Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Brain Apolipoprotein E: an Important Regulator of Food Intake in Rats

OBJECTIVE—The worldwide prevalence of obesity is increasing at an alarming rate, along with the associated increased rates of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and some cancers. While efforts to address environmental factors responsible for the recent epidemic must continue, investigation into the anorectic functions of potential molecules we present here, such as apolipoprotein (apo)E, offers exciting possibilities for future development of successful anti-obesity therapies. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS—Changes in feeding behavior after intracerebroventricular injection of apoE, the regulation of hypothalamic apoE gene expression by energy status, and the interaction of hypothalamic apoE with other neuropeptides were studied. RESULTS—Intracerebroventricular apoE significantly decreased food intake without causing malaise, whereas intracerebroventricular infusion of apoE antiserum stimulated feeding, implying that endogenous apoE tonically inhibits food intake. Consistent with this, apoE was present in the hypothalamus, a brain site intimately involved in the integration of signals for energy homeostasis. Fasted rats exhibited significantly decreased apoE gene expression in the hypothalamus, and refeeding of these rats for 4 h evoked a significant increase of hypothalamic apoE mRNA levels. Both genetically obese (ob/ob) mice and rats with high-fat diet–induced obesity had significantly reduced hypothalamic apoE mRNA levels compared with their lean control counterparts, suggesting that decreased apoE may contribute to hyperphagia in these obese animals. Additionally, apoE-stimulated hypothalamic proopiomelanocortin gene expression and SHU9119, a melanocortin 3/4 receptor antagonist, attenuated the inhibitory function of apoE on feeding. CONCLUSIONS—These data demonstrate that apoE suppresses food intake via a mechanism enhancing melanocortin signaling in the hypothalamus.
Assessment and Therapy with Children: Can Computers Help?

The use of computers in assessment and therapy with children is a relatively new field and one in which there is little research. This article reports on the development of a computer-assisted interview for children and the potential applications of this type of approach to helping children describe their experiences. The computer medium offers a number of important advantages in work with children: (i) its novelty and appeal for the child; (ii) the opportunity that it provides to take the focus of interaction off the one-to-one relationship of child and interviewer, introducing a shared external focus for attention and reducing stress on the child; and (iii) the controllability and structuring of the setting, both for the child and interviewer. The development of a computer-based interview format is described, as are pilot studies of the properties of the program. The use of the program in forensic, child care and therapeutic settings is discussed, together with its applicability to a range of forms of disability.
The double chaotic particle swarm optimization with the performance avoiding local optimum

The research with respect to Particle Swarm Optimization is concentrated in improving their performance on avoiding local maxima. Since standard Particle Swarm Optimization does not perform well in many cases, we propose double chaotic particle swarm optimization algorithm based on logistic map. This chaotic movement has good randomness and ergodic statistics property of chaos sequence. We propose to use chaotic sequence to initialize the particle positions, laying a solid foundation for the diversity of search particle swarm. The improved strategies in the algorithm increase the premature stagnation judgment that the new particles are added into a new region making changes in the trajectory of particles, which help algorithm escaping from local optima effectively and reduce invalid iterations. This strategies result in greatly improving the convergence of the algorithm, accuracy and speed optimization. On the other hand, the proposed algorithm requires very little number of particles and few iterations to fully meet the theory test function optimization. The results of the simulation show the good performance of the optimization algorithm.
Pathways To Civil War

PATHWAYS TO CIVIL WAR: A STUDY OF MULTIPLE PATHS TOWARD CIVIL WAR by SUSUMU SUZUKI August 2013 Advisor: Dr. Frederic S. Pearson Major: Political Science Degree: Doctor of Philosophy This dissertation is about conflict escalation to civil war, and examines why some political confrontations escalate and why principal conflict actors continue fighting rather than reaching a number of political arrangements at various points of the course of conflict. Unlike previous studies, this study treats the progression to civil war as one of complex alternate paths. In so doing, building on the perspective of asymmetric information (i.e. uncertainty) problems as a cause of war, this study claims that involving each conflict actor’s cognitive variances about its opponent’s willingness to resolve and military strength would bolster either side’s costly military mobilization and boil over into civil war. Four extant hypotheses on conflict escalation and two specific propositions from a two-sided uncertainty perspective are tested with ordered and binary multiple logistic regression analyses against state-year aggregated data on government repression and armed resistance levels as well as civil war onset from 1976 to 2000. A comparative case illustration of the Lebanese civil war of 1975-1976 and the Northern Ireland conflict of 1970- 1998 further illuminates the internal conflict dynamics toward or away from civil war, examining the emergence of principal and secondary armed actors in the course of conflict. Both the quantitative and qualitative studies provide evidence for the roles of uncertainty in either
A comparative study of flip classroom teaching method versus traditional classroom teaching method in undergraduate medical students in physiology

