Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Longitudinal Study of Child Development in Children Enrolled in Brazilian Public Daycare Centers

A longitudinal research study was conducted that examined aspects of child development in children who were enrolled in public daycare centers in Brazil. The participants were 596 children (1-3 years old, n = 51; 2-4 years old, n = 545) who were enrolled in 198 public daycare centers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Communication, gross motor, fine motor, problem-solving, and personal-social domains were assessed using the Brazilian version of the Ages and Stages Questionnaire, 3rd edition, adapted for public child daycare centers. A Bayesian robust regression model was performed to check for gender and age differences and interactions. The findings indicated main effects of gender and age. Females had higher scores than males in the communication and personal-social domains. No interactions were found, suggesting the absence of moderation effects between age and gender. This study provides information about child development, especially in children who are enrolled in public daycare centers in Brazil.
LIGNUM: A Tree Model Based on Simple Structural Units

The model LIGNUM treats a tree as a collection of a large number of simple units which correspond to the organs of the tree. The model describes the three dimensional structure of the tree crown and defines the growth in terms of the metabolism taking place in these units. The activities of physiological processes can be explicitly related to the tree structures in which they are taking place. The time step is 1 year. The crown of the model tree consists of tree segments, branching points and buds. Each pair of tree segments is separated by a branching point. The buds produce new tree segments, branching points and buds. The tree segments contain wood, bark and foliage. A model tree consisting of simple elements translates conveniently to a list structure: the computer program implementing LIGNUM treats the tree as a collection of lists. The annual growth of the tree is driven by available photosynthetic products after respiration losses are accounted for. The photosynthetic rate of foliage depends on the amount of light. The amount of photosynthates allocated to the growth of new tree segments is controlled by the light conditions and the amount of foliage on the mother tree segment. In principle, the biomass relationships of the tree parts follow the pipe model hypothesis. The orientation of new tree segments results from the application of constant branching angles. LIGNUM has been parametrized for young Scots pine (Pinus sylaestris L.) trees. However, the model is generic; with a change of parameter values and minor modifications it can be applied to other species as well. # 1996 Annals of Botany Company
Distinct Features of Auditory Steady-State Responses as Compared to Transient Event-Related Potentials

Transient event-related potentials (ERPs) and steady-state responses (SSRs) have been popularly employed to investigate the function of the human brain, but their relationship still remains a matter of debate. Some researchers believed that SSRs could be explained by the linear summation of successive transient ERPs (superposition hypothesis), while others believed that SSRs were the result of the entrainment of a neural rhythm driven by the periodic repetition of a sensory stimulus (oscillatory entrainment hypothesis). In the present study, taking auditory modality as an example, we aimed to clarify the distinct features of SSRs, evoked by the 40-Hz and 60-Hz periodic auditory stimulation, as compared to transient ERPs, evoked by a single click. We observed that (1) SSRs were mainly generated by phase synchronization, while late latency responses (LLRs) in transient ERPs were mainly generated by power enhancement; (2) scalp topographies of LLRs in transient ERPs were markedly different from those of SSRs; (3) the powers of both 40-Hz and 60-Hz SSRs were significantly correlated, while they were not significantly correlated with the N1 power in transient ERPs; (4) whereas SSRs were dominantly modulated by stimulus intensity, middle latency responses (MLRs) were not significantly modulated by both stimulus intensity and subjective loudness judgment, and LLRs were significantly modulated by subjective loudness judgment even within the same stimulus intensity. All these findings indicated that high-frequency SSRs were different from both MLRs and LLRs in transient ERPs, thus supporting the possibility of oscillatory entrainment hypothesis to the generation of SSRs. Therefore, SSRs could be used to explore distinct neural responses as compared to transient ERPs, and help us reveal novel and reliable neural mechanisms of the human brain.
High-dose rifampicin kills persisters, shortens treatment duration, and reduces relapse rate in vitro and in vivo

