Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ROC-Boosting: A Feature Selection Method for Health Identification Using Tongue Image

Objective. To select significant Haar-like features extracted from tongue images for health identification. Materials and Methods. 1,322 tongue cases were included in this study. Health information and tongue images of each case were collected. Cases were classified into the following groups: group containing 148 cases diagnosed as health; group containing 332 cases diagnosed as ill based on health information, even though tongue image is normal; and group containing 842 cases diagnosed as ill. Haar-like features were extracted from tongue images. Then, we proposed a new boosting method in the ROC space for selecting significant features from the features extracted from these images. Results. A total of 27 features were obtained from groups A, B, and C. Seven features were selected from groups A and B, while 25 features were selected from groups A and C. Conclusions. The selected features in this study were mainly obtained from the root, top, and side areas of the tongue. This is consistent with the tongue partitions employed in traditional Chinese medicine. These results provide scientific evidence to TCM tongue diagnosis for health identification.
The scripting of male and female rape

– The purpose of this paper is to investigate how male and female rape is scripted. , – In total, 100 (50 male, 50 female) participants were asked to write down in their own words what they considered to be the typical rape when the victim was either an adult male or female. , – Results revealed that men's and women's rape scripts did not dramatically differ, though several differences were revealed between male and female rape scripting, focussing around the gender stereotypes of men verses women. , – Results are discussed in relation to gender role stereotyping and wider implications are considered.
Constraining Self-Interested Agents to Guarantee Pareto Optimality in Multiagent Coalition Formation Problem

In this article, we tackle the problem of coalition formation in hedonic games. In such context, agents have their own preferences over coalitions which they may join and could be endowed with different behavioral strategies in order to search for appropriate partners and better assess the proposals of the other agents. However when agents are self interested and free to decide which strategies they use, the system cannot expect them to form a coalition structure with specific properties. Our paper addresses such issue and studies the constraints that could be enforced on self-interested agents, in order to form coalitions which guarantee significant solution concepts. In this article, we focus on the Pareto optimality of the formed coalition structure. We develop our coalition formation model and propose a theoretical analysis of this model.
Development of Rapid Detection and Genetic Characterization of Salmonella in Poultry Breeder Feeds

Salmonella is a leading cause of foodborne illness in the United States, with poultry and poultry products being a primary source of infection to humans. Poultry may carry some Salmonella serovars without any signs or symptoms of disease and without causing any adverse effects to the health of the bird. Salmonella may be introduced to a flock by multiple environmental sources, but poultry feed is suspected to be a leading source. Detecting Salmonella in feed can be challenging because low levels of the bacteria may not be recovered using traditional culturing techniques. Numerous detection methodologies have been examined over the years for quantifying Salmonella in feeds and many have proven to be effective for Salmonella isolation and detection in a variety of feeds. However, given the potential need for increased detection sensitivity, molecular detection technologies may the best candidate for developing rapid sensitive methods for identifying small numbers of Salmonella in the background of large volumes of feed. Several studies have been done using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assays and commercial kits to detect Salmonella spp. in a wide variety of feed sources. In addition, DNA array technology has recently been utilized to track the dissemination of a specific Salmonella serotype in feed mills. This review will discuss the processing of feeds and potential points in the process that may introduce Salmonella contamination to the feed. Detection methods currently used and the need for advances in these methods also will be discussed. Finally, implementation of rapid detection for optimizing control methods to prevent and remove any Salmonella contamination of feeds will be considered.
Sympathy Biography and Sympathy Margin

