Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Restriction fragment length polymorphism typing of Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

Restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) typing of Mycobacterium tuberculosis is a recently developed technique which allows strains of tuberculosis to be differentiated with a high degree of confidence. The application of this technique has enabled the patterns of transmission of tuberculosis to be elucidated with far greater certainty than was previously possible. This review will discuss traditional methods of tracing the spread of tuberculosis, explain the technical principles behind RFLP typing, report on the literature validating its ability to differentiate strains of M tuberculosis, and describe studies which have used RFLP typing to increase understanding oftuberculosis transmission. Current limitations, future potentials, and implications for clinical and public health practice will be discussed.
Second-Order Patterns in Human Visual Cortex Orientation-Selective Adaptation to First- and

[PDF] [Full Text] , February 1, 2006; 95 (2): 591-592. J Neurophysiol Z. Kourtzi Adaptation to Firstand Second-Order Patterns in Human Visual Cortex" Textures of Natural Images in the Human Brain. Focus on "Orientation-Selective [PDF] [Full Text] [Abstract] , December 20, 2006; 26 (51): 13128-13142. J. Neurosci. J. Larsson and D. J. Heeger Two Retinotopic Visual Areas in Human Lateral Occipital Cortex [PDF] [Full Text] [Abstract] , February 1, 2007; 97 (2): 1319-1325. J Neurophysiol H. Ashida, A. Lingnau, M. B. Wall and A. T. Smith Motion fMRI Adaptation Reveals Separate Mechanisms for First-Order and Second-Order [PDF] [Full Text] [Abstract] , February 28, 2007; 27 (9): 2186-2195. J. Neurosci. L. Montaser-Kouhsari, M. S. Landy, D. J. Heeger and J. Larsson Orientation-Selective Adaptation to Illusory Contours in Human Visual Cortex
Glycemic control and the risk of multiple microvascular diabetic complications.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Tight glycemic control in type 2 diabetes reduces risk of certain end-organ complications. However, among patients with one complication already, it is unknown whether tight glycemic control reduces the risk of subsequent complications in another organ. We sought to determine if glycemic control is associated with the risk of a second, distinct, end-organ diabetic complication. METHODS Subjects were a retrospective cohort of 250 patients with type 2 diabetes, at least one microvascular diabetic complication, and at least one hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) measurement after that complication. Proportional hazard models estimated the relative hazard of developing another diabetic complication in a second organ system, as predicted by either (1) mean HbA1c level over the study period or (2) first HbA1c after the initial complication. RESULTS Thirty-eight patients had a second complication; the average follow-up duration was 3.7 years. The mean HbA1c model showed an adjusted relative hazard of 1.25 (95% confidence interval [CI]=1.04, 1.51) per percentage-point elevation in mean HbA1c. The first HbA1c model showed an adjusted relative hazard of 1.23 (95% CI=1.08, 1.40) per percentage-point elevation in first HbA1c. CONCLUSIONS Among these type 2 diabetes patients with an initial complication, tight glycemic control was associated with reduced risk of additional complications in other organs.
Motion Adaptive Orientation Adjustment of a Virtual Teacher to Support Physical Task Learning

Watching a real teacher in a real environment from a good distance and with a clear viewing angle has a significant effect on learning physical tasks. This applies to physical-task learning in a mixed-reality environment as well. Observing and imitating body motion is important for learning some physical tasks, including spatial collaborative work. When people learn a task with physical objects, they want to try and practice the task with the actual objects. They also want to keep the referential behavior model close to them at all times. Showing the virtual teacher by using mixed-reality technology can create such an environment, and thus has been researched in this study. It is known that a virtual teacher-model's position and orientation influence (a) the number of errors, and (b) the accomplishment time in physical-task learning using mixed-reality environments. This paper proposes an automatic adjustment method governing the virtual teacher's horizontal rotation angle, so that the learner can easily observe important body motions. The method divides the whole task motion into fixed duration segments, and seeks the most important moving part of the body in each segment, and then rotates the virtual teacher to show the most important part to the learner accordingly. To evaluate the method, a generic physical-task learning experiment was conducted. The method was revealed to be effective for motions that gradually reposition the most important moving part, such as in some manufacturing and cooking tasks. This study is therefore considered likely to enhance the transference of physical-task skills.
Toward understanding distributed blackhole placement