Background: Due to the current passive type of traditional teaching methods leads to a lack of interest in the subject by students affects teaching-learning outcome. In the flipped classroom method, we provide prior handout/teaching material to students as well there is active participation of students by various interactive methods leads subject more interesting and chances of improving teaching learning outcome. Aims and Objectives: The aim of the study was to compare flip classroom teaching method versus traditional classroom teaching method in undergraduate medical students as well evaluate feasibility to implement a flip method in our department. Materials and Methods: After approval from the Institutional Ethical Committee, the study conducted in 130 undergraduate medical students in the Department of Physiology at GMERS Medical College, Gandhinagar between November 2017 and January 2018. Two Groups A and B having 65 students have taken pre-test (10 marks) followed by they have undergone Group A for flip method of topic composition and functions of sympathetic nervous system and Group B for traditional method of the same topic, Group B has undergone flip method for compositions and functions of parasympathetic nervous system and Group A for traditional method for the same topic. Post-test (10 Marks) has taken immediately after the intervention. Pre-validated structured feedback was taken both from students and from faculties in 5-point Likertâ€™s scale questionnaires. Results: After applying paired t-test it shows the flip classroom method is statistically significant (P < 0.05) than the traditional method in both Groups. Students feedback finding shows that flip method is more enjoyable, creates interest in the subject, while faculties feedback shows it requires more time, workforce, and resources. Conclusion: Active intervention in the form of a flip classroom method improves teaching-learning outcome as well improves overall academic performance in students compared to traditional passive teaching-learning method.
An Efficient Fingerprint Matching Approach Based on Minutiae to Minutiae Distance Using Indexing with Effectively Lower Time Complexity

Fingerprint matching is the main module of fingerprint-based person authentication system. Accuracy of fingerprint matching is an important objective of this type authentication system. Multiple features are used for better matching accuracy but more features add more computational complexity as well as time and space complexity. In this paper, we proposed an approach of fingerprint based authentication system where fingerprint matching is carried out using spacial information (distance) of minutiae points only. This approach is simple and it needs very small space to store templates. We have used an indexing technique to speed up the matching process. In our experiment, we have used FVC2004 fingerprint data-set as input data and investigated the false non-match ratio and false matching ratio for DB2, DB3 and DB4 also.
Sensing and control of a prosthetic hand with myoelectric feedback

This paper describes a sensor based control that releases a user of prosthetic hands from the continuous attention usually required in opening and closing actions. Besides this local control, the sensory information is used to generate some feedback to the user for the perception of the progress of the hand operation. This control and feedback constitutes a compromise solution between the simplest clinical prosthetic hands and the more advanced dexterous robotic or even prosthetic hands
On the Identification and Representation of Ontology Correspondence Antipatterns

Semantic data integration and application interoperability are recognized challenges in distributed scenarios, and they have long being addressed by ontology alignment techniques, which try to find correspondences between entities that are semantically equivalent in distinct ontologies. However, ontology alignment is still a costly and difficult task, considering the existence of large-scale scenarios and complex domains. This work introduces the concept of a correspondence antipattern, which is essentially a set of generic correspondences that represent an incorrect alignment and can be used as a predefined template to help identify incorrect correspondences between two existing ontologies and thus refine ontology alignments. We also introduce a methodology that assists the identification and construction of ontology correspondence antipatterns, and evaluate it through a case study using datasets from the last three campaigns of OAEI, the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative.
Chemical antipredator defence is linked to higher extinction risk