Sympathy is an emotion guided by cultural "feeling rules" and by the structure of relationships. This article examines how sympathy flows between sympathizer and sympathizee in our society's "emotional economy. " Data from field observations, surveys, interviews, and content analyses show that sympathy margins exist as a right of group membership. The sizes of one's sympathy margins vary with, among a host of factors, one's sympathy biography or past adherence to sympathy etiquette. Rules of sympathy etiquette for sympathizees are the following: (1) do not make unwarranted claims to sympathy, (2) do not claim too much sympathy, (2a) do not accepts sympathy too readily, (3) claim and accept some sympathy to keep sympathy accounts open, and (4) repay sympathy with gratitude, with sympathy, or with both. Sympathizers are expected to enforce these rules; people who under-or overinvest are considered deviant sympathizers. Finally, sympathy processes may be used, consciously or unconsciously, for micropolitical ends.
Nosocomial Spread of a Staphylococcus hominis subsp. novobiosepticus Strain Causing Sepsis in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit

ABSTRACT From 2002 to 2003, 32 isolates of Staphylococcus hominis subsp. novobiosepticus (SHN) were recovered from 21 patients, 18 of whom were neonates, with 13 considered to have late-onset SHN sepsis. All isolates from neonates had an indistinguishable pulsed-field gel electrophoresis pattern. Our data support SHN as an important nosocomial pathogen in neonates.
A low-noise amplifier with continuously-tuned input matching frequency and output resonance frequency

This paper outlines the popular circuit tuning strategies reported for the implementation of reconfigurable low-noise amplifiers (LNAs). It presents a continuously-tuned LNA intended for multi-standard applications as well as enhancing the yield of conventional narrowband LNAs. The presented LNA is designed and implemented in a 0. 25μm silicon-on-sapphire (SOS) CMOS process. It uses MOS-varactors at the output to continuously tune its load resonance frequency and input matching frequency without the need of a tunable input network, achieving optimized power consumption and noise figure (NF). The post-layout simulations show that the designed LNA can be continuously tuned from 2.6 GHz to 3.5 GHz. Over this frequency range, an input IP3 of of -12 dB, gain of 17 dB and a NF of less than 2 dB have been achieved with 3.4 mW of power consumption at 1.8V.
Phagocytosis Is the Main CR3-Mediated Function Affected by the Lupus-Associated Variant of CD11b in Human Myeloid Cells

The CD11b/CD18 integrin (complement receptor 3, CR3) is a surface receptor on monocytes, neutrophils, macrophages and dendritic cells that plays a crucial role in several immunological processes including leukocyte extravasation and phagocytosis. The minor allele of a non-synonymous CR3 polymorphism (rs1143679, conversation of arginine to histidine at position 77: R77H) represents one of the strongest genetic risk factor in human systemic lupus erythematosus, with heterozygosity (77R/H) being the most common disease associated genotype. Homozygosity for the 77H allele has been reported to reduce adhesion and phagocytosis in human monocytes and monocyte-derived macrophages, respectively, without affecting surface expression of CD11b. Herein we comprehensively assessed the influence of R77H on different CR3-mediated activities in monocytes, neutrophils, macrophages and dendritic cells. R77H did not alter surface expression of CD11b including its active form in any of these cell types. Using two different iC3b-coated targets we found that the uptake by heterozygous 77R/H macrophages, monocytes and neutrophils was significantly reduced compared to 77R/R cells. Allele-specific transduced immortalized macrophage cell lines demonstrated that the minor allele, 77H, was responsible for the impaired phagocytosis. R77H did not affect neutrophil adhesion, neutrophil transmigration in vivo or Toll-like receptor 7/8-mediated cytokine release by monocytes or dendritic cells with or without CR3 pre-engagement by iC3b-coated targets. Our findings demonstrate that the reduction in CR3-mediated phagocytosis associated with the 77H CD11b variant is not macrophage-restricted but demonstrable in other CR3-expressing professional phagocytic cells. The association between 77H and susceptibility to systemic lupus erythematosus most likely relates to impaired waste disposal, a key component of lupus pathogenesis.
Reprinted from transplantation