The monitoring of unused Internet address space has been shown to be an effective method for characterizing Internet threats including Internet worms and DDOS attacks. Because there are no legitimate hosts in an unused address block, traffic must be the result of misconfiguration, backscatter from spoofed source addresses, or scanning from worms and other probing. This paper extends previous work characterizing traffic seen at specific unused address blocks by examining differences observed between these blocks. While past research has attempted to extrapolate the results from a small number of blocks to represent global Internet traffic, we present evidence that distributed address blocks observe dramatically different traffic patterns. This work uses a network of blackhole sensors which are part of the Internet Motion Sensor (IMS) collection infrastructure. These sensors are deployed in networks belonging to service providers, large enterprises, and academic institutions representing a diverse sample of the IPv4 address space. We demonstrate differences in traffic observed along three dimensions: over all protocols and services, over a specific protocol and service, and over a particular worm signature. This evidence is then combined with additional experimentation to build a list of sensor properties providing plausible explanations for these differences. Using these properties, we conclude with recommendations for the understanding the implications of sensor placement.
Health promoting schools and their impact on the oral health of mentally disabled people in Brazil

SUMMARY Health promotion aims to ensure that the population has improved living and health conditions, and schools are appropriate environments in which to do this. The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of health promotion in terms of oral health in special schools for mentally disable pupils in Brazil. The study was cross-sectional and adopted a qualitative and quantitative approach, using triangulation methods to observe the reality. An epidemiological survey was performed in order to analyse the oral health status; a semi-structured questionnaire and participative observation were used for the qualitative analysis of the health promotion activities undertaken in the schools; case studies were carried out to evaluate the profile of oral health status in the context of the schools. The sample was comprised of 383 schoolchildren aged 2‐19, stratified among 7 schools, Curitiba/ Parana´/Brazil. The analysis was performed by means of frequency distribution and associations between variables, using the SPSS 16.0 program. The oral health status prevalences in the population studied were dental caries, 49.3%; bleeding gums, 23.8%; dental trauma, 11% and toothache in the last 3 months, 17,8%. Dental caries and bleeding gums experience was associated with the level of the mother’s education (p,0.00) and age group (p,0.00). Dental trauma and toothache in the last 3 months were associated with the level of the mother’s education (p,0.00 and p,0.00, respectively). Analysis of the dimensions of health promotion demonstrated that health is being promoted in all the schools studied. However, the analysis of oral health indicators per school revealed a possible interference of socio-demographic aspects in the results. It was concluded that the analysed special schools for the mentally disabled promote health. However, the socio-demographic profile of this population appears to have greater influence on vulnerability than the school context in relation to oral health status.
The formation of groups for regional flood frequency analysis

Abstract A new technique is developed for identifying groups for regional flood frequency analysis. The technique uses a clustering algorithm as a starting point for partitioning the collection of catchments. The groups formed using the clustering algorithm are subsequently revised to improve the regional characteristics based on three requirements that are defined for effective groups. The result is overlapping groups that can be used to estimate extreme flow quantiles for gauged or ungauged catchments. The technique is applied to a collection of catchments from India and the results indicate that regions with the desired characteristics can be identified using the technique. The use of the groups for estimating extreme flow quantiles is demonstrated for three example sites.
Communication & the transformation of society : a developing region's perspectives

Twenty Africanist scholars and practitioners have written twenty-three original chapters specifically for this text. The subject matter covers a wide array of issues ranging from philosophical-conceptual and methodological discussions to audience media patterns, as well as new directions for communication and national development. The engaging and provocative essays in this volume utilize case studies of selected African countries to survey audience media use patterns in these developing countries. Communication and the Transformation of Society serves as a standard text for international communication, communication and national development, and other related courses that deal with communication and change on the undergraduate and graduate levels.
A comparison of the grip force distribution in natural hands and in prosthetic hands

Purpose: The aim of this study is to analyse the grip force distribution for different prosthetic hand designs and the human hand fulfilling a functional task. Method: A cylindrical object is held with a power grasp and the contact forces are measured at 20 defined positions. The distributions of contact forces in standard electric prostheses, in a experimental prosthesis with an adaptive grasp, and in human hands as a reference are analysed and compared. Additionally, the joint torques are calculated and compared. Results: Contact forces of up to 24.7 N are applied by the middle and distal phalanges of the index finger, middle finger, and thumb of standard prosthetic hands, whereas forces of up to 3.8 N are measured for human hands. The maximum contact forces measured in a prosthetic hand with an adaptive grasp are 4.7 N. The joint torques of human hands and the adaptive prosthesis are comparable. Conclusions: The analysis of grip force distribution is proposed as an additional parameter to rate the performance of different prosthetic hand designs.
A Scalable Video Search Engine Based on Audio Content Indexing and Topic Segmentation

One important class of online videos is that of news broadcasts. Most news organisations provide near-immediate access to topical news broadcasts over the Internet, through RSS streams or podcasts. Until lately, technology has not made it possible for a user to automatically go to the smaller parts, within a longer broadcast, that might interest them. Recent advances in both speech recognition systems and natural language processing have led to a number of robust tools that allow us to provide users with quicker, more focussed access to relevant segments of one or more news broadcast videos. Here we present our new interface for browsing or searching news broadcasts (video/audio) that exploits these new language processing tools to (i) provide immediate access to topical passages within news broadcasts, (ii) browse news broadcasts by events as well as by people, places and organisations, (iii) perform cross lingual search of news broadcasts, (iv) search for news through a map interface, (v) browse news by trending topics, and (vi) see automatically-generated textual clues for news segments, before listening. Our publicly searchable demonstrator currently indexes daily broadcast news content from 50 sources in English, French, Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, Dutch and Russian.
Teachers' use of health curricula: implementation of growing healthy, project SMART, and the teenage health teaching modules.

