Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mechanosensitive N-Methyl-d-Aspartate Receptors Contribute to Sensory Activation in the Rat Renal Pelvis

The N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) subtype of the ionotropic glutamate receptor is found in the periphery. The present study tested whether NMDA receptors (NMDARs) are present in the ends of afferent renal nerves in the renal pelvis, an area concerned mainly with transmitting sensation and the to reflex regulation of body fluid. The main NMDAR subunit, NMDA&zgr;1, was found to be more abundant in the renal pelvis than the renal cortex and medulla, and was mainly colocalized with the pan-neuronal marker PGP9.5 or the sensory nerve marker, the neurokinin-1 receptor. However, NMDA&zgr;1 mRNA was undetectable, suggesting that it might be synthesized outside the renal pelvis. Intrarenal arterial administration of the specific ion channel blocker (+)-MK-801, but not the inactive enantiomer (−)-MK-801, decreased urine output and sodium excretion. High doses of (+)-MK-801 also caused regional vasoconstriction in the renal cortex, as determined by laser-Doppler flowmetry. Intrapelvic administration of the NMDAR ligand D-serine caused a dose-dependent increase in substance P (SP) release and afferent renal nerve activity, but had no effect on arterial pressure. The D-serine–induced sensory activation and SP release were abrogated by (+)-MK-801, the SP receptor blocker L-703,606, or dorsal rhizotomy. Increasing intrapelvic pressure resulted in an increase in afferent renal nerve activity and a diuretic/natriuretic response. Interestingly, these effects were attenuated by prior administration of (+)-MK-801. These results indicate that NMDAR-positive sensory nerves are present in the renal pelvis and contribute to the renorenal reflex control of body fluid.
Viewpoint Invariant Human Re-Identification in Camera Networks Using Pose Priors and Subject-Discriminative Features

Human re-identification across cameras with non-overlapping fields of view is one of the most important and difficult problems in video surveillance and analysis. However, current algorithms are likely to fail in real-world scenarios for several reasons. For example, surveillance cameras are typically mounted high above the ground plane, causing serious perspective changes. Also, most algorithms approach matching across images using the same descriptors, regardless of camera viewpoint or human pose. Here, we introduce a re-identification algorithm that addresses both problems. We build a model for human appearance as a function of pose, using training data gathered from a calibrated camera. We then apply this “pose prior” in online re-identification to make matching and identification more robust to viewpoint. We further integrate person-specific features learned over the course of tracking to improve the algorithm's performance. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm and compare it to several state-of-the-art algorithms, demonstrating superior performance on standard benchmarking datasets as well as a challenging new airport surveillance scenario.
Polymer Biodegradation and Biodegradable Polymers - a Review

Synthetic polymers are important in many branches of industry, for example in the packaging industry. However, they have an undesirable influence on the environment and cause problems with waste deposition and utilization. Thus, there is a tendency to substitute such polymers with polymers that undergo biodegradable processes. Increasing interest in applying polymers based on natural materials such as starch has been observed. This review describes biodegradation processes of xenobiotics such as aromatic compounds, plastics (PVA, polyesters, polyethylene, and nylon), and polymer blends (Starch/Polyethylene, Starch/Polyester, and Starch/PVA). Moreover, this review includes information about biodegradable polymers such as mixtures of synthetic polymers and substances that are easy digestible by microorganisms (chemically modified starch, starch-polymer composites, thermoplastic starch, and biodegradable packing materials), synthetic materials with groups susceptible to hydrolytic microbial attack (polycaprolactone), and biopolyesters (poly-β-hydroxyalkanoates). Production of this kind of material and introducing it to the market is important for the natural environmental. It may result in decreasing the volume of waste dumps.
Optimization of online data integration

