Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Validation of a Novel Collection Device for Non-Invasive Urine Sampling from Free-Ranging Animals

Recent advances in non-invasively collected samples have opened up new and exciting opportunities for wildlife research. Different types of samples, however, involve different limitations and certain physiological markers (e.g., C-peptide, oxytocin) can only be reliably measured from urine. Common collection methods for urine to date work best for arboreal animals and large volumes of urine. Sufficient recovery of urine is thus still difficult for wildlife biologists, particularly for terrestrial and small bodied animals. We tested three collection devices (two commercially available saliva swabs, Salivette synthetic and cotton, and cotton First aid swabs) against a control to permit the collection of small volumes of urine from the ground. We collected urine samples from captive and wild macaques, and humans, measured volume recovery, and analyzed concentrates of selected physiological markers (creatinine, C-peptide, and neopterin). The Salivette synthetic device was superior to the two alternative devices. Concentrations of creatinine, absolute C-peptide, C-peptide per creatinine, absolute neopterin, and neopterin per creatinine measured in samples collected with this device did not differ significantly from the control and were also strongly correlated to it. Fluid recovery was also best for this device. The least suitable device is the First aid collection device; we found that while absolute C-peptide and C-peptide per creatinine concentrations did not differ significantly from the control, creatinine concentrations were significantly lower than the control. In addition, these concentrations were either not or weakly correlated to the control. The Salivette cotton device provided intermediate results, although these concentrations were strongly correlated to the control. Salivette synthetic swabs seem to be useful devices for the collection of small amounts of urine from the ground destined for the assessment of physiological parameters. They thus provide new opportunities for field studies to incorporate physiological markers, particularly on smaller bodied and terrestrial animals and where urine collection is difficult.
AuntieTuna: Personalized Content-based Phishing Detection

Phishing sites masquerade as copies of legitimate sites (“targets”) to fool people into sharing sensitive information that can then be used for fraud. Current phishing defenses can be ineffective, with training ignored, blacklists of discovered, bad sites too slow to pick up new threats, and whitelists of knowngood sites too limiting. We have developed a new technique that automatically builds personalized lists of target sites (candidates that may be copied by phish) and then tests sites as a user browses them. Our approach uses cryptographic hashing of the browser’s Document Object Model (DOM) of each page, providing a zero false positive rate and identifying more than half detectable phish in a controlled study. Since each user develops a customized list of target sites, our approach presents a diverse defense against phishers. We have prototyped our approach as a Chrome browser plugin called AuntieTuna, emphasizing usability through automated and simple manual addition of target sites and clean reports of potential phish that include context about the targeted site. AuntieTuna does not slow web browsing time and presents alerts on phishing pages before users can divulge information. Our plugin has been used by a few users for months and is open-source.
RDF Needs Annotations

While the current mechanism of reification in RDF is without semantics and widely considered inappropriate and cumbersome, some form of reification – speaking about triples themselves – is needed in RDF for many reasonable applications: in particular, reification allows for enhancing triples with annotations relating to provenance, spatio-temporal validity, degrees of trust, fuzzy values and/or other contextual information. In this position paper, we argue that – besides resolving the issue of how to syntactically represent reification in the future (i.e., whether to stick with the current reification mechanism or standardise a different mechanism such as Named Graphs) – it is time to agree on certain core annotations that are widely needed. We summarise existing work and provide a possible direction towards handling reification by means of a general annotation framework that can be instantiated for those major use cases we currently see arising.
Context counts! social anxiety modulates the processing of fearful faces in the context of chemosensory anxiety signals

