Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Portable ambient projection system: build your room projectable space

With the development of digital technology, many researchers increasingly study projection-based augmented reality (AR) that recognizes surrounding space, considers users' situation and provides space-oriented information rather than merely providing simple, fragmentary information. However, complicated installation issues persist, such as projection system installation and space setup to provide projection under various environments. In this study, we propose a portable, ambient projection system to address such complex installation issues. We defined pervasive projection AR system that enables projection in various spaces. The system consists of a pico-projector, a depth-sensing camera, and a pan/tilting platform that supports the projector-camera system. The portable ambient projection system can be positioned at an unknown space and can extract plane information by scanning its surrounding environment as it rotates 360-degrees in a clockwise manner. Users are provided with a pervasive projection AR environment as with a simple tablet user interface to control it.
An enhanced GA to improve the search process reliability in tuning of control systems

Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) have been largely applied to optimisation and synthesis of controllers. In spite of several successful applications and competitive solutions, the stochastic nature of EAs and the uncertainty of the results have considerably hindered their use in industrial applications. In this paper we propose a Genetic Algorithm (GA) for tuning controllers for classical first and second order plants with actuator nonlinearities. To increase the robustness of the algorithm we introduce two features: 1) genetic operators that perform directional mutations, 2) selection tournaments organized by genome vicinity. The experiment results show that the proposed GA is able to guarantee high performance and low variance in the results from different runs. The increased reliability, compared to the results from a classical GA, seems to favour particularly the application of Evolutionary Computation (EC) in tuning of control systems, where, thanks to this approach, a large search space can be searched repeatedly with high consistency in the solutions.
An interpretation of some whole plant water transport phenomena.

A treatment of water flow into and through plants to the evaporating surface of the leaves is presented. The model is driven by evaporation from the cell wall matrix of the leaves. The adsorptive and pressure components of the cell wall matric potential are analyzed and the continuity between the pressure component and the liquid tension in the xylem established. Continuity of these potential components allows linking of a root transport function, driven by the tension in the xylem, to the leaf water potential. The root component of the overall model allows for the solvent-solute interactions characteristic of a membrane-bound system and discussion of the interactions of environmental variables such as root temperature and soil water potentials. A partition function is developed from data in the literature which describes how water absorbed by the plant might be divided between transpiration and leaf growth over a range of leaf water potentials.Relationships between the overall system conductance and the conductance coefficients of the various plant parts (roots, xylem, leaf matrix) are established and the influence of each of these discussed.The whole plant flow model coupled to the partition function is used to simulate several possible relationships between leaf water potential and transpiration rate. The effects of changing some of the partition function coefficients, as well as the root medium water potential on these simulations is illustrated.In addition to the general usefulness of the model and its ability to describe a wide range of situations, we conclude that the relationships used, dealing with bulk fluid flow, diffusion, and solute transport, are adequate to describe the system and that analogically based theoretical systems, such as the Ohm's law analogy, probably ought to be abandoned for this purpose.
A novel function of CD40: induction of cell death in transformed cells

CD40 is known as an important T-B cell interaction molecule which rescues B lymphocytes from undergoing apoptosis. Like other receptors of the tumor necrosis factor (TNF) receptor gene family, CD40 is expressed on cells of different tissue origins including some transformed cells. In contrast to its well-studied effects on B cells, the biological functions of CD40 in non-immune cells remain largely unknown. Here we show that CD40 ligation induces apoptotic cell death in transformed cells of mesenchymal and epithelial origin. This CD40- mediated cell death seems to use a preformed signaling pathway since it occurs even when protein synthesis is blocked. Notably, the CD40 cytoplasmic domain shares a structural homology with the recently defined "death domains" of the 55-kD TNF receptor (p55TNFR) and Fas. Despite these structural similarities, differences are seen in the way phorbol myristate acetate, interleukin 1, TNF, and various metabolic inhibitors influence the cellular responsiveness to CD40, p55TNFR, and Fas-mediated killing. Our study indicates that CD40 induces cell death by a distinct mechanism.
Hybrid code description for developing fast and resource efficient image processing architectures