This quasi-experimental study assessed impact of factors associated with classroom implementation of health curricula by North Carolina teachers. School representatives selected and implemented one of three tobacco prevention curricula--Project SMART, Growing Healthy, or the Teenage Health Teaching Modules--in either sixth or seventh grades. Prior to implementation, experimental teachers and administrators received extensive curricula training. Implementation data were collected through teacher completed checksheets and classroom observations for two time periods--initial implementation (n = 69) and maintained implementation (n = 136). While training was associated significantly with whether teachers implemented a curriculum (p < .05), other factors also were important. Variables outside of teachers' direct control, such as supportive administrators, context in which health instruction is taught, and turbulence, affected quantity and quality of curricular implementation.
A Knowledge-free Method for Capitalized Word Disambiguation

In this paper we present an approach to the disambiguation of capitalized words when they are used in the positions where capitalization is expected, such as the first word in a sentence or after a period, quotes, etc. Such words can act as proper names or can be just capitalized variants of common words. The main feature of our approach is that it uses a minimum of prebuilt resources and tires to dynamically infer the disambiguation clues from the entire document. The approach was thoroughly tested and achieved about 98.5% accuracy on unseen texts from The New York Times 1996 corpus.
Ultrafast Diffusion of a Fluorescent Cholesterol Analog in Compartmentalized Plasma Membranes

Cholesterol distribution and dynamics in the plasma membrane (PM) are poorly understood. The recent development of Bodipy488‐conjugated cholesterol molecule (Bdp‐Chol) allowed us to study cholesterol behavior in the PM, using single fluorescent‐molecule imaging. Surprisingly, in the intact PM, Bdp‐Chol diffused at the fastest rate ever found for any molecules in the PM, with a median diffusion coefficient (D) of 3.4 µm2/second, which was ∼10 times greater than that of non‐raft phospholipid molecules (0.33 µm2/second), despite Bdp‐Chol's probable association with raft domains. Furthermore, Bdp‐Chol exhibited no sign of entrapment in time scales longer than 0.5 milliseconds. In the blebbed PM, where actin filaments were largely depleted, Bdp‐Chol and Cy3‐conjugated dioleoylphosphatidylethanolamine (Cy3‐DOPE) diffused at comparable Ds (medians = 5.8 and 6.2 µm2/second, respectively), indicating that the actin‐based membrane skeleton reduces the D of Bdp‐Chol only by a factor of ∼2 from that in the blebbed PM, whereas it reduces the D of Cy3‐DOPE by a factor of ∼20. These results are consistent with the previously proposed model, in which the PM is compartmentalized by the actin‐based membrane‐skeleton fence and its associated transmembrane picket proteins for the macroscopic diffusion of all of the membrane molecules, and suggest that the probability of Bdp‐Chol passing through the compartment boundaries, once it enters the boundary, is ∼10× greater than that of Cy3‐DOPE. Since the compartment sizes are greater than those of the putative raft domains, we conclude that raft domains coexist with membrane‐skeleton‐induced compartments and are contained within them.
Noise equivalent circuit of a semiconductor laser diode

The noise equivalent circuit of a semiconductor laser diode is derived from the rate equations including Langevin noise sources. This equivalent circuit allows a straightforward calculation of the noise and modulation characteristics of a laser diode combined with electronic components. The intrinsic junction voltage noise spectrum and the light intensity fluctuation of a current driven laser diode are calculated as a function of bias current and frequency.
Temporal variability of stream macroinvertebrate abundance and biomass following pesticide disturbance

stuayinchtded3dtoughtyearsfollowedby2wetyeaft.Meantotal alhdame and biomass of macroix hence, assemblage structure had also recovered. In each stream, mean annual abwdawe and biomass of total 1 and of each FFG, aside from shredder abundance, differed signikmtly among years. However, assemblage structure, was generally similar among years. Among-year CVs were usually lower than within-year CVs because macroinvertebrate abundance and biomass fluctuated more during a year than it did from year to year, and difkent proces8es apparently contrii uted to the variation observed at these 2 time scales. For exampk juvenile development t&ne influenced within-year CV8, indicating that life-histciy &aracteristics affec&d temporal yariability of matroinvertebrate abundance and biomass. Ekamination of both the means and their variaxes was useful for determining thk extent of recovery and how macroinvertebrates responded to natural environmental variability. The detailed analysis of temporal dynamic8 at different time scales afforded by the CV supported our contention that F’T’S had recovered from the pesticide application relative to R! 3. Key umd& lone-term rec&ery, within-year variability, ‘among-y&r variability, coefficient of vari
Region adaptive PET gating using internal motion estimation