During emotion perception, context is an important source of information. Whether contextual cues from modalities other than vision or audition influence the perception of social emotional information has not been investigated. Thus, the present study aimed at testing emotion perception and regulation in response to fearful facial expressions presented in the context of chemosensory stimuli derived from sweat of anxious individuals. In groups of high (HSA) and low socially anxious (LSA) participants we recorded the startle reflex (Experiment I), and analysed event-related potentials (ERPs; Experiment II) while they viewed anxious facial expressions in the context of chemosensory anxiety signals and chemosensory control stimuli. Results revealed that N1/P1 and N170 amplitudes were larger while late positive potential (LPP) activity was smaller for facial expressions presented in the context of the anxiety and the chemosensory control stimulus as compared to facial expressions without a chemosensory context. Furthermore, HSA participants were highly sensitive to the contextual anxiety signals. They showed enhanced motivated attention allocation (LPP, Study II), as well as larger startle responses toward faces in the context of chemosensory anxiety signals than did LSA participants (Study I). Chemosensory context had no effect on emotion regulation, and both LSA and HSA participants showed effective emotion regulation (Study I and II). In conclusion, both anxiety and chemosensory sport context stimuli enhanced early attention allocation and structural encoding, but diminished motivated attention allocation to the facial expressions. The current results show that visual and chemosensory information is integrated on virtually all levels of stimulus processing and that socially anxious individuals might be especially sensitive to chemosensory contextual social information.
AVO Modeling of Monochromatic Spherical Waves: Comparison to Band-Limited Waves

Summary Monochromatic and band-limited spherical waves have differing reflection coefficient curves. To facilitate comparison, a new expression for monochromatic reflectivity is given in terms of a weighting function. The weighting function approach, developed previously for a specific class of band-limited spherical waves (Rayleigh filtered waves), shows explicitly how different plane waves contribute to a spherical-wave reflection coefficient. Direct comparison shows that monochromatic waves have oscillatory, non-decaying weighting functions, and thus sample a wide range of plane waves. In contrast, typical Rayleigh wavelets produce localized weighting functions. These two behaviors lead to reflection coefficient curves which differ beyond the critical angle. A bridge between these two behaviors is constructed by considering unusually narrow Rayleigh wavelets. These show intermediate properties. This study shows 1) a simple and convenient method for calculating monochromatic spherical-wave reflection coefficients, and 2) a clearer understanding of how spherical-wave reflection coefficients are created from constituent plane-waves.
Generation of Ultrahydrophobic Properties of Aluminium – A first Step to Self‐cleaning Transparently Coated Metal Surfaces

In the last few years, significant efforts have been made to provide surfaces with self-cleaning properties. This approach utilises principles wich have been discovered in nature, like the well known lotus-effect. The transformation of this strategy to metallic surfaces is a scientifically and technologically challenging target. This publication focuses on the investigation of different routes for the generation of the necessary micro-morphological propoerties of Al
Impact of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome and the Perceived Avian Influenza Epidemic on the Increased Rate of Influenza Vaccination Among Nurses in Hong Kong

Objective. To determine the rate of influenza vaccination and the factors associated with the vaccination's acceptance among nurses in Hong Kong. Design. Cross-sectional survey. Participants. Nurses practicing between 2003 and 2007. Methods. A questionnaire was sent to all nurses registered with any of the 3 nursing associations that participated in this study. Results. A total of 941 completed questionnaires were available for analysis, though not all nurses responded to every question (response rate, 33.5%-36.3%). Vaccination rates in 2006 and 2007 were 57.2% and 46.2%, respectively. Nurses who were vaccinated in 2006 were more likely to get vaccinated in 2007 (P<.01); 56% of the nurses perceived influenza vaccine as being effective against influenza. The perceived effectiveness of influenza vaccine was a consistent predictor of rates of vaccination in 2006 (odds ratio [OR], 8.47 [95% confidence interval {CI}, 6.13-11.70]; P<.01) and 2007 (OR, 6.05 [95% CI, 3.79-9.67]; P<.01). Concern about contracting avian influenza was a predictor of the vaccination rate in 2006 but not in 2007 (OR, 1.47 [95% CI, 1.03-2.09]; P<.05), as was the perceived lack of control over avian influenza infection (OR, 1.52 [95% CI, 1.06-2.18]; P<.05). Conclusions. The overall influenza vaccination rate for nurses in Hong Kong was about 50%. It was affected by the perceived threat of an impending outbreak. The attitudes of nurses toward the effectiveness of and rationale for vaccination were a major barrier to increasing the rate of vaccination.
Addressing mobile information overload in the universal inbox through lenses