In the last 15 years there have been numerous reports demonstrating that transplanted hepatocytes can retain hepatocellular functions (1), correct congenital enzyme deficiencies (24), and improve survival rates in animal models of acute hepatic failure (5-7). Recently, Moscioni et a1. (8) showed that human liver cells attached to collagen-coated microcarriers (9, 10) were able to correct metabolic defects following transplantation into mutant rat recipients that were genetically deficient in either bilirubin-uridine diphosphate glucuronosyltransferase activity or albumin synthesis. Interestingly, the intraperitoneally injected hepatocyte-microcarriers that were well vascularized were almost exclusively found on the surface of the pancreas. This apparent cellular tropism raises questions about the presence and mechanism of action of pancreas-derived hepatotrophic factors and their role in the maintenance of hepatocyte integrity (11-14). The aim of this study was to determine the effect of pancreatic islets on the survival of human hepatocytes in an ectopic site in nude mice. Human hepatocytes were obtained from segments of preserved cadaver donor livers that had been discarded during size reduction procedures before transplantation of the residual fragments to pediatric recipients. A modification of the automated procedure for isolation of human pancreatic islets (15) was used for the isolation of hepatocyte aggregates. After cannulation of its portal branch, the liver segment was perfused with 200 ml of a solution of 1 mg/ml collagenase (Boehringer-Mannheim, type P) in Hanks solution (28°C) and placed into a digestion chamber. Separation of hepatocellular clusters was accomplished by the same separation procedure used previously for isolation of human pancreatic islets (15). Between 80% and 95% of the harvested hepatocytes were viable, as assessed by trypan blue exclusion. Collagen-coated microcarriers (Cytodex 3, Pharmacia Fine Chemicals, Upsala, Sweden) were prepared as described by Demetriou et al. (9). Pancreatic islets were obtained from the
Layered Depth Inference from Flow in Underwater Imagery

Motion blur is a common phenomenon in the presence of camera shake or object motion. In this paper, we deal with the challenging situation of underwater imaging. Specifically, we assume a static camera looking vertically downwards at a scene but through a flowing water surface. The source of motion blur is due to the dynamic medium between the scene and the camera. Under reasonable assumptions, we establish that the motion blur induced by commonly observed uid flows can serve as a valuable cue for inferring the underlying depth layers of the scene. We validate our approach with synthetic and real examples.
The CoPaSul intonation model

A new data-driven and linguistically interpretable intonation model for the automatic analysis and synthesis of fundamental frequency contours is introduced: the CoPaSul model, which provides a contour-based (Co), parametric (Pa), and superpositional (Sul) intonation representation. Its application in F0 analysis and generation is described as well as its linguistic anchoring with respect to semantic weight and utterance finality.
MSF-MUD and BA-MUD receivers: principles and comparison

Microstatistic multi-user detection receiver (MSF-MUD) and blind adaptive multi-user receiver (BA-MUD) are two different minimum mean square error suboptimum receivers for code division multiple access (CDMA) transmission systems. The BA-MUD belongs to well-know receivers. On the other hand, the MSF-MUD has been described only in several papers. The properties of the MSF-MUD have not been yet compared with that of the BA-MUD. With regard to that fact, we would like to describe the basic structure of the MSF-MUD and BA-MUD and to compare their basic performance properties in this paper. Because the MSF-MUD properties have not been described extensively, we believe that this comparison is useful contribution to MUD theory
Dynamic capability through project portfolio management in service and manufacturing industries

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to summarise a recent doctoral thesis on the relationship between project portfolio management (PPM) and competitive advantage in service and manufacturing organisations.Design/methodology/approach – This two‐phase mixed method study comprises a quantitative questionnaire‐based survey and a qualitative multiple‐case study to address the “what” and the “how” of the research questions.Findings – This paper adopts a “dynamic capabilities” perspective, drawing on organisational learning theory to explain the path‐dependent nature of PPM capability development and how PPM capabilities work with the resource base to enhance competitive advantage. Findings support prior PPM studies and suggest a positive relationship between structured PPM capabilities and improved outcomes. The research compares service and manufacturing environments; future challenges are likely to result from the increasing blurring of the boundaries between service and manufacturing industries.Practical.
PANP - a New Method of Gene Detection on Oligonucleotide Expression Arrays