Although high-dose rifampicin holds promise for improving tuberculosis control by potentially shortening treatment duration, these effects attributed to eradication of persistent bacteria are unclear. The presence of persistent Mycobacterium tuberculosis was examined using resuscitation promoting factors (RPFs) in both in vitro hypoxia and in vivo murine tuberculosis models before and after treatment with incremental doses of rifampicin. Pharmacokinetic parameters and dose-dependent profile of rifampicin in the murine model were determined. The Cornell mouse model was used to test efficacy of high-dose rifampicin in combination with isoniazid and pyrazinamide and to measure relapse rate. There were large numbers of RPF-dependent persisters in vitro and in vivo. Stationary phase cultures were tolerant to rifampicin while higher concentrations of rifampicin eradicated plate count positive but not RPF-dependent persistent bacteria. In murine infection model, incremental doses of rifampicin exhibited a dose-dependent eradication of RPF-dependent persisters. Increasing the dose of rifampicin significantly reduced the risk of antibiotic resistance emergence. In Cornell model, mice treated with high-dose rifampicin regimen resulted in faster visceral clearance; organs were M. tuberculosis free 8 weeks post-treatment compared to 14 weeks with standard-dose rifampicin regimen. Organ sterility, plate count and RPF-dependent persister negative, was achieved. There was no disease relapse compared to the standard dose regimen (87.5%). High-dose rifampicin therapy results in eradication of RPF-dependent persisters, allowing shorter treatment duration without disease relapse. Optimizing rifampicin to its maximal efficacy with acceptable side-effect profiles will provide valuable information in human studies and can potentially improve current tuberculosis chemotherapy.
Effect of retinoic acid in experimental diabetic nephropathy

Although the pathogenetic mechanism of diabetic nephropathy has not been elucidated, an inflammatory mechanism has been suggested to contribute to its progression. Monocyte chemoattractant peptide (MCP)-1 attracts macrophages and T cells, and ultimately injures renal tissue. In early diabetic nephropathy, urinary excretion of MCP-1 was elevated, and increased as renal damage became more severe. Podocytes are expected to have an inflammatory role in diabetic nephropathy, as the surface expression of chemokine receptors such as CCR and CXCR on these cells has been recently reported. Although retinoid (retinal), a known anti-inflammatory agent, has been reported to be beneficial in some experimental models of renal disease, it has not been determined to prevent disease progression in diabetic nephropathy. We investigated the effects of alltrans retinoic acid on the production of MCP-1 under high glucose conditions in cultured mouse podocytes. We also evaluated whether alltrans retinoic acid inhibits inflammatory changes and improves renal function during the early stages of diabetic nephropathy in streptozotocin-induced diabetic rats. In cultured podocytes, high glucose stimuli rapidly upregulated the MCP-1 mRNA transcript and protein release. Treatment with retinoic acid tended to suppress the MCP-1 gene transcript, and significantly inhibited MCP-1 protein synthesis induced by high glucose stimulation. Urinary protein excretion and the urinary albumin : creatinine ratio (ACR) were significantly higher in diabetic rats 4 weeks after the induction of diabetes mellitus compared with control rats, and retinoic acid treatment markedly decreased both proteinuria and urinary ACR (proteinuria: 1.25 ± 0.69 vs 0.78 ± 0.72 mg/mgCr, P = 0.056; urinary ACR: 0.47 ± 0.25 vs 0.21 ± 0.06 mg/mgCr, P = 0.088). Urinary excretion of MCP-1 was rapidly increased 2 days after induction of diabetes mellitus in diabetic rats, and further increased until rats were 4 weeks of age, compared with control rats. Retinoic acid treatment resulted in 30% reduction of the urinary level of MCP-1 compared with vehicletreated diabetic rats (119.3 ± 74.2 vs 78.1 ± 62.7 pg/mgCr, P = 0.078). Immunohistochemistry revealed a significant increase in staining for MCP-1 and anti-monocyte/macrophage (ED-1) protein in the diabetic kidney, and retinoic acid treatment significantly suppressed intrarenal MCP-1 and ED-1 protein synthesis. In conclusion, podocytes are involved in the inflammatory reaction under diabetic circumstances, and these reactions were suppressed by retinoic acid. Retinoic acid also suppressed inflammatory changes in the diabetic rat kidney, and decreased proteinuria in diabetic rats. These results suggest that retinoic acid may have renoprotective effects in the early stages of diabetic nephropathy through an anti-inflammatory activity.
A meta-analysis of threats to valid clinical inference in preclinical research of sunitinib

