Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multi‐slice perfusion‐based functional MRI using the FAIR technique: comparison of CBF and BOLD effects

Perfusion‐weighted imaging techniques employing blood water protons as an endogenous tracer have poor temporal resolution because each image should be acquired with an adequate spin "tagging' time. Thus, perfusion‐based functional magnetic resonance imaging studies are typically performed on a single slice. To alleviate this problem, a multi‐slice flow‐sensitive alternating inversion recovery technique has been developed. Following a single inversion pulse and a delay time, multi‐slice echo‐planar images are acquired sequentially without any additional inter‐image delay. Thus, the temporal resolution of multi‐slice FAIR is almost identical to that of single slice techniques. The theoretical background for multi‐slice FAIR is described in detail. The multi‐slice FAIR technique has been successfully applied to obtain three‐slice cerebral blood flow based functional images during motor tasks. The relative CBF change in the contralateral motor/sensory area during unilateral thumb–digit opposition is 45.0±12.2% (n=9), while the blood oxygenation level dependent signal change is 1.5±0.4 SD%. Relative changes of the oxygen consumption rate can be estimated from CBF and BOLD changes using FAIR. The BOLD signal change is not correlated with the relative CBF increase, and thus caution should be exercised when interpreting the BOLD change as a quantitative index of the CBF change, especially in inter‐subject comparisons. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The Implementation of Life Space Crisis Intervention as a School-Wide Strategy for Reducing Violence and Supporting Students' Continuation in Public Schools

The Implementation of Life Space Crisis Intervention as a School-Wide Strategy for reducing violence and supporting students’ continuation in public schools. By: John E. Ramin, Ed.D. The purpose of this study was to explore the effectiveness of implementing Life Space Crisis Intervention as a school-wide strategy for reducing school violence. Life Space Crisis Intervention (LSCI) is a strength-based verbal interaction strategy (Long, Fecser, Wood, 2001). LSCI utilizes naturally occurring crisis situations as teachable moments. The literature review analyzes school violence, violence prevention programs and effective change practices. This study employed mixed research methods with a sample population of public school, LSCI trained, staff members in Central New York. The result of this study supports two conclusions: LSCI is an effective schoolwide strategy, but was not implemented effectively or that LSCI is effective as part of a school-wide violence prevention continuum. Further research is warranted. Syracuse University – School of Education The Implementation of Life Space Crisis Intervention as a School-Wide Strategy for reducing violence and supporting students’ continuation in public schools. By John E. Ramin B.S. SUNY @ Fredonia, 1988 M.A. Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, 1990 C.A. S. Syracuse University, 2001 Ed.D. Syracuse University, 2011 Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Education (EdD) in Teaching and Leadership in the School of Education of Syracuse University
On NoC Bandwidth Sharing for the Optimization of Area Cost and Test Application Time

Current NoC test scheduling methodologies in the literature are based on a dedicated path approach; a physical path through the NoC routers and interconnects are allocated for the transportation of test data from an external tester to a single core during the whole duration of the core test. This approach unnecessarily limits test concurrency of the embedded cores because a physical channel bandwidth is typically larger than the scan rate of any core-under-test. We are proposing a bandwidth sharing approach that divides the physical channel bandwidth into multiple smaller virtual channel bandwidths. The test scheduling is performed under the objective of co-optimizing the wrapper area cost and the resulting test application time using two complementary NoC wrappers. Experimental results showed that the area overhead can be optimized (to an extent) without compromising the test application time. Compared to other NoC scheduling approaches based on dedicated paths, our bandwidth sharing approach can reduce the test application time by up to 75.4%.
LOST: localization-space trails for robot teams

Cushioning member that has a thickness greater than that of a card-type electronic device and is formed of an elastic material is detachably attached to the peripheral edge portion of the electronic device, thereby covering at least the four corner portions of the electronic device. The card-type electronic device having the cushioning member thereon is opposed to a seating surface of a seating portion, and a retaining member is located on the electronic device so as to face the seating surface. The cushioning member is clamped between the retaining member and the seating surface, and the card-type electronic device is held on the seating portion by the cushioning member.
A MODIFIED E SHAPED PATCH ANTENNA FOR MIMO SYSTEMS

A compact E shaped patch antenna is proposed in the present work, which can be used for Multiple Input Multiple output (MIMO) systems. The modified E shaped patch antenna proposed in this paper offers improved directivity, bandwidth, and return loss characteristics compared to normal E shaped antenna. The antenna system resonates at 5.36GHz and 5.89GHz frequencies for VSWR≤2 which can be used for WiMAX (Wireless interoperability for microwave access) applications. The simulation results of return loss, VSWR, gain
Nucleotide Polymorphisms and Haplotype Diversity of RTCS Gene in China Elite Maize Inbred Lines