The method currently most used for probeset detection calls on Affymetrix GeneChipreg Human Genome Arrays is provided as part of the MAS5 software. The MAS method uses Wilcoxon statistics for determining presence-absence (MAS-P/A) calls. However, MAS-P/A is only usable with MAS5 processing, which requires the use of both perfect match (PM) and mismatch (MM) probe data in order to call the resulting probeset present or absent. A considerable amount of recent research has convincingly shown that using MM data in gene expression analysis may be problematic. The RMA method, which uses PM data only, is one method that has been developed in response to this. However, there is no publicly available method that works with PM-only expression data to establish presence or absence of genes from the probesets in microarray data. It seems desirable to decouple the method used to generate gene expression values from the method used to make gene detection calls. We have therefore developed a statistical method in R, called presence-absence calls with negative probesets (PANP) which uses sets of Affymetrix-reported probes with no known hybridization partners on two chip sets: HG-U133A and HG-U133 Plus 2.0. PANP allows the use of any Affymetrix microarray data preprocessing method to generate expression values, including PM-only methods as well as PM and MM methods. We present our results on PANP and its performance using the set of 28 HG-U133A chips from a published Affymetrix Latin squares spike-in dataset as well as an internal TaqMan-validated human tissue dataset on the HG-U133 Plus 2.0 chipsets. We And that using these datasets, PANP out-performs the MAS-PA method in several metrics of accuracy and precision using a variety of preprocessing methods: RMA, GCRMA, and even MAS5 itself. PANP out-performs MAS-P/A in probeset detection across a full range of concentrations, especially with low concentration transcripts. An R software package has been prepared for PANP and is available in R as part of the Bioconductor package release at http://www.bioconductor. org.
Slice Cultures as a Model to Study Neurovascular Coupling and Blood Brain Barrier In Vitro

Proper neuronal functioning depends on a strictly regulated interstitial environment and tight coupling of neuronal and metabolic activity involving adequate vascular responses. These functions take place at the blood brain barrier (BBB) composed of endothelial cells, basal lamina covered with pericytes, and the endfeet of perivascular astrocytes. In conventional in vitro models of the BBB, some of these components are missing. Here we describe a new model system for studying BBB and neurovascular coupling by using confocal microscopy and fluorescence staining protocols in organotypic hippocampal slice cultures. An elaborated network of vessels is retained in culture in spite of the absence of blood flow. Application of calcein-AM either from the interstitial or from the luminal side resulted in different staining patterns indicating the maintenance of a barrier. By contrast, the ethidium derivative MitoSox penetrated perivascular basal lamina and revealed free radical formation in contractile cells embracing the vessels, likely pericytes.
High-energy Ti:sapphire laser system at 1 kHz optimised for efficient frequency conversion

Over the past two decades significant progress was made in generation of high peak power ultrashort pulses utilizing the chirped pulse amplification (CPA) technique. Sub-30-fs pulses with more than 12 mJ energies at 1 kHz repetition rate were generated using Ti:sapphire CPA laser systems. We developed a high-energy Ti:sapphire CPA laser system delivering up to 12 mJ pulses with sub-100-fs duration and spectral bandwidth of 13 nm.
Facilitating data mining on a net-work of workstations

The computationally-intensive nature of many data mining algorithms and the size of the datasets involved has motivated efforts to use parallel computing to produce timely results. A particularly cost effective computing platform for such parallelizations is a network of workstations (NOW). However, there are many problems associated with efficient parallelizations on a NOW, including data transmission over a low bandwidth network, load-balancing, fault-tolerance, interactivity, programming complexity, etc. To address some of these problems, in this paper, we propose the programmable, distributed doall, a generic mechanism, similar to the doall primitive on SMPs, which schedules a set of independent tasks on a NOW. It allows incremental reporting of results, which is used to allow the user to monitor and, if necessary, interrupt the operation. Most importantly, it seeks to reduce communication bandwidth requirements by allowing specification of resource requirements of the tasks at the application programming level. This information is used by a “resource-aware” scheduler to reduce communication. We evaluate the performance of this mechanism using a template application that resembles, both in its computational and data access patterns, several common data mining applications. We also evaluate the primitive on clustering, a common data mining technique.
Semi-Online Algorithms for Computational Task Offloading with Communication Delay