Online data integration is a process of continuous consolidation of data transmitted over the wide area networks with data already stored at a central site of a multidatabase system. The continuity of the process requires activation of data integration procedure each time a new portion of data is received at a central site. Efficient implementation of online data integration needs a new system of elementary operations on the increments and/or decrements of data and the intermediate results of integration. This work shows how to derive a new system of elementary operations for online data integration from a system of base operations on the data containers. In particular, we define a new system of online operations based on the system of binary operations of relational algebra. The paper analyses the properties of the new system and describes the transformations of global data integration expressions into the collections of online data integration plans. It is presented how the system can be used for the comprehensive analysis and optimization of online data integration plans. The optimization techniques described in the paper include reduction of input data increments, identification and elimination of intermediate materializations, and reduction of fixed size arguments in online data integration plans
Committee machines and quadratic B-spline wavelet for the P300 speller paradigm

In this study we propose a new approach to analyze data from the P300 speller paradigm using the quadratic B-spline wavelet coefficients and committee machines technique. Data set II from the BCI competition 2005 were used. The data were decomposed into five-octave frequency bands. We used coefficients between 4-8 Hz (theta) and 0.5-4 Hz (delta) frequency ranges as features. Extracted features used as inputs into committee machines (CM) based on LDA, MLP and SVM. This algorithm achieved an accuracy of 94% in P300 detection. We used only 7 electrodes of 64 recorded electrodes, Therefore it can noticeably reduce the time and cost of EEG measurement.
Cognitive Mechanisms underlying visual perspective taking in typical and ASC children

Previous research has suggested that people with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) may have difficulty with visual perspective taking (VPT) but it is not clear how this relates to different strategies that can be used in perspective taking tasks. The current study examined VPT in 30 children with autism and 30 verbal mental age matched typical children, in comparison to mental rotation (MR) abilities and body representation abilities. Using a similar paradigm to Hamilton, Brindley, and Frith [2009] all children completed three tasks: a VPT task in which children decided what a toy on a table would look like from a different points of view; a MR task in which the child decided what a toy would look like after it had been rotated; and a body posture matching task, in which children matched pictures of a body shown from different viewpoints. Results showed that children with ASC performed better than the typically developing children on the MR task, and at a similar level on the VPT task and body matching task. Importantly, in the typical children VPT performance was predicted by performance on the body matching task, whereas in the ASC children VPT performance was predicted by MR ability. These findings suggest that differences in VPT in ASC may be explained by the use of a spatial rotation strategy rather than the embodied egocentric transformation strategy used by typical children. Autism Res 2015. © 2015 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Animal-Borne Anti-Poaching System

Wildlife poaching is a critical driver of biodiversity loss and population decline. Poaching is a particular threat to high value, large-bodied species, such as elephants, that are slow to reproduce. Increasingly, GPS tracking collars serve as a key tool for studying the behavior and monitoring wildlife globally, including application to anti-poaching efforts. However, collars provide indirect information on poaching, such as immobility, that is often not available in real time. In parallel to collar development, acoustic gunshot detection systems have proliferated in the military and law enforcement. Static systems in wildlife areas have been deployed for detecting poaching, but such systems do not scale geographically. This paper explores the idea of fusing GPS tracking collars with acoustic shockwave detectors to create an animal-borne anti-poaching sensor. A real-time alert of gunshots near elephant groups would enable rangers to respond immediately to such events. The two main technical challenges to such a system are battery life and detection accuracy. The paper presents a prototype designed for elephants that has great promise in addressing these significant technical challenges.
Characterizing Web Response Time