Image processing algorithms applied on programmable embedded systems very often do not meet the given constraints in terms of real time capability. Mapping these algorithms to reconfigurable hardware solves this issue, but demands further specific knowledge in hardware development. The design process can be accelerated by code generation through high-level synthesis, which is very flexible. However, the quality of synthesis depends on many factors like the provided constraints, code description, and algorithmic complexity. Hence, optimizing these parameters may improve the generated results in terms of logic and memory utilization, as well as data throughput and synthesis duration. In this work, we aim to exploit domain-specific knowledge for a hybrid code description in order to benefit from rapid development through high-level synthesis in combination with throughput optimized generic hardware descriptions. By utilizing code generation techniques, the entire design flow gets accelerated. Our synthesis results show a similar resource utilization and achievable throughput to a pure HDL described hardware.
Detecting spelling variants in non-standard texts

Spelling variation in non-standard language, e.g. computer-mediated communication and historical texts, is usually treated as a deviation from a standard spelling, e.g. 2mr as an non-standard spelling for tomorrow. Consequently, in normalization – the standard approach of dealing with spelling variation – so-called non-standard words are mapped to their corresponding standard words. However, there is not always a corresponding standard word. This can be the case for single types (like emoticons in computer-mediated communication) or a complete language, e.g. texts from historical languages that did not develop to a standard variety. The approach presented in this thesis proposal deals with spelling variation in absence of reference to a standard. The task is to detect pairs of types that are variants of the same morphological word. An approach for spelling-variant detection is presented, where pairs of potential spelling variants are generated with Levenshtein distance and subsequently filtered by supervised machine learning. The approach is evaluated on historical Low German texts. Finally, further perspectives are discussed.
Interdisciplinary information seeking behaviour : a naturalistic inquiry

The thesis begins with an introduction to the study, interdisciplinarity and information seeking behaviour. A review of the literature pertinent to information-seeking behaviour and interdisciplinarity leads to the suggestion that existing research is insufficient to address questions about the information behaviour of interdisciplinary researchers. From this review questions relating to the nature of interdisciplinary information behaviour and the shape of a model of interdisciplinary information seeking behaviour and how this relates to existing single discipline models are developed. The methodology of the study followed a naturalistic inquiry approach to the subject using interviews and inductive analysis while addressing validity within the Lincoln and Guba framework and is based around a sample of 45 academics selected using a combination of purposive and snowball sampling techniques. This thesis traces the development of the results in a sequence of chapters detailing core processes (Opening. Orientation, and Consolidation) and what may be termed "general influences" relating to Cognitive Approach, Internal Context and External Context. There are therefore three core processes and three levels of general influence, each composed of several individual activities and attributes. Further chapters discuss the relationship of the core processes and general influences and their position in a model. The behavioural patterns identified are analogous to an artist's palette in which activities remain available throughout the course of information seeking, each process iteratively leading back to a new selection from the palette. The interactivity and shifts described by the model show information seeking to be non-linear dynamic, holistic, and flowing. A non-linear model of interdisciplinary information behaviour is put forward. The resulting model presents an alternative framework for understanding interdisciplinary information seeking behaviour with wider implications based upon transferability of the findings to other contexts and plans for further research to develop the model.
Assessing Benefits of Neighborhood Walkability to Single-Family Property Values

This article investigates the impact of neighborhood walkability, measured by Street Smart Walk Score and sidewalk density, on property values by analyzing the 2010–2012 single-family home sale transactions in Austin, Texas. The Cliff-Ord spatial hedonic model (also known as the General Spatial Model, or SAC) is used to control for spatial autocorrelation effects. Results show that improving walkability through increased access to amenities in car-dependent neighborhoods does not appear to increase property values; adding sidewalks in these neighborhoods leads to a minimal increase in property values. Investments in neighborhood amenities and sidewalks will yield a greater home price increase in a walkable neighborhood than in a car-dependent neighborhood.
Using Cognitive Theory to Improve Nurse Practitioners' Anticipatory Guidance With Contraceptive Pill Users

Community health nurse practitioners are often the major contraceptive counselors who may use anticipatory guidance to help clients' use behaviors. Because pregnancy rates during typical use are much higher than during "perfect" use, more effective anticipatory guidance could help improve use behaviors. Principles of cognitive theory were used to explore the implications of specific words and approaches associated with discussing young adults' contraceptive use. Qualitative results are reported here, and potential implications are made for nurse practitioners' anticipatory guidance related to contraceptive use.
Managing energy and server resources in hosting centers