Increasingly, smartphones are being used to access all manner of information: email messages, Facebook status updates, tweets, RSS feeds, photographs and more. Approaches to dealing with this multi-faceted information stream developed on the desktop, such as switching between multiple applications or multiple browser windows, are unwieldy and scale poorly for mobile devices. In this paper, we propose the combination of the universal inbox and a system called 'Lenses' for extracting information of interest as part of a solution to this problem. These mechanisms allow the user to easily specify ways to sort, filter and manage their universal inbox in an intuitive way. We culminate with a discussion of implications for mobile phone interface design.
Hepatitis B Virus Genotype D Isolates Circulating in Chapecó, Southern Brazil, Originate from Italy

Hepatitis B virus genotype A1 (HBV/A1), of African origin, is the most prevalent genotype in Brazil, while HBV/F predominates in the other South American countries. However, HBV/D is the most common in the three states of southern Brazil, where ‘islands’ of elevated prevalence, as Chapecó and other cities, have been described. In this study, 202 HBV chronic carriers attending in 2013 the viral hepatitis ambulatory of Chapecó, were investigated. In comparison with previous studies performed in the same ambulatory, a rapid aging of the HBV infected population was observed (mean age of the newly diagnosed patients increasing from 29.9 ± 10.3 years in 1996 to 44.4 ± 13.3 years in 2013), probably due to a singular vaccination schedule at Chapecó that included not only children but also adolescents. Phylogenetic and BLAST analyses (S region) classified 91 HBV isolates into genotypes A (n = 3) and D (n = 88). The majority of HBV/D isolates were closely related to D3 sequences. To understand the reasons for the absence or near absence of genotypes A and F, and how HBV/D was introduced in the south of Brazil, HBV/D infected patients were inquired about their genealogical and geographical origins. Forty-three (52%) patients have their four grandparents of Italian origin, vs. seven (8%) who have their four grandparents of Brazilian origin. At all, 65 out of 83 (78%) patients had at least one grandparent originating from Italy. Taking into consideration the fact that Italy is one of the few countries where subgenotype D3 is predominant, the results strongly suggested that HBV/D was introduced in Brazil through Italian immigration which culminated between 1870 and 1920.
Bridging Topic Modeling and Personalized Search

This work presents a study to bridge topic modeling and personalized search. A probabilistic topic model is used to extract topics from user search history. These topics can be seen as a roughly summary of user preferences and further treated as feedback within the KL-Divergence retrieval model to estimate a more accurate query model. The topics more relevant to current query contribute more in updating the query model which helps to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant parts and filter out noise in user search history. We designed task oriented user study and the results show that: (1) The extracted topics can be used to cluster queries according to topics. (2) The proposed approach improves ranking quality consistently for queries matching user past interests and is robust for queries not matching past interests.
Tire Shred Backfill in Mechanically Stabilized Earth Wall Applications

