Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
EOG and Marker Recognition for Wearable User Interface

This paper presents an EOG (electrooculogram) sensing circuit and marker recognition for wearable user interface. The EOG sensor circuit which tracks the movement of eyes by sensing the potential difference across the eye is used as a pointing device. Objects to manipulate are represented with human readable markers. And the marker recognition system detects and recognizes markers from the camera image. By using the EOG sensor circuit and the marker recognition system, user can manipulate an object with only eye movement in the wearable computing environment.
Talking about, knowing about HIV/AIDS in Canada: a rural-urban comparison.

PURPOSE To explore information exchange about HIV/AIDS among people living in rural and urban communities and to assess the value of social capital theory, as well as demographic factors, in predicting community members' knowledge of HIV/AIDS and their likelihood of having talked about the disease. METHOD A random-digit dial telephone survey was conducted in 3 rural regions and matched urban communities in Canada during 2006 and 2007. A total of 1,919 respondents (response rate: 22.2%) answered questions about their knowledge of and attitudes toward HIV/AIDS, their social networks, whether they were personally acquainted with a person with HIV/AIDS (PHA), and whether they had ever talked to anyone about HIV/AIDS. FINDINGS Rurality was a significant predictor of HIV/AIDS knowledge and discussion. Even after controlling for factors such as age and level of education, respondents living in rural regions were less knowledgeable about HIV/AIDS and were less likely to have spoken with others about the disease. Social capital theory was not as strongly predictive as expected, although people with more bridging ties in their social networks were more likely to have discussed the disease, as were those who knew a PHA personally. CONCLUSION Rural-dwelling Canadians are less likely than their urban counterparts to be knowledgeable about HIV/AIDS or to talk about it, confirming reports by PHAs that rural communities tend to be silent about the disease. The findings support policy recommendations for HIV education programs in rural areas that encourage discussion about the disease and personal contact with PHAs.
GLUTAMATE AS THE NEUROTRANSMITTER OF CEREBELLAR GRANULE CELLS IN THE RAT: ELECTROPHYSIOLOGICAL EVIDENCE

1 Glutamate and the excitatory aminoacid antagonist, α‐aminoadipic acid (αAA), have been applied by microiontophoresis to Purkinje cells in the rat cerebellum. 2 Glutamate produced excitation of Purkinje cells and αAA selectively reduced that excitation without affecting responses to acetylcholine or hydrogen ions. 3 Monosynaptic spikes were evoked in Purkinje cells by stimulating the parallel fibres. αAA had little effect on these spikes when applied alone. 4 When the Purkinje cell excitability was reduced by the iontophoresis of γ‐aminobutyric acid, αAA then produced failure of the monosynaptic spike on 10 of 13 Purkinje cells, in doses shown to be selectively antagonistic towards aminoacids. 5 These results support neurochemical evidence that glutamic acid may be the neurotransmitter released by granule cell parallel fibres.
Users' acceptance behavior for m-commerce based on Customer Perceived Value and TAM

From the perspective of users, the current paper mainly studied users' acceptance behavior for mobile commerce based on Customer Perceived Value (CPV) and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). In this article the research model was established and the empirical analysis was carried out with the selected interviewers. Research found out that all the factors of CPV, except Perceived Ease of Use, have remarkable influence on users' behavior. Meanwhile the consumer innovativeness, the development and compatibility of m-commerce also have certain influence on users' acceptance.
Mosquito Saliva Increases Endothelial Permeability in the Skin, Immune Cell Migration, and Dengue Pathogenesis during Antibody-Dependent Enhancement