Internet hosting centers serve multiple service sites from a common hardware base. This paper presents the design and implementation of an architecture for resource management in a hosting center operating system, with an emphasis on energy as a driving resource management issue for large server clusters. The goals are to provision server resources for co-hosted services in a way that automatically adapts to offered load, improve the energy efficiency of server clusters by dynamically resizing the active server set, and respond to power supply disruptions or thermal events by degrading service in accordance with negotiated Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Our system is based on an economic approach to managing shared server resources, in which services "bid" for resources as a function of delivered performance. The system continuously monitors load and plans resource allotments by estimating the value of their effects on service performance. A greedy resource allocation algorithm adjusts resource prices to balance supply and demand, allocating resources to their most efficient use. A reconfigurable server switching infrastructure directs request traffic to the servers assigned to each service. Experimental results from a prototype confirm that the system adapts to offered load and resource availability, and can reduce server energy usage by 29% or more for a typical Web workload.
Development and initial validation of a computer-administered health literacy assessment in Spanish and English: FLIGHT/VIDAS

Current measures of health literacy have been criticized on a number of grounds, including use of a limited range of content, development on small and atypical patient groups, and poor psychometric characteristics. In this paper, we report the development and preliminary validation of a new computer-administered and -scored health literacy measure addressing these limitations. Items in the measure reflect a wide range of content related to health promotion and maintenance as well as care for diseases. The development process has focused on creating a measure that will be useful in both Spanish and English, while not requiring substantial time for clinician training and individual administration and scoring. The items incorporate several formats, including questions based on brief videos, which allow for the assessment of listening comprehension and the skills related to obtaining information on the Internet. In this paper, we report the interim analyses detailing the initial development and pilot testing of the items (phase 1 of the project) in groups of Spanish and English speakers. We then describe phase 2, which included a second round of testing of the items, in new groups of Spanish and English speakers, and evaluation of the new measure’s reliability and validity in relation to other measures. Data are presented that show that four scales (general health literacy, numeracy, conceptual knowledge, and listening comprehension), developed through a process of item and factor analyses, have significant relations to existing measures of health literacy.
Disruption of Interleukin-1β Autocrine Signaling Rescues Complex I Activity and Improves ROS Levels in Immortalized Epithelial Cells with Impaired Cystic Fibrosis Transmembrane Conductance Regulator (CFTR) Function

Patients with cystic fibrosis (CF) have elevated concentration of cytokines in sputum and a general inflammatory condition. In addition, CF cells in culture produce diverse cytokines in excess, including IL-1β. We have previously shown that IL-1β, at low doses (∼30 pM), can stimulate the expression of CFTR in T84 colon carcinoma cells, through NF-κB signaling. However, at higher doses (>2.5 ng/ml, ∼150 pM), IL-1β inhibit CFTR mRNA expression. On the other hand, by using differential display, we found two genes with reduced expression in CF cells, corresponding to the mitochondrial proteins CISD1 and MTND4. The last is a key subunit for the activity of mitochondrial Complex I (mCx-I); accordingly, we later found a reduced mCx-I activity in CF cells. Here we found that IB3-1 cells (CF cells), cultured in serum-free media, secrete 323±5 pg/ml of IL-1β in 24 h vs 127±3 pg/ml for S9 cells (CFTR-corrected IB3-1 cells). Externally added IL-1β (5 ng/ml) reduces the mCx-I activity and increases the mitochondrial (MitoSOX probe) and cellular (DCFH-DA probe) ROS levels of S9 (CFTR-corrected IB3-1 CF cells) or Caco-2/pRSctrl cells (shRNA control cells) to values comparable to those of IB3-1 or Caco-2/pRS26 cells (shRNA specific for CFTR). Treatments of IB3-1 or Caco-2/pRS26 cells with either IL-1β blocking antibody, IL-1 receptor antagonist, IKK inhibitor III (NF-κB pathway) or SB203580 (p38 MAPK pathway), restored the mCx-I activity. In addition, in IB3-1 or Caco-2/pRS26 cells, IL-1β blocking antibody, IKK inhibitor III or SB203580 reduced the mitochondrial ROS levels by ∼50% and the cellular ROS levels near to basal values. The AP-1 inhibitors U0126 (MEK1/2) or SP600125 (JNK1/2/3 inhibitor) had no effects. The results suggest that in these cells IL-1β, through an autocrine effect, acts as a bridge connecting the CFTR with the mCx-I activity and the ROS levels.
Kinetic study of bicarbonate reabsorption in proximal tubule of the rat.