(ABSTRACT) It is critical to understand WWW latency in order to design better HTTP protocols. In this study we characterize Web response time and examine the effects of proxy caching, network bandwidth, traffic load, persistent connections for a page, and periodicity. Based on studies with four workloads, we show that at least a quarter of the total elapsed time is spent on establishing TCP connections with HTTP/1.0. The distributions of connection time and elapsed time can be modeled using Pearson, Weibul, or Log-logistic distributions. We also characterize the effect of a user's network bandwidth on response time. Average connection time from a client via a 33.6 K modem is two times longer than that from a client via switched Ethernet. We estimate the elapsed time savings from using persistent connections for a page to vary from about a quarter to a half. Response times display strong daily and weekly patterns. This study finds that a proxy caching server is sensitive to traffic loads. Contrary to the typical thought about Web proxy caching, this study also finds that a single stand-alone squid proxy cache does not always reduce response time for our workloads. Implications of these results to future versions of the HTTP protocol and to Web application design also are discussed. Acknowledgments I thank Professor Edward A. Fox, my advisor, for his advice, help and support during my thesis and throughout my graduate program in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. I also thank the members of my advisory committee Professor Marc Abrams and Professor Roger W. Enrich for their comments and suggestions. Help and suggestions from other members of the Network Research Group (NRG) at Virginia Tech including Ghaleb Abdulla and Tommy Johnson also are appreciated. Grants from IBM and the National Science Foundation (NCR-9627922) partially supported my graduate study. IBM donated the equipment used to collect the traffic log files, conduct experiments and analyze the data. Finally, many thanks go to Wen Wang, my wife and Andy Liu, my son for their understanding and support during the course of my graduate studies.
Considerations in the assessment of heart rate variability in biobehavioral research

Heart rate variability (HRV) refers to various methods of assessing the beat-to-beat variation in the heart over time, in order to draw inference on the outflow of the autonomic nervous system. Easy access to measuring HRV has led to a plethora of studies within emotion science and psychology assessing autonomic regulation, but significant caveats exist due to the complicated nature of HRV. Firstly, both breathing and blood pressure regulation have their own relationship to social, emotional, and cognitive experiments – if this is the case are we observing heart rate (HR) changes as a consequence of breathing changes? Secondly, experiments often have poor internal and external controls. In this review we highlight the interrelationships between HR and respiration, as well as presenting recommendations for researchers to use when collecting data for HRV assessment. Namely, we highlight the superior utility of within-subjects designs along with the importance of establishing an appropriate baseline and monitoring respiration.
Pro-Poor Tax Reforms, with an Application to Mexico

This paper proposes a methodology for testing for whether tax reforms are pro-poor. This is done by extending stochastic dominance techniques to help identify tax reforms that will necessarily be deemed absolutely or relatively pro-poor by a wide spectrum of poverty analysts. The statistical properties of the various estimators are also derived in order to make the method implementable using survey data. The methodology is used to assess the pro-poorness of possible reforms to Mexico’s indirect tax system. This leads to the identification of several possible pro-poor tax reforms in that country. It also shows how the pro-poorness of a tax reform depends on one’s conception of poverty as well as on the revenue and efficiency impact of the reform.
Towards Privacy-Preserving Data Trading for Web Browsing History

The trading of social media data has attracted wide research interests over years. Especially the trading for web browsing histories probably produces tremendous economic value for data consumers when being applied to targeted advertising. However, the disclosure of entire browsing histories, even in form of anonymous datasets poses a huge threat to user privacy. Although some existing solutions have investigated privacy-preserving outsourcing of social media data, unfortunately, they neglected the impact on the data consumer's utility. In this paper, we propose PEATSE, a new Privacy-prEserving dAta Trading framework for web browSing historiEs. It takes users' diverse privacy preferences and the utility of their web browsing histories into consideration. PEATSE perturbs users' detailed browsing times on released browsing records to protect user privacy, while balancing the privacy-utility tradeoff. Through real-data based experiments, our analysis and evaluation results demonstrate PEATSE indeed achieves user privacy protection, the data consumer's accuracy requirement, and truthfulness, individual rationality as well as budget balance.
A case for a Living Enterprise Architecture in a Private Bank