Dengue remains the most prevalent arthropod-borne viral disease in humans. While probing for blood vessels, Aedes aegypti and Ae. albopictus mosquitoes transmit the four serotypes of dengue virus (DENV1-4) by injecting virus-containing saliva into the skin. Even though arthropod saliva is known to facilitate transmission and modulate host responses to other pathogens, the full impact of mosquito saliva on dengue pathogenesis is still not well understood. Inoculating mice lacking the interferon-α/β receptor intradermally with DENV revealed that mosquito salivary gland extract (SGE) exacerbates dengue pathogenesis specifically in the presence of enhancing serotype-cross-reactive antibodies—when individuals already carry an increased risk for severe disease. We further establish that SGE increases viral titers in the skin, boosts antibody-enhanced DENV infection of dendritic cells and macrophages in the dermis, and amplifies dendritic cell migration to skin-draining lymph nodes. We demonstrate that SGE directly disrupts endothelial barrier function in vitro and induces endothelial permeability in vivo in the skin. Finally, we show that surgically removing the site of DENV transmission in the skin after 4 hours rescued mice from disease in the absence of SGE, but no longer prevented lethal antibody-enhanced disease when SGE was present. These results indicate that SGE accelerates the dynamics of dengue pathogenesis after virus transmission in the skin and induces severe antibody-enhanced disease systemically. Our study reveals novel aspects of dengue pathogenesis and suggests that animal models of dengue and pre-clinical testing of dengue vaccines should consider mosquito-derived factors as well as enhancing antibodies.
An Investigation into Usability Aspects of E-Commerce Websites Using Users' Preferences

We investigate the usability problems of e-commerce online shopping websites from user’s preferences and determine the relative importance of factors such as navigability, content, design, ease of use, and structure through user survey. The main intent of this ranking of web site characteristics is that a designer can relatively give higher efforts on designing features that may lead to higher merit and better usability. As such, our research work help us capture the data by involving user testing (usability testing) and open source automated tools such as Camtasia. Hence, the outcomes of the above approach show the navigation, content, design were the first, second, and third priority for evaluating the usability of e-commerce websites whereas ease of use and structure were the fourth and fifth features from the overall usability value calculation. There is a significant statistical difference between novice and expert users only for navigation feature. The maximum number of users feels satisfied with navigation, content, and design features whereas they are dissatisfied with ease of use and structural features of the websites.
Team and Noncooperative Solutions to Access Control with Priorities

We consider decentralized medium-access control in which many pairwise interactions occur between randomly selected users that belong to a large population. In each local interaction, the users involved compete over an access opportunity. A given user has a fixed number of access attempts and a fixed budget for buying different priority levels. In each time-slot, the access is attributed to the user with the largest priority level. We analyze this problem under both cooperative as well as competitive frameworks. We show that unlike many standard team problems, optimal pure policies do not exist in the team framework, but both an optimal solution as well as equilibria exist within the class of mixed policies. We establish structural properties as well as explicit characterization of these: We show that the optimal policy requires only three priority levels, whereas the noncooperative game possesses a unique symmetric equilibrium point that uses at most two priority levels. Our analysis is applied to power control over wireless capture channels, where the budget constraint corresponds to the battery lifetime.
Effects of stage of gestation and uterine ligation on ovine placentome development and glycosaminoglycans.

Effects of restricting uterine space on physical, biochemical, and histochemical characteristics of ovine placental tissues were studied. Ewes (n = 20) were unilaterally ovariectomized, assigned to either control (C; n = 10) or unilateral (UPx; n = 10) pregnancy groups, mated (d 0), and hysterectomized on either d 60, 90, or 120. Placental and fetal weights and placentome wet weights (PWT) in three placental areas (AI, AII, AIII) were recorded. Placentome tissue concentrations of RNA, DNA, hyaluronic acid (HA), and protein (TP) were determined. Overall, placentome numbers were reduced (P < .02) 23%, but individual PWT increased (P < .05) 27% in UPx ewes. In UPx ewes, neither total placental nor placentome weights, fetal weights, fetal crown-rump lengths, nor PWT:fetal weight ratios were affected by treatment (Trt). In the C and UPx groups, PWT increased (P < .01) from d 60 to 90. However, compensatory growth was confined to placental areas AII and AIII in UPx groups (treatment x area, P < .01). Treatment did not affect concentrations of RNA, DNA, TP, or HA. However, RNA, DNA, and TP increased from d 60 to 120 (P < .01), but HA decreased (P < .01). Histologically, placentome cellularity increased from d 60 to 120 as area occupied by individual fetal chorioallantoic villi (FV) decreased. The FV stained with Alcian Blue 8X. Alcianophilia was attenuated at low pH and eliminated by pretreatment with hyaluronidase, indicating the presence of HA. Thus, increased placentomal cellularity was accompanied by loss of HA from fetal allantoic mesenchyme. Mechanisms regulating loss of HA from FV may support placental maturation and fetal growth.
Aggregated Activity Recognition Using Smart Devices