The maize RTCS gene, encoding a LOB domain transcription factor, plays important roles in the initiation of embryonic seminal and postembryonic shoot-borne root. In this study, the genomic sequences of this gene in 73 China elite inbred lines, including 63 lines from 5 temperate heteroric groups and 10 tropic germplasms, were obtained, and the nucleotide polymorphisms and haplotype diversity were detected. A total of 63 sequence variants, including 44 SNPs and 19 indels, were identified at this locus, and most of them were found to be located in the regions of UTR and intron. The coding region of this gene in all tested inbred lines carried 14 haplotypes, which encoding 7 deferring RTCS proteins. Analysis of the polymorphism sites revealed that at least 6 recombination events have occurred. Among all 6 groups tested, only the P heterotic group had a much lower nucleotide diversity than the whole set, and selection analysis also revealed that only this group was under strong negative selection. However, the set of Huangzaosi and its derived lines possessed a higher nucleotide diversity than the whole set, and no selection signal were identified.
Evaluation of the Spectral Finite Element Method With the Theory of Phononic Crystals

We evaluated the performance of the classical and spectral finite element method in the simulation of elastodynamic problems. We used as a quality measure their ability to capture the actual dispersive behavior of the material. Four different materials are studied: a homogeneous non-dispersive material, a bilayer material, and composite materials consisting of an aluminum matrix and brass inclusions or voids. To obtain the dispersion properties, spatial periodicity is assumed so the analysis is conducted using Floquet-Bloch principles. The effects in the dispersion properties of the lumping process for the mass matrices resulting from the classical finite element method are also investigated, since that is a common practice when the problem is solved with explicit time marching schemes. At high frequencies the predictions with the spectral technique exactly match the analytical dispersion curves, while the classical method does not. This occurs even at the same computational demands. At low frequencies however, the results from both the classical (consistent or mass-lumped) and spectral finite element coincide with the analytically determined curves. Surprisingly, at low frequencies even the results obtained with the artificial diagonal mass matrix from the classical technique exactly match the analytic dispersion curves.
A Teratocarcinoma-Like Human Embryonic Stem Cell (hESC) Line and Four hESC Lines Reveal Potentially Oncogenic Genomic Changes

The first Swiss human embryonic stem cell (hESC) line, CH-ES1, has shown features of a malignant cell line. It originated from the only single blastomere that survived cryopreservation of an embryo, and it more closely resembles teratocarcinoma lines than other hESC lines with respect to its abnormal karyotype and its formation of invasive tumors when injected into SCID mice. The aim of this study was to characterize the molecular basis of the oncogenicity of CH-ES1 cells, we looked for abnormal chromosomal copy number (by array Comparative Genomic Hybridization, aCGH) and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). To see how unique these changes were, we compared these results to data collected from the 2102Ep teratocarcinoma line and four hESC lines (H1, HS293, HS401 and SIVF-02) which displayed normal G-banding result. We identified genomic gains and losses in CH-ES1, including gains in areas containing several oncogenes. These features are similar to those observed in teratocarcinomas, and this explains the high malignancy. The CH-ES1 line was trisomic for chromosomes 1, 9, 12, 17, 19, 20 and X. Also the karyotypically (based on G-banding) normal hESC lines were also found to have several genomic changes that involved genes with known roles in cancer. The largest changes were found in the H1 line at passage number 56, when large 5 Mb duplications in chromosomes 1q32.2 and 22q12.2 were detected, but the losses and gains were seen already at passage 22. These changes found in the other lines highlight the importance of assessing the acquisition of genetic changes by hESCs before their use in regenerative medicine applications. They also point to the possibility that the acquisition of genetic changes by ESCs in culture may be used to explore certain aspects of the mechanisms regulating oncogenesis.
Akuntabilitas sebagai Upaya Peningkatan Kualitas Pendidikan

The continuous escalating of demand for access and quality of education has make all educational institutions around the world think hard: “How to make their institutions better. ” Accountability was approved as one of the key factors to construct a qualified institution. Even though accountability was not a new idea, topics about accountability such as: accountability applications, accountability on educational funding, or accountability assessment, remain interesting to discuss. It’s not an easy work to conduct accountability properly in an educational institution. All the key players related to the institution such as parents, teachers, students, stakeholders, etc, need to work together to conduct practices of accountability, at least accountability practice at their own part. If one of them is absent, it could affect accountability process for the whole institution. Accountability can be categorized in three aspects: transparency, response, and compliant. Each individuals and, or groups accountability’s performances contain at least one aspect. Maximum Accountability application by all educational institution’s key players will create a strong, qualified institution that is adaptive to change. A qualified educational institution has big chances to produce qualified graduates, and it will affect the nation’s competitiveness in international scale. Keywords: Accountability, quality, education, competitiveness, globalization.
Contropedia - the analysis and visualization of controversies in Wikipedia articles