This paper presents a case for the development of an Enterprise Architecture (EA) in a private bank. Architectural Blueprints are generated on-the-fly based on information collected from information sources. Such blueprints are integrated in the bank ́s intranet and are the entry point not only for the technical documentation of the bank ́s IT, but also for a knowledge database supported by wikis that development teams can update and use to improve their effectiveness. So EA is a living asset used in the day to day work of the bank ́s IT teams. Currently, the bank is moving ahead further integrating EA with their Agile development process, by making sprints results (TO-BE states) also available in the EA for everyone. The EAMS tool supports such living EA, not only by supporting automatic generation of blueprints but also by providing a time travel bar allowing a seamless navigation between past, present and future states every blueprint.
The Influence of Incentives and Instructions on Behaviour in Driving Simulator Studies

There are a number of factors which may influence the validity of experimental studies, including the incentives offered and the instructions provided to participants. These have been little-studied in the driving domain. The aim of this study was to investigate how manipulating these factors influenced participants' feelings of 'presence' (i.e. the extent to which they believed they were actually driving and not in a simulated environment). The findings showed that imposing a penalty system for poor driving performance and providing 'good driving' instructions did not affect presence ratings and this can be explained by the inherent need to perform well under test conditions and the small range of performance variability expected in the driving scenario. Participants in the penalty and instructions conditions gave higher ratings for negative effects (related to physically feeling unwell), suggesting that these conditions made them more aware of the physical symptoms of being in a simulator.
Exploiting various implicit feedback for collaborative filtering

So far, many researchers have worked on recommender systems using users' implicit feedback, since it is difficult to collect explicit item preferences in most applications. Existing researches generally use a pseudo-rating matrix by adding up the number of item consumption; however, this naive approach may not capture user preferences correctly in that many other important user activities are ignored. In this paper, we show that users' diverse implicit feedbacks can be significantly used to improve recommendation accuracy. We classify various users' behaviors (e.g., search item, skip, add to playlist, etc.) into positive or negative feedback groups and construct more accurate pseudo-rating matrix. Our preliminary experimental result shows significant potential of our approach. Also, we bring out a question to the previous approaches, aggregating item usage count into ratings.
A Novel Approach to Estimate Gaze Direction in Eye Gaze HCI System

In order to realize head-free eye-gaze tracking human-computer interaction(HCI) system, a novel gaze direction estimation method is proposed in this paper. The point of gaze (PoG) is estimated by building up the geometric mapping relationship between the vector from the infrared light to the eye-gaze point and the vector from the purkinje spot to the pupil center in 3D space. To calculate the position of purkinje spot and pupil center in 3D space, user-dependent parameters, such as the radius of the cornea and the inter-pupillary distance, should be calibrated before using the eye-gaze tracking HCI system. Different from most monocular(2D) vision techniques simplifying the 3D eye-gaze tracking issue into 2D issue, the proposed method uses a single camera to estimate PoG on 2D plane by means of 3D spatial geometry mapping. Experiments on PoG estimation have been done and the results suggest the proposed method is feasible.
Ortorexia nervosa em estudantes de nutrição: associações com o estado nutricional, satisfação corporal e período cursado

Objective: To identify the prevalence of orthorexia nervosa (ON)’s risky behaviors and their association with nutritional status, body satisfaction and coursed period in nutrition students. Methods: The study included 141 students (mean age 21.5 ± 3.5 years). The risk behavior to ON was assessed by using the questionnaire to identify ON (ORTHO-15) and body satisfaction with the Body Shape Questionnaire. The classification of nutritional status was evaluated by BMI (kg.m). Association between variables was evaluated by chi-square test (p < 0.05). Results: Eating behaviors at risk for ON were identified in 87.2% of students. Students with ON had more body dissatisfaction (χ = 7.48; p = 0.005) and overweight (χ = 6.56; p = 0.010). No association was observed between the ON and coursed period. Conclusion: The results show that Nutrition students seem to be a population at a particular risk for ON, regardless
Switch-Level Test Generation of Competing Bridging Faults in the Presence of Feedback

