) by anextension of the Kauﬀman bracket. This implies in particular thatthere are loops in M ess which consist of regular isotopies of knotstogether with crossing changings and which are not contractible inM ess (leading to the title of the paper). We conjecture that our construction gives rise to a new knot poly-nomial for knots of unknotting number one. 1 1 Introduction and results The study ofknot spaces consists mainly ofthe study ofspaces ofnonsingularknots (compare [2], [4], [10], [3]). In this paper we change the point of view:we construct a 1-cocycle for some space which includes singular knots too.
Stimulation of astrocyte fatty acid oxidation by thyroid hormone is protective against ischemic stroke-induced damage

We previously demonstrated that stimulation of astrocyte mitochondrial ATP production via P2Y1 receptor agonists was neuroprotective after cerebral ischemic stroke. Another mechanism that increases ATP production is fatty acid oxidation (FAO). We show that in primary human astrocytes, FAO and ATP production are stimulated by 3,3,5 triiodo-l-thyronine (T3). We tested whether T3-stimulated FAO enhances neuroprotection, and show that T3 increased astrocyte survival after either hydrogen peroxide exposure or oxygen glucose deprivation. T3-mediated ATP production and protection were both eliminated with etomoxir, an inhibitor of FAO. T3-mediated protection in vitro was also dependent on astrocytes expressing HADHA (hydroxyacyl-CoA dehydrogenase/3-ketoacyl-CoA thiolase/enoyl-CoA hydratase), which we previously showed was critical for T3-mediated FAO in fibroblasts. Consistent with previous reports, T3-treatment decreased stroke volumes in mice. While T3 decreased stroke volume in etomoxir-treated mice, T3 had no protective effect on stroke volume in HADHA +/− mice or in mice unable to upregulate astrocyte-specific energy production. In vivo, 95% of HADHA co-localize with glial-fibrillary acidic protein, suggesting the effect of HADHA is astrocyte mediated. These results suggest that astrocyte-FAO modulates lesion size and is required for T3-mediated neuroprotection post-stroke. To our knowledge, this is the first report of a neuroprotective role for FAO in the brain.
Mechanisms of corneal tissue cross-linking in response to treatment with topical riboflavin and long-wavelength ultraviolet radiation (UVA).

PURPOSE Treatment of de-epithelialized human corneas with riboflavin (RF) + long-wavelength ultraviolet light (UVA; RFUVA) increases corneal stroma tensile strength significantly. RFUVA treatment retards the progression of keratoconus, perhaps by cross-linking of collagen molecules, but exact molecular mechanisms remain unknown. Research described here tested possible chemical mechanisms of cross-linking. METHODS Corneas of rabbits and spiny dogfish sharks were de-epithelialized mechanically, subjected to various chemical pretreatments, exposed to RFUVA, and then subjected to destructive tensile stress measurements. Tensile strength was quantified with a digital force gauge to measure degree of tissue cross-linking. RESULTS For both rabbit and shark corneas, RFUVA treatment causes significant cross-linking by mechanism(s) that can be blocked by the presence of sodium azide. Conversely, such cross-linking is greatly enhanced in the presence of deuterium oxide (D(2)O), even when RF is present at only one tenth the currently used clinical concentrations. Blocking carbonyl groups preexisting in the stroma with 2,4-dinitrophenylhydrazide or hydroxylamine blocks essentially all corneal cross-linking. In contrast, blocking free amine groups preexisting in the stroma with acetic anhydride or ethyl acetimidate does not affect RFUVA corneal cross-linking. When both carbonyl groups are blocked and singlet oxygen is quenched, no RFUVA cross-linking occurs, indicating the absence of other cross-linking mechanisms. CONCLUSIONS RFUVA catalyzes cross-linking reactions that require production of singlet oxygen ((1)O(2)), whose half-life is extended by D(2)O. Carbonyl-based cross-linking reactions dominate in the corneal stroma, but other possible reaction schemes are proposed. The use of D(2)O as solution media for RF would enable concentration decreases or significant strength enhancement in treated corneas.
Health Outcomes for Children Born to Teen Mothers in Cape Town, South Africa