Many attributes of species may be linked to contemporary extinction risk, though some such traits remain untested despite suggestions that they may be important. Here, I test whether a trait associated with higher background extinction rates, chemical antipredator defence, is also associated with current extinction risk, using amphibians as a model system—a group facing global population declines. I find that chemically defended species are approximately 60% more likely to be threatened than species without chemical defence, although the severity of the contemporary extinction risk may not relate to chemical defence. The results confirm that background and contemporary extinction rates can be predicted from the same traits, at least in certain cases. This suggests that associations between extinction risk and phenotypic traits can be temporally stable over long periods. The results also provide novel insights into the relevance of antipredator defences for species subject to conservation concerns.
Market‐Oriented Resource Management and Scheduling: A Taxonomy and Survey

Market-oriented computing has gained a lot of attention both from industry and academia. Grid computing is the major paradigm, which supports the market-oriented computing, thus can enable vision of computing as utility a reality. Most important challenge in enabling utility Grids is the resource management and scheduling. From last decade many researchers has try to address many issues within the resource management and scheduling but still it looks far away from the original vision. Thus, to find out the gaps and direct future research, this chapter summarizes and classified all the important works through a comprehensive Taxonomy. This chapter also presents the survey of the most popular market-oriented resource management systems with research gaps still needed to be filled in. This survey is intended to help researchers to make cooperative effort towards the goal of utility grids and provide insights for extending and reusing the existing grid middleware.
The Role of Perspective-Taking on Ability to Recognize Fear

Impairment in the ability to detect certain emotions, such as fear, is linked to multiple disorders and follows a pattern of inter-individual variability and intra-individual stability over time. Deficits in fear recognition are often related to social and interpersonal difficulties but the mechanisms by which this processing deficit might occur are not well understood. One potential mechanism through which impaired fear detection may influence social competency is through diminished perspective-taking, the ability to perceive and consider the point of view of another individual. In the current study, we hypothesized that intra-individual variability in the accuracy of facial emotion recognition is linked to perspective-taking abilities in a well-characterized, non-clinical adult sample. Results indicated that the ability to accurately detect fear in the faces of others was positively correlated with perspective-taking, consistent with initial hypotheses. This relationship appeared to be unique to recognition of fear, as perspective-taking was not significantly associated with recognition of the other basic emotions. Results from this study represent an initial step towards establishing a potential mechanism between some processes of FER and perspective-taking difficulties. It is important to establish the relationship between these processes in a non-clinical adult sample so that we can consider the possibility of a developmental or pathological influence of impoverished perspective-taking on fear perception.
Eclipse: A Heterogeneous Multiprocessor Architecture for Flexible Media Processing

Eclipse defines a heterogeneous multiprocessor architecture template for data-dependent stream processing. Intended as a scalable and flexible subsystem of forthcoming media-processing systems-on-a-chip, Eclipse combines application configuration flexibility with the efficiency of function-specific hardware, or 'coprocessors'. The multi-tasking coprocessors concurrently execute application tasks of one or more applications. To facilitate reuse, Eclipse separates coproces-sor functionality from generic support, implemented by 'shells', attached to each coprocessor. The shells offer multi-tasking, inter-task synchronization, and data transport services to the coproces-sors. This facilitates the design of coprocessors that require complex control to handle e.g. data-dependent I/O and saving/restoring task state. This paper presents the Eclipse architecture template as well as a first instantiation with coprocessors that support simultaneous MPEG-2 encoding and decoding.
UCL+Sheffield at SemEval-2016 Task 8: Imitation learning for AMR parsing with an alpha-bound

We develop a novel transition-based parsing algorithm for the abstract meaning representation parsing task using exact imitation learning, in which the parser learns a statistical model by imitating the actions of an expert on the training data. We then use the imitation learning algorithm DA GGER to improve the performance, and apply an α -bound as a simple noise reduction technique. Our performance on the test set was 60% in F-score, and the performance gains on the development set due to DA GGER was up to 1.1 points of F-score. The α -bound improved performance by up to 1.8 points.
BigTable, Dynamo & Cassandra – A Review

— The main aspect of NoSQL data stores is “shared nothing” horizontal scaling, which enables them to support a large number of simple read/write operations per second. Most of the NoSQL data stores generally do not provide strict ACID properties. The idea is that by giving up strict ACID constraints high performance and scalability can be achieved. The objective of this paper is to study and compare the features of the most popular NoSQL data stores like Bigtable (used in Google), Dynamo (used in Amazon) and Cassandra (used in Facebook). The significance of these data stores is that most of the NoSQL data stores available today are developed using the concepts put forwarded by Bigtable and Dynamo. They can be considered as the foundation stones of today’s NoSQL data stores.
Quasi-Analytical Modeling of Transmission/Reflection in Strip/Slit Gratings Loaded With Dielectric Slabs