We study the scheduling of computational tasks on one local processor and one remote processor with communication delay. This problem has important application in cloud computing. Although the communication time to transmit a task can be inferred from the known data size of the task and the transmission bandwidth, the processing time of the task is generally unknown until it is processed to completion. Given a set of independent tasks with unknown processing times, our objective is to minimize makespan. We study the problem under two scenarios: 1) the communication times of the tasks to the remote processor are smaller than their corresponding processing times on the remote processor, and 2) the communication times of the tasks to the remote processor are larger than their corresponding processing times on the remote processor. For the first scenario we propose the Semi-online Partitioning and Communication (SPaC) algorithm, and for the second scenario we propose the SPaC-Restart (SPaC-R) algorithm. Even though the offline version of this problem, with a priori known processing times, is NP-hard, we show that the proposed semi-online algorithms achieve $O(1)$ competitive ratios for their intended scenarios. We also provide competitive ratios for both algorithms for more general communication times. We use simulation to demonstrate that SPaC and SPaC-R outperform online list scheduling and performs comparably well with the best known offline heuristics.
Multiobjective Optimization of Inverse Problems Using a Vector Cross Entropy Method

To develop an effective vector cross entropy method, multiple probability density functions are introduced; measures to consider both the number of improvements in the objective functions and the amount of improvements in a specified objective function are proposed. An information sharing mechanism is also designed. To demonstrate and showcase the feasibility and advantage of the proposed algorithm, both high and low frequency inverse problems are solved and reported in this paper.
Reconstructing Prehistory: Scientific Method in Archaeology

Preface Introduction Part I: The Context and the Issues 1. Controversy Over Method in Theoretical Archaeology 2. Issues in Theory Building and Assessment 3. Testability Part II: The Philosophical and Methodological Roots 4. Induction 5. The Paradigmatic View of Science 6. The Refutationist View of Science 7. The Anarchic View of Science Part III: Individualism and Cognitive Archaeology 8. Holism, Individualism, and Empathy 9. Cognitive Archaeology Conclusion Bibliography Index
Terrain aided navigation for long-range AUVs using a new bathymetric contour matching method

Terrain aided navigation (TAN) is an effective technique to obtain a position estimate for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) when GPS signals are unavailable. To overcome the limitations on initial position errors and AUV trajectory, this paper presents a new bathymetric contour matching method on high-resolution maps. With the help of the single beam echo sounder or the multi-beam echo sounder, the proposed method is verified by seabed TAN. Extensive experiments with high-accuracy bathymetric data on both synthetic and real bathymetric maps show that the AUV position errors are almost proportional to the circular error probability (CEP) of the position. The research has practical significance in position initial alignment for long-range AUVs.
What induces watts in WAT?

ABSTRACT Excess calories stored in white adipose tissue (WAT) could be reduced either through the activation of brown adipose tissue (BAT) or the development of brown-like cells (“beige” or “brite”) in WAT, a process named “browning. ” Calorie dissipation in brown and beige adipocytes might rely on the induction of uncoupling protein 1 (UCP1), which is absent in white fat cells. Any increase in UCP1 is commonly considered as the trademark of energy expenditure. The intracellular events involved in the recruitment process of beige precursors were extensively studied lately, as were the effectors, hormones, cytokines, nutrients and drugs able to modulate the route of browning and theoretically affect fat mass in rodents and in humans. The aim of this review is to update the characterization of the extracellular effectors that induce UCP1 in WAT and potentially provoke calorie dissipation. The potential influence of metabolic cycling in energy expenditure is also questioned.