Activity recognition has become of great importance in many fields especially in fitness monitoring, health and elder care by offering the opportunity for large amount of applications which recognize human's daily life activities. Human activity recognition (HAR) was not only limited on health care field or monitoring sports, but it also started to emerge in the religious branch and monitor people behavior while performing their religious activity like praying. The prevalence of smart phones in our society with their ever growing sensing power has opened the door for more sophisticated data mining applications which takes the raw sensor data as input and classify the motion activity performed. The main sensor used in performing activity recognition is the accelerometer. This paper presents a framework for activity recognition using smart phone sensors to recognize simple daily activities and then aggregate these simple activities (walking, standing, sitting,…) to recognize a more complex one which is prayer. Features extracted from raw sensor data are used to train and test supervised machine learning algorithms.
Network scaling reveals consistent fractal pattern in hierarchical mammalian societies

Recent studies have demonstrated that human societies are hierarchically structured with a consistent scaling ratio across successive layers of the social network; each layer of the network is between three and four times the size of the preceding (smaller) grouping level. Here we show that similar relationships hold for four mammalian taxa living in multi-level social systems. For elephant (Loxodonta africana), gelada (Theropithecus gelada) and hamadryas (Papio hamadryas hamadryas) baboon, successive layers of social organization have a scaling ratio of almost exactly 3, indicating that such branching ratios may be a consistent feature of all hierarchically structured societies. Interestingly, the scaling ratio for orca (Orcinus orca) was 3.8, which might mean that aquatic environments place different constraints on the organization of social hierarchies. However, circumstantial evidence from a range of other species suggests that scaling ratios close to 3 may apply widely, even in species where hierarchical social structures have not traditionally been identified. These results identify the origin of the hierarchical, fractal-like organization of mammalian social systems as a fundamental question.
Conversational implicature: interacting with grammar

Grice defined conversational implicatures as social, cognitively com- plex meanings that discourse participants create jointly in interaction. Grammar- driven accounts are framed in opposition to this view. I seek to mediate this debate. I describe a general framework for interactional models of implicature and then assess the major arguments for grammar-driven approaches. My cen- tral findings are that many of these arguments are conceptually or theoretically problematic, and that the valid ones do not compromise the Gricean picture. Stepping back, I find that the two sides in this debate are not really in opposition, but rather offer complementary insights.
Time vs. Information Tradeoffs for Leader Election in Anonymous Trees

Leader election is one of the fundamental problems in distributed computing. It calls for all nodes of a network to agree on a single node, called the leader. If the nodes of the network have distinct labels, then agreeing on a single node means that all nodes have to output the label of the elected leader. If the nodes of the network are anonymous, the task of leader election is formulated as follows: every node v of the network must output a simple path, which is coded as a sequence of port numbers, such that all these paths end at a common node, the leader. In this article, we study deterministic leader election in anonymous trees. Our aim is to establish tradeoffs between the allocated time τ and the amount of information that has to be given a priori to the nodes to enable leader election in time τ in all trees for which leader election in this time is at all possible. Following the framework of algorithms with advice, this information (a single binary string) is provided to all nodes at the start by an oracle knowing the entire tree. The length of this string is called the size of advice. For a given time τ allocated to leader election, we give upper and lower bounds on the minimum size of advice sufficient to perform leader election in time τ. For most values of τ, our upper and lower bounds are either tight up to multiplicative constants, or they differ only by a logarithmic factor. Let T be an n-node tree of diameter diam ⩽ D. While leader election in time diam can be performed without any advice, for time diam − 1 we give tight upper and lower bounds of Θ(log D). For time diam − 2 we give tight upper and lower bounds of Θ(log D) for even values of diam, and tight upper and lower bounds of Θ(log n) for odd values of diam. Moving to shorter time, in the interval [β · diam, diam − 3] for constant β > 1/2, we prove an upper bound of O(nlog n/D) and a lower bound of Ω(n/D), the latter being valid whenever diam is odd or when the time is at most diam − 4. Hence, with the exception of the special case when diam is even and time is exactly diam − 3, our bounds leave only a logarithmic gap in this time interval. Finally, for time α · diam for any constant α < 1/2 (except for the case of very small diameters), we again give tight upper and lower bounds, this time Θ(n).
Low-overhead fault-tolerance for the preconditioned conjugate gradient solver