Poor study methodology leads to biased measurement of treatment effects in preclinical research. We used available sunitinib preclinical studies to evaluate relationships between study design and experimental tumor volume effect sizes. We identified published animal efficacy experiments where sunitinib monotherapy was tested for effects on tumor volume. Effect sizes were extracted alongside experimental design elements addressing threats to valid clinical inference. Reported use of practices to address internal validity threats was limited, with no experiments using blinded outcome assessment. Most malignancies were tested in one model only, raising concerns about external validity. We calculate a 45% overestimate of effect size across all malignancies due to potential publication bias. Pooled effect sizes for specific malignancies did not show apparent relationships with effect sizes in clinical trials, and we were unable to detect dose–response relationships. Design and reporting standards represent an opportunity for improving clinical inference. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.08351. 001
Early Front-End Innovation Decisions for Self-Organized Industrial Symbiosis Dynamics—A Case Study on Lignin Utilization

The emergence of self-organized industrial symbiosis (IS) is based on the expectations of industrial actors regarding financial and/or environmental benefits through symbiotic inter-company linkages. One such linkage is the exchange of by-products as substitutes for primary raw materials. However, the company generating the by-product may even not be aware of potential application fields in other industries. In cases where the by-product triggers an innovation, the very early phase of the innovation process (“early front-end”—EFE) is extremely important, as it is here that a first rough picture of future application fields must be defined. In contrast to traditional market innovations of industries, the EFE of IS innovations is triggered by the existence of a certain by-product. As conventional innovation models are not very helpful in supporting the EFE decisions in IS innovations, our paper aims to establish a link between self-organized IS and innovation by creating a specific theoretical framework for the support of EFE decisions. We thus introduce the “stage-gate model of self-organized IS innovations” and place a particular emphasis on the early phases within this model. Subsequently, we illustrate the application of the early phases of the model in a case study on lignin utilization in the Austrian paper and pulp industry (P&P industry). In this way, the study contributes to a better understanding of the peculiarities and conditions of EFE decisions in IS innovations and their significance in the emergence of self-organized IS networks.
Shadow Detection and Removal in Real Images: A Survey

Abstract. Shadow detection and removal in real scene images is always a challenging but yet intriguing problem. In contrast with the rapidly expanding and continuous interests on this area, the authors are unaware of any comprehensive surveys on this topic. This paper aimed to give a comprehensive and critical survey of current shadow detection and removal methods. Algorithms are categorized into there sets by their different functions and assumptions about the scenes. A discussion of reasonable evaluation is given at the end of this survey. 1 Introduction Shadows and shadings in images have long been disruptive to computer vision algorithms. They appear as surface features, when in fact they are caused by the interaction between light and objects. This may lead to problems in scene understanding, object segmentation, tracking, recognition, etc. Because of the undesirable effects of shadows on image analysis, much attention was paid to the area of shadow detection and removal over the past decades and covered many specific applications such as traffic surveillance [1, 2], face recognition [3, 4, 5] and image segmentation [6]. In spite of these extensive studies, more researches focus on providing a general method for arbitrary scene images and thereby obtaining “visually pleasing” shadow free images. In contrast with the rapidly expanding interests on shadow removal, no comprehensive survey is reported on this particular topic. A list of recent work on this area is reported in [7] but algorithm details are missed. A survey was conducted by A. Prati [8, 9] on the moving cast shadow detection, which is the part of current interests. This paper aims to give a relatively comprehensive study on the current methods of detecting and removing shadows in both still and moving images. Before going into the detailed algorithms, we first review some different kinds of shadows in natural scenes.
Musical Genre Tag Classification With Curated and Crowdsourced Datasets