The purpose of this study was to assess the optimal gates number of each region using estimated internal motion. Internal motion has been demonstrated in lung and liver region of small animal by coated molecular sieve. We coated molecular sieve with Pluronic F-127 hydrogel for keeping the activity in the body. All PET studies were performed with a dedicated small animal PET scanner. Respiratory gating was operated the external trigger device synchronized with the list mode acquisition. The trigger signals were simultaneously reflected motion of heart and breathing. The list mode data were converted to sinogram gated 2∼16 bin. In PET image analysis for determining optimal gate number, count and SNR were measured from ROI in the target region. Horizontal and vertical FWHM were measured from line profile in each images. The motion compensation PET image for optimal gate number was confirmed by internal motion. The measured value of lung region showed high count (8.67), high SNR (3.25), and high FWHM (1.83) in 8 bin. In liver region, high count (2.09), high SNR (3.99), and high FWHM (2.23) were revealed in 9 bin. The artificial tumor evaluation study using molecular sieve is a method to assess accurately internal organ motion in the rodent. The gate number for motion correction should be set differently in accordance with the organ because motion level varies as each organ. The estimated internal motion will be a useful method for motion compensation modeling.
Index Pruning and Result Reranking: Effects on Ad-Hoc Retrieval and Named Page Finding

We describe experiments conducted for the TREC 2006 Terabyte track. Our experiments are centered around two concepts: Static index pruning (for increased retrieval eciency) and result reranking (for improved precision). We investigate their eect on retrieval eciency and eectiveness, paying special attention to the dierence between ad-hoc retrieval and named page nding. We show that index pruning and reranking based on relevance models can be benecial in an ad-hoc retrieval setting, but have a disastrous repercussion on the eectiv eness of named page nding. Result reranking based on anchor text, on the other hand, is very useful for named page nding, but should not be used for ad-hoc retrieval. This dichotomy poses a problem for search engines, as there is no easy way for a search engine to decide whether a given query represents an ad-hoc retrieval task, with the purpose to satisfy an abstract information need, or a named page nding task, targeting a specic document.
Tingenone, a Pentacyclic Triterpene, Induces Peripheral Antinociception Due to Opioidergic Activation

Abstract Plants belonging to the genus Maytenus are routinely used in folk medicine for the treatment of pain diseases. Our previous phytochemical study of the roots of Maytenus imbricata resulted in the isolation and characterization of tingenone, a pentacyclic triterpene. Natural triterpenoids are of growing interest because they have several biological activities, including analgesic properties. The present study assessed the involvement of the opiodergic pathway in the tingenone-induced antinociceptive effect against hyperalgesia induced by prostaglandin E2 (2 µg) in the peripheral pathway. We evaluated the effect of several antagonists to opioid receptors using the mouse paw pressure test. Tingenone administered into the right hind paw induced a local antinociceptive effect that was antagonized by naloxone, a nonselective antagonist to opioid receptors. Clocinnamox, naltrindole, and nor-binaltorphimine are selective antagonists to µ, δ, and κ receptors, respectively, which reverted the peripheral antinociception induced by tingenone. Bestatine acts as an inhibitor of aminopeptidase, an enzyme that degrades endogenous opioid peptides, and was shown to intensify the antinociceptive effect of tingenone. The results suggest that the opioidergic system participates in the peripheral antinociception induced by tingenone.
Principles of System Identification: Theory and Practice [Bookshelf]

The book is up-to-date in the field of system identification. It contains a large amount of code and references to the Matlab System Identification Toolbox. With the book being so thick, it may seem overwhelming to contemplate using it as a textbook for a single, introductory, one-semester course on system identification. However, in the preface, the author does provide some helpful suggestions on which sections to use for a beginner course and which to use for a more advanced course. Nevertheless, the book will serve as an excellent reference for students and instructors alike looking to learn about the field. I make this latter statement because what the author has bravely attempted to do with this book is to create a onestop resource for system identification. The focus of the book is on discrete-time, linear time invariant, open-loop identification. The structure of the book is hierarchical but also very accessible at different places, depending on the reader’s background. The book contains 26 chapters divided into five parts.