Linear system solvers are an integral part for many different compute-intensive applications and they benefit from the compute power of heterogeneous computer architectures. However, the growing spectrum of reliability threats for such nano-scaled CMOS devices makes the integration of fault tolerance mandatory. The preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) method is one widely used solver as it finds solutions typically faster compared to direct methods. Although this iterative approach is able to tolerate certain errors, latest research shows that the PCG solver is still vulnerable to transient effects. Even single errors, for instance, caused by marginal hardware, harsh environments, or particle radiation, can considerably affect execution times, or lead to silent data corruption. In this work, a novel fault-tolerant PCG solver with extremely low runtime overhead is proposed. Since the error detection method does not involve expensive operations, it scales very well with increasing problem sizes. In case of errors, the method selects between three different correction methods according to the identified error. Experimental results show a runtime overhead for error detection ranging only from 0.04% to 1.70%.
Fen Bilgisi Öğretmen Adaylarının Kimya Dersine Yönelik Tutumlarının Çeşitli Değişkenlere Göre Değerlendirilmesi

Bu calismanin amaci, fen bilgisi ogretmen adaylarinin alan dersleri icerisinde yer alan kimya dersine yonelik tutumlarini belirlemek ve tutum ile akademik basari arasindaki iliskileri arastirmaktir. Ayrica bu degiskenlerin cinsiyet ve okul durumlari ile iliskilerini incelemektir. Arastirma, karsilastirma niteliginde bir calisma olup 2005–2006 egitim-ogretim yili bahar (II.donem) doneminde Cumhuriyet Universitesi Egitim Fakultesi Fen Bilgisi Ogretmenliginde ogrenim goren 147 ogretmen adayinin katilimiyla gerceklestirilmistir. Veri toplama araci olarak, arastirmacilar tarafindan gelistirilen, “Ogretmen Adaylari icin Kimya Dersine Yonelik Tutum Olcegi (OAKTO)” uygulanmistir. Ogretmen adaylarinin tutum puanlari ile akademik basari puanlari arasindaki iliski pearson korelasyon katsayisi ile incelenmistir. Yapilan calisma sonucunda, cinsiyete ve mezun olduklari lise turune gore tutum ve akademik basari duzeyleri arasinda farkliliklar oldugu, fakat genel olarak kimyaya yonelik tutumlari ile akademik basari duzeyleri arasinda orta duzeyde bir iliski oldugu gorulmustur. (r=0.623, p
Antiangiogenic and Vascular-Targeting Activity of the Microtubule-Destabilizing trans-Resveratrol Derivative 3,5,4′-Trimethoxystilbene