Tire shred-soil mixture backfill for use in mechanically stabilized earth (MSE) walls has several advantages over traditional backfill materials: 1) good drainage, 2) high shear strength, 3) low compacted unit weight and 4) low lateral pressure exerted on retaining structures. This work presents the results of laboratory tests performed on tire shred-sand mixtures focusing on determining the properties required for their use as backfill in MSE wall applications. Three sizes of tire shreds are considered: tire chips with 9.5mm in nominal size, and tire shreds with 50-to-100-mm and 100-to-200-mm in length. The optimal mix proportions of tire shred-sand mixtures for enhanced mechanical response of the composite material are provided. Segregation of the materials in the tire shred-sand mixtures was investigated for various mix proportions. The effects of tire shred size, and tire shred-sand mixing ratio on the interaction between geogrids/ ribbed-metal strips and the mixtures are evaluated based on a series of laboratory pullout tests. Results indicate that the optimal mix proportion of tire shreds and sand is 25/75 and 30/70 (tire shred/sand) by weight, equivalent to approximately 40/60 and 50/50 (tire shred/sand) by volume for tire shreds with 50-100 mm and 100-200mm in length, respectively. This optimum mix proportion also ensures negligible segregation of the components of the mixture in the composite material. For all three shredded tire sizes considered, the pullout capacity of a geogrid embedded in the tire shred-sand mixtures prepared at the optimum mixing ratio is larger than that obtained for pure tire shreds. The pullout capacity of geogrid placed in samples prepared at optimum tire shred-sand mixing ratio is found to be higher for tire chip-sand mixtures than for tire shred-sand mixtures. This is mainly due to the crossing of the geogrid by the tire chips, which generates passive resistance during pullout. The size of tire shred has a negligible effect on the pullout response of ribbed-strip embedded in mixtures. Large-scale direct tests evaluated the shear strength properties of samples prepared at optimum tire chip-sand and tire shred (50 to 100 mm in size)-sand mixing ratios.
HOW DOES PHYTOSEIULUS PERSIMILIS FIND ITS PREY WHEN FORAGING WITHIN A BEAN PLANT

The role of herbivore-induced volatile substances in prey-finding by phytoseiid mites has been repeatedly documented using an olfactometer. The objective of the present paper is to test the hypothesis that movement by Phytoseiulus persimilis is affected by these volatiles even on plants. Two series of laboratory experiments were carried out. In the first series we studied searching behavior of P. persimilis females on young bean plants in which a single leaf was infested with spider mites. The effect of spider mite colony location on the walking pattern of predatory mites while on a leaf was studied in the second series of experiments. We found that P. persimilis individuals were unable to discriminate between infested and uninfested leaves when they walked up the stem of a bean plant. On the other hand, results of the second series of experiments indicate that walk was not random once a predator was on the leaf surface since it was attracted to the spider mite patch, at least over a distance of 1 cm. These results thus demonstrate that herbivore-induced volatiles can be utilized by P. persimilis during search for prey also under conditions that mimic natural situations better than an olfactometer does.
Predicting Non-protein-coding RNA Genes in Escherichia Coli Using SVM with Signature Descriptor

Non-protein-coding RNA (ncRNA) genes are known to play significant roles. Along with transfer RNAs, ribosomal RNAs and mRNAs, ncRNAs contribute to gene splicing, nucleotide modification, protein transport and regulation of gene expression. Several methods exist for predicting ncRNA genes in Escherichia coli (E.coli). In this paper, we describe a very general, highthroughput method for predicting ncRNA genes in E.coli. The method predicts more than two hundred intergenic regions to contain ncRNA genes, and over half of these overlap with previous tested candidates. Our results indicate that the number of ncRNA genes in E.coli is larger than what has previously been estimated.
Collision resolution algorithms for a time-constrained multiaccess channel

Collision resolution algorithms (CRAs) for the ternary feedback multiple access channel with time constraints are considered. The authors wish to maximize the number of packets successfully transmitted within a fixed deadline K after their arrival for transmission. Packet arrivals are assumed to be Poisson. A nonnested CRA is described and its performance is compared with a nested CRA for values of K >
Design issues in a haptics-based master-slave system for minimally invasive surgery

Minimally invasive surgery (MIS) is an alternative to open surgery where special instruments are inserted into the body cavity through tiny incisions in order to perform surgical procedures. In this work, some design issues in a master-slave robotic system for use in MIS are discussed. First, we discuss the design of a user interface that can be used to incorporate haptic interaction in robot-assisted MIS. Then we discuss the design of a laparoscopic end effector that meets MlS requirements and is instrumented for haptic feedback.
Unknown-tolerance analysis and test-quality control for test response compaction using space compactors