Analyzing music audio files based on genres and other qualitative tags is an active field of research in machine learning. When paired with particular classification algorithms, most notably support vector machines (SVMs) and k-nearest-neighbor classifiers (KNNs), certain features, including Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs), Chroma attributes and other spectral properties, have been shown to be effective features for classifying music by genre. In this paper we apply these methods and features across two datasets (GTZAN and the Million Song Dataset) with four different tag sources (GTZAN, The Echo Nest, MusicBrainz, and Last.fm). Two of these tag sources are professionally curated (GTZAN and MusicBrainz) while the other two are crowdsourced—that is, unmonitored users create the tags for each track. Two of the datasets had features on a track-by-track basis (GTZAN and Last.fm) while the other two are classified by artist. By exploring the cross-validation balanced accuracy across these different datasets, we find that classifications are made significantly more accurately on curated tags in comparison to crowdsourced tags, but that tagging by artist as opposed to by song creates a considerably smaller difference in effect. We found, however, that crowdsourced tags can be effective when done in large enough quantites, as seen in the Last.fm dataset.
Hepatic arterial infusion using pirarubicin combined with systemic chemotherapy: a phase II study in patients with nonresectable liver metastases from colorectal cancer.

BACKGROUND A prospective phase II study was performed to determine the feasibility, efficacy and safety of arterial hepatic infusion (HAI) using pirarubicin combined with intravenous chemotherapy. PATIENTS AND METHODS From December 1991 to April 1994, 75 patients with unresectable colorectal metastases confined to the liver were included in this multicenter study to receive intra-arterial hepatic pirarubicin and a systemic monthly regimen of 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) and folinic acid. Sixty-four patients were analyzed in the intention-to-treat analysis and 61 in the per-protocol analysis. RESULTS Tolerance of this regimen was rather good; however, functional catheter problems were observed in 29 patients (45%) resulting in failure of HAI in 21 cases (33%) after a median of three cycles; vomiting grade 3 was present in 12.5% of patients, neutropenia grade 4 in 23% and alopecia grade 3 in 19%. The overall response rate was 31.9% in intention-to-treat analysis, and 39.3% in per-protocol analysis. Extrahepatic progression was reported in only 21.7% of patients. Time to hepatic progression and extra-hepatic progression was 8.3 and 15 months, respectively, in intention-to-treat analysis, and 11 and 18 months, respectively, in per-protocol analysis. Median survival was 19 and 20 months in intention-to-treat analysis and per-protocol, respectively. CONCLUSIONS In our study, the combination of intra-arterial pirarubicin and intravenous chemotherapy demonstrated some efficacy and good tolerance in the treatment of isolated colorectal liver metastases. This treatment seems to prevent extra-hepatic spread and prolong survival time. The results of this study have to be confirmed by new trials using more active systemic chemotherapy.
Involvement of AMP-activated protein kinase in TGF-β-stimulated VEGF synthesis in osteoblasts

It is generally recognized that AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) acts as a key regulator of energy homeostasis. We have previously shown that transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) stimulates synthesis of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) via p44/p42 mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase, stress-activated protein kinase/c-Jun N-terminal kinase (SAPK/JNK) and p38 MAP kinase in osteoblast-like MC3T3-E1 cells. In the present study, we investigated whether AMPK is involved in the TGF-β-stimulated VEGF synthesis in osteoblast-like MC3T3-E1 cells. TGF-β time-dependently induced the phosphorylation of the AMPK α-subunit (Thr172) and the AMPK β-subunit (Ser108). Compound C, an AMPK inhibitor, significantly reduced the TGF-β-stimulated VEGF release. The inhibitory effect of compound C was also observed in normal human osteoblasts (NHOst). Although compound C failed to affect the TGF-β-induced phosphorylation of SAPK/JNK, p38 MAP kinase or Smad2, it markedly suppressed the TGF-β-induced phosphorylation of both MEK1/2 and p44/p42 MAP kinase. In addition, compound C significantly suppressed the VEGF mRNA expression induced by TGF-β. Taken together, our results strongly suggest that AMPK is involved in TGF-β-stimulated VEGF synthesis, and that it functions at a point upstream of MEK1/2.
The Study and Implementation of Face Recognition and Tracking System