This article analyzes whether children born to teen mothers in Cape Town, South Africa, are disadvantaged in terms of their health outcomes because their mother is a teen. Exploiting the longitudinal nature of the Cape Area Panel Study, we assess whether observable differences between teen mothers and slightly older mothers can explain why firstborn children of teen mothers appear disadvantaged. Our balanced regressions indicate that observed characteristics cannot explain the full extent of the disadvantage of being born to a teen mother, with children born to teen mothers continuing to have significantly worse child health outcomes, especially among Coloured children. In particular, children born to teens are more likely to be underweight at birth and to be stunted, with the disadvantage for Coloured children four times that for African children.
The persistent challenge of foetal heart rate monitoring

Purpose of review To analyse the reasons why foetal heart rate (FHR) monitoring failed to fulfil the initial expectations of unequivocally decreasing perinatal morbidity and mortality, and to summarize the most recent advances in this field. Recent findings It is now clear that expectations towards FHR monitoring at the time of its introduction into clinical practice were unrealistic. Several pitfalls in FHR monitoring have been identified, and solutions established to avoid them. Correct use of FHR equipment and adequate tracing recording are as important as analysis and interpretation. New methods of computerized FHR analysis have been developed, and wide clinical validation of these is currently ongoing. More concrete guidelines on future research and development, as well as on regular training of healthcare professionals have been produced. Summary FHR monitoring needs to be used with realistic expectations. Acquisition, storage and analysis of tracings according to available guidelines need to be guaranteed. Integration of data with foetal blood sampling and foetal ECG analysis during labour, and with umbilical artery blood flow analysis or the biophysical profile in the antepartum period, may further improve clinical decisions. Central monitoring stations and computer analysis are becoming more widespread and are currently undergoing wide clinical evaluation. Research, development and training need to take into account recent guidelines outlining the main issues in these fields.
CYP 2 C 9-CYP 3 A 4 Protein-Protein Interactions : Role of the Hydrophobic N Terminus

Cytochromes P450 (P450s) interact with redox transfer proteins, including P450 reductase (CPR) and cytochrome b5 (b5), all being membrane-bound. In multiple in vitro systems, P450-P450 interactions also have been observed, resulting in alterations in enzymatic activity. The current work investigated the effects and mechanisms of interaction between CYP2C9 and CYP3A4 in a reconstituted system. CYP2C9-mediated metabolism of S-naproxen and S-flurbiprofen was inhibited up to 80% by coincubation with CYP3A4, although Km values were unchanged. Increasing CYP3A4 concentrations increased the degree of inhibition, whereas increasing CPR concentrations resulted in less inhibition. Addition of b5 only marginally affected the magnitude of inhibition. In contrast, CYP2C9 did not alter the CYP3A4-mediated metabolism of testosterone. The potential role of the hydrophobic N terminus on these interactions was assessed by incubating truncated CYP2C9 with full-length CYP3A4, and vice versa. In both cases, the inhibition was fully abolished, indicating an important role for hydrophobic forces in CYP2C9-CYP3A4 interactions. Finally, a CYP2C9/CYP3A4 heteromer complex was isolated by coimmunoprecipitation techniques, confirming the physical interaction of the proteins. These results show that the N-terminal membrane binding domains of CYP2C9 and CYP3A4 are involved in heteromer complex formation and that at least one consequence is a reduction in CYP2C9 ac-
Learning units for domain-independent out-of- vocabulary word modelling

This paper describes our recent work on detecting and recognizing out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words for robust speech recognition and understanding. To allow for OOV recognition within a word-based recognizer, the in-vocabulary (IV) word network is augmented with an OOV word model so that OOV words are considered simultaneously with IV words during recognition. We explore several configurations for the OOV model, the best of which utilizes a set of domain-independent, automatically derived, variable-length units. The units are created using an iterative bottom-up procedure where, at each iteration, the unit pairs with maximum mutual information are merged. When evaluating this method on a weather information domain, the false alarm rate of our baseline OOV model [1] is reduced by over 60%. For example, with an OOV detection rate of 70%, the OOV false alarm rate is reduced from 8.5% to 3.2%. At these settings the addition of the OOV model degrades the word error rate on IV data by only 0.3% absolute (3% relative).
CustomCut: On‐demand Extraction of Customized 3D Parts with 2D Sketches