For a space compactor, degradation of fault detection capability caused by the masking effects from unknown values is much more serious than that caused by error masking (i.e. aliasing). In this paper, we first propose a mathematical framework to estimate the percentage of observable responses under unknown-induced masking for a space compactor. We further develop a prediction scheme which can correlate the percentage of observable responses with the modeled-fault coverage and with an n-detection metric for a given test set. As a result, the quality of a space compactor can be measured directly based on its test quality, instead of based on indirect metrics such as the number of tolerated unknowns or the aliasing probability. With the prediction scheme above, we propose a construction flow for space compactors to achieve the desired level of test quality while maximizing the compaction ratio
Age-Associated Sirtuin 1 Reduction in Vascular Smooth Muscle Links Vascular Senescence and Inflammation to Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm.

RATIONALE Uncontrolled growth of abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAAs) is a life-threatening vascular disease without an effective pharmaceutical treatment. AAA incidence dramatically increases with advancing age in men. However, the molecular mechanisms by which aging predisposes individuals to AAAs remain unknown. OBJECTIVE In this study, we investigated the role of SIRT1 (Sirtuin 1), a class III histone deacetylase, in AAA formation and the underlying mechanisms linking vascular senescence and inflammation. METHODS AND RESULTS The expression and activity of SIRT1 were significantly decreased in human AAA samples. SIRT1 in vascular smooth muscle cells was remarkably downregulated in the suprarenal aortas of aged mice, in which AAAs induced by angiotensin II infusion were significantly elevated. Moreover, vascular smooth muscle cell-specific knockout of SIRT1 accelerated angiotensin II-induced formation and rupture of AAAs and AAA-related pathological changes, whereas vascular smooth muscle cell-specific overexpression of SIRT1 suppressed angiotensin II-induced AAA formation and progression in Apoe-/- mice. Furthermore, the inhibitory effect of SIRT1 on AAA formation was also proved in a calcium chloride (CaCl2)-induced AAA model. Mechanistically, the reduction of SIRT1 was shown to increase vascular cell senescence and upregulate p21 expression, as well as enhance vascular inflammation. Notably, inhibition of p21-dependent vascular cell senescence by SIRT1 blocked angiotensin II-induced nuclear factor-κB binding on the promoter of monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 and inhibited its expression. CONCLUSIONS These findings provide evidence that SIRT1 reduction links vascular senescence and inflammation to AAAs and that SIRT1 in vascular smooth muscle cells provides a therapeutic target for the prevention of AAA formation.
The SPmap: a probabilistic framework for simultaneous localization and map building

This article describes a rigorous and complete framework for the simultaneous localization and map building problem for mobile robots: the symmetries and perturbation map (SPmap), which is based on a general probabilistic representation of uncertain geometric information. We present a complete experiment with a LabMate/sup TM/ mobile robot navigating in a human-made indoor environment and equipped with a rotating 2D laser rangefinder. Experiments validate the appropriateness of our approach and provide a real measurement of the precision of the algorithms.
A generalized modeling framework for schema versioning support

Advanced object-oriented applications require the management of schema versions, in order to cope with changes in the structure of the stored data. Two types of versioning have been separately considered so far: branching and temporal. The former arose in application domains like CAD/CAM and software engineering, where different solutions have been proposed to support design schema versions (consolidated versions). The latter concerns temporal databases, where some works have considered temporal schema versioning to fulfil advanced needs of other typical object-oriented applications like GIS and multimedia. In this work, we propose a general model which integrates the two approaches by supporting both design and temporal schema versions. The model is provided with a complete set of schema change primitives for fully-fledged version manipulation whose semantics is described in the paper.