Neovascularization plays an important role in neoplasia and angioproliferative diseases. Two major modalities have been developed so far to affect neovascularization: its prevention by antiangiogenic compounds, and immature vessel disruption by vascular-targeting agents. trans-Resveratrol, found in grapes and wine, exerts antioxidant, antineoplastic, and antiangiogenic activities. Here, among various synthetic trans-resveratrol derivatives tested, 3,5,4′-trimethoxystilbene was an antiangiogenic agent 30 to 100 times more potent than parent compound in inhibiting endothelial cell proliferation, sprouting, collagen gel invasion, and morphogenesis (ID50 = 0.3–3.0 μM). In addition, 3,5,4′-trimethoxystilbene acts as a vascular-targeting agent by causing microtubule disassembling and tubulin depolymerization and by impairing the repositioning of the microtubule organization center and the formation of membrane ruffles in migrating endothelial cells. In keeping with a vascular-targeting ability, 3,5,4′-trimethoxystilbene induced apoptosis only in subconfluent endothelial cells and apoptotic regression of immature vessels in the ex vivo rat aorta ring assay. In vivo, 3,5,4′-trimethoxystilbene caused the rapid stasis of blood flow and regression of intersegmental vessels in the trunk of zebrafish embryos. In addition, it inhibited blood vessel growth and caused the disappearance of pre-existing blood vessels in the area vasculosa of the chick embryo. In conclusion, 3,5,4′-trimethoxystilbene associates an antiangiogenic profile to a significant vascular-targeting activity.
Reliance on Accounting Information, Budgetary Participation, and Task Uncertainty: Tests of a Three-Way Interaction

A series of studies reported in this Journal has addressed the question of whether evaluative styles of managers, which vary in terms of their reliance on accounting-based performance assessments, have systematically different behavioral consequences. These studies have produced conflicting results. In particular, Otley [1978] failed to confirm Hopwood's [1972] earlier findings that evaluative styles dominated by a heavy reliance on accounting performance measures, or a high budget-emphasis (BE), had adverse effects on job-related tension (JRT) and managerial performance. In two independent attempts to reconcile this conflict, Brownell [1982] found that a high (low) BE had positive effects on performance so long as budget participation is also high (low), and Hirst [1983] found that a high (low) BE is associated with low JRT in situations of low (high) task uncertainty. In this paper we report the results of a study which links the Brownell and Hirst attempts to reconcile the above conflict. More specifically, our objective was to assess the extent to which Brownell's finding also depends on the level of task uncertainty, the primary independent variable in the Hirst study. Arguments are presented which predict that
movMF: An R Package for Fitting Mixtures of von Mises-Fisher Distributions

Finite mixtures of von Mises-Fisher distributions allow to apply model-based clustering methods to data which is of standardized length, i.e., all data points lie on the unit sphere. The R package movMF contains functionality to draw samples from finite mixtures of von Mises-Fisher distributions and to fit these models using the expectation-maximization algorithm for maximum likelihood estimation. Special features are the possibility to use sparse matrix representations for the input data, different variants of the expectation-maximization algorithm, different methods for determining the concentration parameters in the M-step and to impose constraints on the concentration parameters over the components. In this paper we describe the main fitting function of the package and illustrate its application. In addition we compare the clustering performance of finite mixtures of von Mises-Fisher distributions to spherical k-means. We also discuss the resolution of several numerical issues which occur for estimating the concentration parameters and for determining the normalizing constant of the von Mises-Fisher distribution.
Benefits of Levothyroxine Replacement Therapy on Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease in Subclinical Hypothyroidism Patients

Objectives. To evaluate the effect of levothyroxine (LT4) replacement therapy on nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) in subclinical hypothyroidism (SCH) patients. Methods. This study was a post hoc analysis of a randomized controlled trial and involved 33 significant and 330 mild SCH patients. All of the significant SCH patients received LT4 supplement. The mild SCH patients were grouped as LT4 treated or not. After 15 months of follow-up, prevalence of NAFLD in each group was reevaluated. Subgroup analysis was conducted in mild SCH patients with dyslipidemia. Results. After treatment with LT4, the prevalence of NAFLD in significant SCH patients reduced from 48.5% to 24.2% (p = 0.041). In mild SCH patients, prevalence of NAFLD and serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT) was not significantly affected by LT4 supplementation. Nonetheless, mild SCH patients with dyslipidemia who received LT4 treatment experienced decreases in the prevalence of NAFLD and serum ALT levels (p < 0.05 for both). In contrast, these parameters remained comparably stable in patients who were not treated. Conclusion. LT4 supplementation has benefits on NAFLD in significant SCH patients or mild SCH patients with dyslipidemia. For NAFLD patients with SCH, appropriate supplementation of LT4 may be an effective means of controlling NAFLD. The original trial was registered with ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT01848171).