Collaborative content creation inevitably reaches situations where different points of view lead to conflict. In Wikipedia, one of the most prominent examples of collaboration online, conflict is mediated by both policy and software, and conflicts often reflect larger societal debates. Contropedia is a platform for the analysis and visualization of such controversies in Wikipedia. Controversy metrics are extracted from activity streams generated by edits to, and discussions about, individual articles and groups of related articles. An article's revision history and its corresponding discussion pages constitute two parallel streams of user interactions that, taken together, fully describe the process of the collaborative creation of an article. Our proposed platform, Contropedia, builds on state of the art techniques and extends current metrics for the analysis of both edit and discussion activity and visualizes these both as a layer on top of Wikipedia articles as well as a dashboard view presenting additional analytics. Furthermore, the combination of these two approaches allows for a deeper understanding of the substance, composition, actor alignment, trajectory and liveliness of controversies on Wikipedia. Our research aims to provide a better understanding of socio-technical phenomena that take place on the web and to equip citizens with tools to fully deploy the complexity of controversies. Contropedia is useful for the general public as well as user groups with specific interests such as scientists, students, data journalists, decision makers and media communicators. Contropedia can be found at http://contropedia.net.
Channel assignment in a metropolitan wireless multi-radio mesh network

We investigate the problem of channel assignment in a metropolitan wireless multi-radio mesh network with directional antennas. We first present a new conflict graph model for capturing the interference between links in a mesh network with a known wireless interface communication graph. Then we present a channel assignment procedure which accounts for interference both between links internal to the mesh network, and from external sources. Key components of the channel assignment procedure are the interference model, the link ordering, and the channel selection metric. We have implemented and evaluated the proposed channel assignment procedure in an actual metropolitan mesh network with link distances from 1.6 to 5 Km. The experimental results demonstrate how link ordering and the channel selection metric affect performance, in terms of the average packet delay and http latency. Moreover, the experimental results show that the proposed channel assignment procedure achieves performance that is within approximately 11% of a lower bound of the average packet delay, and significantly higher than the performance achieved with a simpler interference-unaware procedure.
Feature-Specific Encoding Flexibility in Visual Working Memory

The current study examined selective encoding in visual working memory by systematically investigating interference from task-irrelevant features. The stimuli were objects defined by three features (color, shape, and location), and during a delay period, any of the features could switch between two objects. Additionally, single- and whole-probe trials were randomized within experimental blocks to investigate effects of memory retrieval. A series of relevant-feature switch detection tasks, where one feature was task-irrelevant, showed that interference from the task-irrelevant feature was only observed in the color-shape task, suggesting that color and shape information could be successfully filtered out, but location information could not, even when location was a task-irrelevant feature. Therefore, although location information is added to object representations independent of task demands in a relatively automatic manner, other features (e.g., color, shape) can be flexibly added to object representations.
First Results from the Large-Area Lyman Alpha Survey

We report on a new survey for z ≈ 4.5 Lyα sources, the Large-Area Lyman Alpha (LALA) survey. Our survey achieves an unprecedented combination of volume and sensitivity by using narrowband filters on the new 81922 pixel CCD Mosaic camera at the 4 m Mayall telescope of Kitt Peak National Observatory. Well-detected sources with flux and equivalent width matching previously known high-redshift Lyα galaxies (i.e., observed equivalent width EW > 80 Å; 2.6 × 10-17 ergs cm-2 s-1 < line + continuum flux < 5.2 × 10-17 ergs cm-2 s-1, and a small uncertainty on the equivalent width, δEW < EW/4) have an observed surface density corresponding to 11,000 ± 700 deg-2 per unit redshift at z = 4.5. Variations in this surface density are apparent on comparison between counts in 6561 ± 40 and 6730 ± 40 Å filters. Early spectroscopic followup results from the Keck telescope included three sources meeting our criteria for good Lyα candidates. Of these, one is confirmed as a z = 4.52 source, another remains consistent with either z = 4.55 or z = 0.81, and the third is an [O III] λ5007 emitter at z = 0.34. These pilot spectroscopic results suggest that approximately one-third of our good candidates are bona fide Lyα emitters, implying a net density of ~4000 Lyα emitters per square degree per unit redshift.
Domestic Violence Law Reform and Women's Experience in Court: The Implementation of Feminist Reforms in Civil Proceedings