MALNIC, GERHARD, AND MARGARIDA DE MELLO-AIRES. Kinetic study of bicarbonate reabsorption in proximal tubule of the rat. Am. J. Physiol. 220(6) : 1759-1767. 197 1 . -Continuous recording of tubular pH was performed during stopped-flow microperfusion of rat proximal tubules with isotonic solutions containing 25 or 100 mEq/liter HCO 3, by means of an antimony microelectrode. After stabilization of pH values, lower pH and HCO,were found than during free flow in control rats. In acetazolamide-infused rats, pH was higher and bicarbonate lower than during free flow, but both values were significantly higher than controls. The velocity of acidification was decomposed into two phases, a first, rapid one, and a second, slower phase. The first phase was shown to depend on CO2 diffusion. It disappeared upon perfusion with a solution preequilibrated with CO2 . The second phase, evaluated by transformation of the pH values into bicarbonate concentrations, had a half-time of 3-4 sec. It was not significantly altered by substitution of choline for sodium, but was considerably retarded in acetazolamide-infused rats. Only one process of bicarbonate reabsorption was apparent, whose rate is about halved by acetazolamide. Its maximal rate may approach that of sodium chloride.
A comparision between methods for generating differentially expressed genes from microarray data for prediction of disease

Feature selection from microarray data has become an ever evolving area of research. Numerous techniques have widely been applied for extraction of genes which are expressed differentially in microarray data. Some of these comprise of studies related to fold-change approach, classical t-statistics and modified t-statistics. It has been found that the gene lists returned by these methods are dissimilar. In this work we compare the outputs of two different feature selection methods using three classifiers based on different algorithms namely the Random Forest Ensemble based method, the Support vector machine (SVM) and the KNN methods, using the prediction accuracy of the test datasets.
Lossless contour representation using efficient multiple grid chain coding

We present an efficient lossless contour coding scheme based on a chain code representation. The algorithm is suitable for the binary shape coding of arbitrarily-shaped objects. Previous attempts to exploit the correlation between successive chain links have resulted in a complex encoding process, due either to the employment of chain code post processing or by dividing the contour into segments. Our approach exploits the differential predictability of contour smoothness by embedding it into the chain structure. Anisotropic chain links are applied in the direction of the contour according to selection rules that exploit contour coherence effectively. Experimental evaluation indicates that the proposed algorithm provides superior performance over existing chain coding schemes, and implementation complexity is not increased.
Automatic discovery of attributes in relational databases

In this work we design algorithms for clustering relational columns into attributes, i.e., for identifying strong relationships between columns based on the common properties and characteristics of the values they contain. For example, identifying whether a certain set of columns refers to telephone numbers versus social security numbers, or names of customers versus names of nations. Traditional relational database schema languages use very limited primitive data types and simple foreign key constraints to express relationships between columns. Object oriented schema languages allow the definition of custom data types; still, certain relationships between columns might be unknown at design time or they might appear only in a particular database instance. Nevertheless, these relationships are an invaluable tool for schema matching, and generally for better understanding and working with the data. Here, we introduce data oriented solutions (we do not consider solutions that assume the existence of any external knowledge) that use statistical measures to identify strong relationships between the values of a set of columns. Interpreting the database as a graph where nodes correspond to database columns and edges correspond to column relationships, we decompose the graph into connected components and cluster sets of columns into attributes. To test the quality of our solution, we also provide a comprehensive experimental evaluation using real and synthetic datasets.
Effects of experimental diabetes on the structure and ultrastructure of the coagulating gland of C57BL/6J and NOD mice.

Diabetes mellitus can lead to reproductive disorders that in turn result in weakened fertility brought about by morphofunctional changes in the testes and accessory sex glands. However, doubts persist concerning the basic biology of the secretory epithelial cells and the stroma of the coagulating gland of diabetic mice. Thus, the objective of the present study was to analyze the histological and ultrastructural changes associated with stereology of the coagulating gland of mice with alloxan-induced diabetes, and of spontaneously diabetic mice. Sixteen mice of the C57BL/6J strain, and eight non-obese diabetic (NOD) mice were used. The animals were divided into three groups: 1) control (C), 2) alloxan diabetic (AD), and 3) NOD. Thirty days after the detection of diabetic status in group 2, all of the animals were killed and then perfused with Karnovsky's solution through the left cardiac ventricle. The coagulating gland was then removed and processed for morphometric study by light microscopy and electron microscopy. The results showed thickening of the stroma, atrophy of secretory epithelial cells, and disorganization of the organelles involved in the secretory process in both NOD and alloxan-induced mice. Thus, it may be concluded that the coagulating gland suffered drastic morphological changes, and consequently impaired glandular function, in the presence of diabetes mellitus type I in both NOD and AD mice.