Several applications in shape modeling and exploration require identification and extraction of a 3D shape part matching a 2D sketch. We present CustomCut, an on‐demand part extraction algorithm. Given a sketched query, CustomCut automatically retrieves partially matching shapes from a database, identifies the region optimally matching the query in each shape, and extracts this region to produce a customized part that can be used in various modeling applications. In contrast to earlier work on sketch‐based retrieval of predefined parts, our approach can extract arbitrary parts from input shapes and does not rely on a prior segmentation into semantic components. The method is based on a novel data structure for fast retrieval of partial matches: the randomized compound k‐NN graph built on multi‐view shape projections. We also employ a coarse‐to‐fine strategy to progressively refine part boundaries down to the level of individual faces. Experimental results indicate that our approach provides an intuitive and easy means to extract customized parts from a shape database, and significantly expands the design space for the user. We demonstrate several applications of our method to shape design and exploration.
Daily Patterns of Communication and Contact Between Italian Early Adolescents and Their Friends

The goal of the present study was to explore patterns of communication between adolescents and their friends across both "online" and "in-person" contexts. The participants were adolescents (n = 727) aged 11-16 years attending middle schools in urban and rural areas of Italy. Participants completed daily logs of their in-person and online contacts with friends for 20 consecutive school days. Girls reported more total contacts with their friends than did boys as well as friendships that were closer and more intimate. However, boys indicated more contact than girls via electronic communication and online. Contacts with peers in general were less frequent among the older participants, perhaps because of increasing academic demands. Participants who complemented in-person contact with friends with electronic contact were less lonely than their counterparts who were less versatile in accessing different modalities of making contact with friends.
Effects of Low-Level Deuterium Enrichment on Bacterial Growth

Using very precise (±0.05%) measurements of the growth parameters for bacteria E. coli grown on minimal media, we aimed to determine the lowest deuterium concentration at which the adverse effects that are prominent at higher enrichments start to become noticeable. Such a threshold was found at 0.5% D, a surprisingly high value, while the ultralow deuterium concentrations (≤0.25% D) showed signs of the opposite trend. Bacterial adaptation for 400 generations in isotopically different environment confirmed preference for ultralow (≤0.25% D) enrichment. This effect appears to be similar to those described in sporadic but multiple earlier reports. Possible explanations include hormesis and isotopic resonance phenomena, with the latter explanation being favored.
Direction-optimizing Breadth-First Search

Breadth-First Search is an important kernel used by many graph-processing applications. In many of these emerging applications of BFS, such as analyzing social networks, the input graphs are low-diameter and scale-free. We propose a hybrid approach that is advantageous for low-diameter graphs, which combines a conventional top-down algorithm along with a novel bottom-up algorithm. The bottom-up algorithm can dramatically reduce the number of edges examined, which in turn accelerates the search as a whole. On a multi-socket server, our hybrid approach demonstrates speedups of 3.3 -- 7.8 on a range of standard synthetic graphs and speedups of 2.4 -- 4.6 on graphs from real social networks when compared to a strong baseline. We also typically double the performance of prior leading shared memory (multicore and GPU) implementations.
The association between singing and/or playing a musical instrument and cognitive functions in older adults

ABSTRACT Objectives: Cognitive decline happens to everyone when aging, but to some more than others. Studies with children, adults, and professional musicians suggest that making music could be associated with better cognitive functioning. In older adults however, this association is less well investigated, which is therefore the aim of this study. Methods: In this cross-sectional study data from 1101 participants aged 64 and older from the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam were used. Multivariable linear regression analyses were performed to test the association between making music and cognitive functioning and time spent making music and cognitive functioning. ANCOVA analyses were performed to differentiate between participants who made no music, only sang, only played an instrument or both sang and played an instrument in terms of cognitive functioning. Results: Making music was significantly positively associated with letter fluency, learning and attention/short-term memory. Time spent making music yielded no significant results. The ANCOVA analyses showed higher scores for participants who only played an instrument compared to participants who made no music on learning, working memory and processing speed. For processing speed the instrument only group also had a higher score than participants who only sang. Discussion: Making music at least once every two weeks and especially playing a musical instrument, is associated with better attention, episodic memory and executive functions. The results suggest that making music might be a potential protective factor for cognitive decline; however, to support this notion a longitudinal study design is needed.