This paper presents a quasi-analytical approach to study the classic topic of transmission/reflection of electromagnetic waves through 1-D periodic arrays of strips/slits in metal screens. The approach is based on standard waveguide discontinuity theory. Starting from field equations, it is inferred a circuit-like reduced-order model with just one parameter to be determined. The value of this parameter can be obtained from the transmission/reflection coefficient provided by any full-wave method at just one single frequency. In this way, the computation effort to obtain very wide-band responses of periodically distributed slits or strips under oblique TE/TM illumination in the presence of loading dielectric slabs is reduced to the full-wave analysis of the structure at a single frequency value. For relatively narrow strip/slit gratings, this procedure gives very accurate results even for very complicated transmission/reflection spectra. An additional advantage of the present approach is that it allows for an easy understanding of the underlying physics of the phenomena involved.
Relative availability of natural prey versus livestock predicts landscape suitability for cheetahs Acinonyx jubatus in Botswana

Prey availability and human-carnivore conflict are strong determinants that govern the spatial distribution and abundance of large carnivore species and determine the suitability of areas for their conservation. For wide-ranging large carnivores such as cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus), additional conservation areas beyond protected area boundaries are crucial to effectively conserve them both inside and outside protected areas. Although cheetahs prefer preying on wild prey, they also cause conflict with people by predating on especially small livestock. We investigated whether the distribution of cheetahs’ preferred prey and small livestock biomass could be used to explore the potential suitability of agricultural areas in Botswana for the long-term persistence of its cheetah population. We found it gave a good point of departure for identifying priority areas for land management, the threat to connectivity between cheetah populations, and areas where the reduction and mitigation of human-cheetah conflict is critical. Our analysis showed the existence of a wide prey base for cheetahs across large parts of Botswana’s agricultural areas, which provide additional large areas with high conservation potential. Twenty percent of wild prey biomass appears to be the critical point to distinguish between high and low probable levels of human-cheetah conflict. We identified focal areas in the agricultural zones where restoring wild prey numbers in concurrence with effective human-cheetah conflict mitigation efforts are the most immediate conservation strategies needed to maintain Botswana’s still large and contiguous cheetah population.
Classification of Usability Problems (CUP) Scheme

Defect classification can improve product quality and motivate process improvement. Several defect classification schemes have been developed and used with good results in software development. This paper describes the design and test of a defect classification scheme that specifically extracts information from usability problems. We describe the attributes of the defects, the attribute values, including the phases of user interface development. We have tested the classification scheme on defects that were found during heuristic evaluation and user test of software that implements a broker for exchange of on line learning resources. The paper presents results of the classifications and assesses the repeatability of the defect classification scheme. We show how developers, project manager, and process engineers can use information from the defect classification for improvement of the user interface, personal skills and training, and process improvement.
Bilingual lexicon extraction for a distant language pair using a small parallel corpus

The aim of this thesis proposal is to perform bilingual lexicon extraction for cases in which small parallel corpora are available and it is not easy to obtain monolingual corpus for at least one of the languages. Moreover, the languages are typologically distant and there is no bilingual seed lexicon available. We focus on the language pair Spanish-Nahuatl, we propose to work with morpheme based representations in order to reduce the sparseness and to facilitate the task of finding lexical correspondences between a highly agglutinative language and a fusional one. We take into account contextual information but instead of using a precompiled seed dictionary, we use the distribution and dispersion of the positions of the morphological units as cues to compare the contextual vectors and obtaining the translation candidates.
Analysing Image Denoising using Non Local Means Algorithm

Digital image processing remains a challenging domain of programming. All digital images contain some degree of noise. Often times this noise is introduced by the camera when a picture is taken. Image denoising algorithms attempt to remove this noise from the image. In this paper the method for image denoising based on the nonlocal means (NL-means) algorithm has been implemented and results have been developed using matlab coding. The algorithm, called nonlocal means (NLM), uses concept of Self-Similarity. Also images taken from the digital media like digital camera and the image taken from the internet have been compared. The image that is taken from the internet has got aligned pixel than the image taken from digital media. Experimental results are given to demonstrate the superior denoising performance of the NL-means denoising technique over various image denoising benchmarks.