This study investigates the ways in which women’s experiences of domestic violence are heard and understood in civil court settings, and examines women’s experiences of telling their stories (or at least attempting to do so) in those settings. The two areas on which the study focuses are intervention order proceedings in State Magistrates’ Courts, and residence, contact, and property matters in the federal Family Court in Australia. The relevant legislation in the two jurisdictions is either partly or wholly a product of feminist legal activism. The study, therefore, seeks to determine whether the feminist claim that the criminal law silences women also pertains in the context of new civil claims specifically designed to respond to women’s experiences.
Factor Sensitivity Analysis for Multivariable Systems Using Bayesian Neural Networks

Neural interpretation is of increasing interest in artificial neural networks and it is potential to reveal the intrinsic mechanism of multivariable systems. This study aims at investigating the efficiency of Bayesian neural networks in neural interpretation. The measures to ensure the stability of the network model are first elaborated and then, two types of Bayesian networks with linear and partly-linear transfer functions are exploited to conduct neural interpretation for simulated multivariable systems. Experimental results show that aided with connection weight calculation, Bayesian neural networks own distinct advantages over other network models in evaluating the relative contribution of independent variables to single dependent one. Therefore, the method proposed in this study is promising to perform factor sensitivity analysis for multivariable systems.
Comparative Study of the Immunological Marker IL-6 and the Non- Immunological Marker PCT in Surgery Patients with Infections and Multiple Trauma

The objective of this study was to assess and to compare the time course of the immunological signaling marker IL-6 and the non-immunological marker PCT in surgical patients with local and systemic bacterial infections and with multiple trauma of well-defined severity. 45 surgical and 26 intensive care patients were enrolled in this collaborative study. We analyzed IL-6 and PCT blood concentrations under the different experimental conditions with Cochran's ˆ Q -criterion for testing null hypotheses. For the surgical patients with local infections and with systemic infections, we did not find a significant decline of IL-6 in the time course at the confidence intervals 0.999, 0.990, and 0.950. No differences in PCT concentrations were found for the various experimental conditions. The time course of IL-6 did not change significantly with medium and high severity trauma, whereas PCT declined over time with significance levels 0.990 and 0.950. The measurement of IL-6 is predominantly a research tool at present. There are no absolute indications for routine measurements. Regarding PCT, our results do not point to this marker as a valid predictor of bacterial infections including sepsis during the early period after trauma.
Protein structure, neighbor effect, and a new index of amino acid dissimilarities.

Amino acids interact with each other, especially with neighboring amino acids, to generate protein structures. We studied the pattern of association and repulsion of amino acids based on 24,748 protein-coding genes from human, 11,321 from mouse, and 15,028 from Escherichia coli, and documented the pattern of neighbor preference of amino acids. All amino acids have different preferences for neighbors. We have also analyzed 7,342 proteins with known secondary structure and estimated the propensity of the 20 amino acids occurring in three of the major secondary structures, i.e., helices, sheets, and turns. Much of the neighbor preference can be explained by the propensity of the amino acids in forming different secondary structures, but there are also a number of intriguing association and repulsion patterns. The similarity in neighbor preference among amino acids is significantly correlated with the number of amino acid substitutions in both mitochondrial and nuclear genes, with amino acids having similar sets of neighbors replacing each other more frequently than those having very different sets of neighbors. This similarity in neighbor preference is incorporated into a new index of amino acid dissimilarities that can predict nonsynonymous codon substitutions better than the two existing indices of amino acid dissimilarities, i.e., Grantham's and Miyata's distances.
Robust guidance of a conventionally steered vehicle using destination bearing

An algorithm for camera-based navigation of a conventionally steered vehicle is presented. The destination bearing, obtained by actively panning the camera to fixate on the destination, is the primary measurement. A steering sequence designed to direct a moving vehicle towards a visible destination is generated using an extension of predictive control techniques. A variable sampling interval, based on distance traveled instead of elapsed time, provides robustness to destination range errors. Additional robustness is achieved by incorporating nonlinearities into the steering algorithm, ensuring that the moving vehicle originating from an awkward position and heading will not diverge from the destination. A two-stage extended Kalman filter, which uses the destination bearing angle and known vehicle motion, provides estimates of range. A criterion for shifting the attention of the camera between intermediate destinations is presented. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed steering algorithm. <<ETX>>
Exploring residual and spatial consistency for object detection

Local image features show a high degree of repeatability, while their local appearance usually does not bring enough discriminative pattern to obtain a reliable matching. In this paper, we present a new object matching algorithm based on a novel robust estimation of residual consensus and flexible spatial consistency filter. We evaluate the similarity between different homography model via two-parameter integratedWeibull distribution and inlier probabilities estimates, which can select uncontaminated model to help eliminating outliers. Spatial consistency test was encoded by the geometric relationships of domain knowledge in two directions, which is invariant to scale, rotation, and translation especially robust to the flipped image. Experiment results on nature images with clutter background demonstrate our method effectiveness and robustness.