There's some very important meaning in the study of realtime face recognition and tracking system for the video monitoring and artifical vision. The current method is still very susceptible to the illumination condition, non-real time and very common to fail to track the target face especially when partly covered or moving fast. In this paper, we propose to use Boosted Cascade combined with skin model for face detection and then in order to recognize the candidate faces ,they will be analyzed by the hybrid Wavelet, PCA and SVM method. After that, Meanshift and Kalman filter will be invoked to track the face. The experimental results show that the algorithm has quite good performance in terms of real-time and accuracy. Keywords-component; face recognition; face tracking; PCA; meanshift; Kalman filter; svm; wavelet
Maximal Halos in High-Luminosity Spiral Galaxies

We test the halo dominated mass model, recently proposed for high-luminosity galaxies, against the rotation ve- locity data of a large sample of L L spirals. We find that this model does not reproduce the general kinematic properties required. The alternative disc dominated model, on the contrary, easily fits the data.
Iris Data Indexing Method Using Gabor Energy Features

Biometric features are extracted from a complex pattern and stored as high dimensional data. These data do not follow traditional sorting order like numerical and alphabetical data. Hence, a linear search method makes the identification process extremely slow as well as increases the false acceptance rate beyond an acceptable range. To address this problem, we propose an efficient indexing mechanism to retrieve iris biometric templates using Gabor energy features. The Gabor energy features are calculated from the preprocessed iris texture in different scales and orientations to generate a 12-dimensional index key for an iris template. An index space is created based on the values of index keys of all individuals. A candidate set is retrieved from the index space based on the values of query index key. Next, we rank the retrieved candidates according to their occurrences. If the identity of the query template is matched, then it is a hit, otherwise a miss. We have experimented our approach with Bath, CASIA-V3-Interval, CASIA-V4-Thousand, MMU2, and WVU iris databases. Our proposed approach gives 11.3%, 14.5%, 16.3%, 13.5%, and 10.3% penetration rates and 98.2%, 91.1%, 90.7%, 85.2%, and 96% hit rates for Bath, CASIA-V3-Interval, CASIA-V4-Thousand, MMU2, and WVU iris database, respectively, when we consider the retrieving templates up to the fifth rank. Experiments substantiate that our approach is capable of retrieving biometric data with a higher hit rate and lower penetration rate compared to the existing approaches. Application of Gabor energy features to index iris data proves to be effective for fast and accurate retrieval. With our proposed approach, it is possible to retrieve a set of iris templates similar to the query template in the order of milliseconds and is independent of sizes of databases.
The Architecture of a Debugger for Lazy Functional Languages

Debugging programs written in lazy functional languages is diicult, and there are currently no realistic, general purpose debugging tools available. The basic problem is that computations in general do not take place in the order one might expect. Furthermore, lazy functional languages arèdeclarative'. Hence it is advantageous if debugging takes place at the same, high level of abstraction. Thus, we propose to base debugging on what we call Evaluation Dependence Trees (EDT), which reeect the declarative semantics of the programs rather than operational concerns such as evaluation order. This in turn naturally suggests a two level debugger architecture where the lower level generates the EDT and the upper level allows the user to investigate it. The main advantage of this is exibility: components realizing the two levels may be chosen independently to suit the debugging problem at hand.