This paper presents an efficient scheme to improve the test generation of voltage testing under the competing bridge fault model. A procedure is presented that extracts test generation objectives from switch-level networks, which will maximize the likelihood of detecting a bridging fault that is undetectable by a stuck-at test set. The effects of both active feedback and variations in transistor parameters are taken into account. The experimental results show that the proposed method generates a significant increase in fault coverage at a relatively low computational cost.
Biomarkers of Osteosarcoma, Chondrosarcoma, and Ewing Sarcoma

Osteosarcoma is the most frequent malignant bone neoplasm, followed by chondrosarcoma and Ewing sarcoma. The diagnosis of bone neoplasms is generally made through histological evaluation of a biopsy. Clinical and radiological features are also important in aiding diagnosis and to complete the staging of bone cancer. In addition to these, there are several non-specific serological or specific molecular markers for bone neoplasms. In bone tumors, molecular markers increase the accuracy of the diagnosis and assist in subtyping bone tumors. Here, we review these markers and discuss their role in the diagnosis and prognosis of the three most frequent malignant bone neoplasms, namely osteosarcoma, chondrosarcoma, and Ewing sarcoma.
BPMS para la gestión: una revisión sistemática de la literatura

El objetivo de este trabajo es realizar un análisis sistemático de la literatura para mostrar el estado del arte en la investigación sobre los Sistemas de Gestión de Procesos de Negocio (BPMS, por sus siglas en inglés). Los BPMS representan una tecnología que automatiza los procesos de negocio, conectando a usuarios con sus tareas. Para ello, se realizó una revisión sistemática de la literatura de los últimos diez años, utilizando trabajos científicos indexados en las principales bases de datos del área de conocimiento. Los trabajos generados por la búsqueda fueron posteriormente analizados y filtrados. Entre los hallazgos de este estudio destaca el interés académico y el carácter multidisciplinar de la materia, identificándose este tipo de estudio en distintas áreas de conocimiento. Este estudio sirve como punto de partida para futuras investigaciones en este ámbito que servirían para desarrollar una teoría más robusta y ampliar el interés del tema por su impacto económico en la gestión por procesos.
‘Moral foreign language effect – claims we have never made’ (response to commentary by Białek and Fugelsang, in press)

ABSTRACT The moral foreign language effect has been investigated with increased interest with both evidence for as well as against it being demonstrated. In a recent publication, Białek and Fugelsang (in press) critically evaluated our previous publication (Čavar and Tytus, 2017) aiming to establish boundaries of this effect. In the current reply, we address the criticism and encourage further investigation of this phenomenon with groups of participants who experienced the atrocities of war, accounting for factors, such as language proficiency, amount of language and culture exposure and/or degree of acculturation, which can mediate the degree of emotionality.
Robust Beamforming by Linear Programming

In this paper, a robust linear programming beamformer (RLPB) is proposed for non-Gaussian signals in the presence of steering vector uncertainties. Unlike most of the existing beamforming techniques based on the minimum variance criterion, the proposed RLPB minimizes the ℓ∞-norm of the output to exploit the non-Gaussianity. We make use of a new definition of the ℓp-norm (1 ≤ p ≤ ∞) of a complex-valued vector, which is based on the lp-modulus of complex numbers. To achieve robustness against steering vector mismatch, the proposed method constrains the ℓ∞-modulus of the response of any steering vector within a specified uncertainty set to exceed unity. The uncertainty set is modeled as a rhombus, which differs from the spherical or ellipsoidal uncertainty region widely adopted in the literature. The resulting optimization problem is cast as a linear programming and hence can be solved efficiently. The proposed RLPB is computationally simpler than its robust counterparts requiring solution to a second-order cone programming. We also address the issue of appropriately choosing the uncertainty region size. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed RLPB over several state-of-the-art robust beamformers and show that its performance can approach the optimal performance bounds.