Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Computational Intelligence in Portfolio Optimization – the IPSOS Model

Although returns distributions are complex, they can’t avoid manipulation in any form. We propose a new methodology, the Intelligent Portfolio Selection & Optimisation System – IPSOS that takes into account hidden information within the extended accounting data and financial statements, among other values incorporates them on a new Jordan Elman hybrid network to provide safer financial evaluations. Keywords— integrated systems; jordan & elman neural networks; genetic algorithms; finance, non-linear regressions
Identification of the phenolic compounds contributing to antibacterial activity in ethanol extracts of Brazilian red propolis

The purpose of this study is to identify the quantity and antibacterial activity of the individual phenolic compounds in Brazilian red propolis. Quantitative analysis of the 12 phenolic compounds in Brazilian red propolis was carried out using reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography. The main phenolic compounds in Brazilian red propolis were found to be (3S)-vestitol (1), (3S)-neovestitol (2) and (6aS,11aS)-medicarpin (4) with quantities of 72.9, 66.9 and 30.8 mg g of ethanol extracts− 1, respectively. Moreover, the antibacterial activities of each compound against Staphylococcus aureus, Bacillus subtilis and Pseudomonas aeruginosa were evaluated by measuring the minimum inhibitory concentrations. In particular, compound 4 exhibited the most potent antibacterial activity among all the assayed compounds against selected bacteria, indicating that 4 is the most active compound in Brazilian red propolis extracts. Thus, Brazilian red propolis may be used as food additives and pharmaceuticals to protect against bacteria.
Fetal and neonatal murine skin harbors Langerhans cell precursors

Resident epidermal Langerhans cells (LC) in adult mice express ADPase, major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class II, and CD205 and CD207 molecules, while the first dendritic leukocytes that colonize the fetal and newborn epidermis are only ADPase+. In this study, we tested whether dendritic epidermal leukocytes (DEL) are end‐stage cells or represent LC precursors. In epidermal sheets of fetal and neonatal mice, we found no apoptotic leukocytes, suggesting that these cells do not die in situ. To address whether DEL can give rise to LC, sorted DEL from murine newborn skin were cultured with cytokines used to generate LC from human CD34+ precursors. After 7–14 days, DEL proliferated and acquired the morphology and phenotype of cells reminiscent of LC. In concordance with this finding, we show that neonatal epidermis harbors 10–20 times the number of cycling MHC class II+ leukocytes as adult tissue. To test whether LC can differentiate from skin precursors in vivo, we developed a transplantation model. As it was impossible to transplant fetal epidermis, whole fetal skin was grafted onto adult severe combined immunodeficient mice. As opposed to the uniform absence of donor LC at the time of transplantation, examination of the epidermis from the grafts after 2–4 weeks revealed MHC class II+ donor cells, which had acquired CD205 and CD207, thus qualifying them as LC. Finally, we present evidence that endogenous LC persist in skin grafts for the observation period of 45 days. These studies show that hematopoietic precursors seed the skin during embryonic life and can give rise to LC.
A Geometric Filter Algorithm for Robust Device-Free Localization in Wireless Networks

Device-free localization (DFL) is the method of determining an uncooperative target's location by using the shadowing induced by the target on the radio links crossing through the wireless network's deployment area. Most DFL schemes require high memory and computing resources for accurate tracking performance, and thus may not be suitable for resource-constrained applications. To address this issue, a geometric filter (GF) algorithm that achieves accurate tracking using only operations on simple geometric objects is proposed. It reduces the algorithm's storage and computational resource requirements resulting in fast execution times. Experimental results show that the GF algorithm outperforms some grid-based and particle filterbased DFL methods with up to 65% reduction in tracking root-mean-square error, and up to 300 times improvement in average execution time.
Image-based gesture recognition for user interaction with mobile companion-based assistance systems

In this paper, we present image-based methods for robust recognition of static and dynamic hand gestures in real-time. These methods are used for an intuitive interaction with an assistance-system in which the skin-tones are used to segment the hands. The segmentation builds the basis of feature extraction for the static and dynamic gestures. In the static gestures, the activation of particular region leads us to associated actions whereas HMM classifier is used to extract the dynamic gestures dependent upon the flow. The assistance-system supports the workers in manual working tasks in the context of assembling complex products. This paper is focused on the interaction of the user with this system and describes the work in progress with the initial results from an application scenario.
Development of on-off duty cycle control with zero computational algorithm for CC-CV Li ion battery charger

Constant current constant voltage (CC-CV) lithium ions battery charger with new on off duty cycle control zero computational algorithm has been proposed in this paper. The techniques concise of simplify battery charger circuit and zero computational algorithm duty cycle control. The proposed circuit and technique then being tested with sort of experiment to prove it. Finally, the proposed technique is successfully doing the CC-CV stage swiftly and successfully charges the battery until 97% of its capacity in less than 3 hours' time.
Precancerous lesions in two counties of China with contrasting gastric cancer risk.

BACKGROUND Gastric cancer (GC) is one of the most common cancers worldwide and shows remarkable geographical variation even within countries such as China. Linqu County in Shandong Province of northeast China has a GC rate that is 15 times higher than that of Cangshan County in Shandong, even though these counties are within 200 miles of each other. METHOD In order to evaluate the frequency of precancerous gastric lesions in Linqu and Cangshan Counties we examined 3400 adults in Linqu County and 224 adults in Cangshan County. An endoscopic examination with four biopsies was performed in each individual of the two populations. RESULTS The prevalence of intestinal metaplasia (IM) and dysplasia (DYS) was 30% and 15.1%, respectively, in Linqu compared to 7.9% and 5.6% in Cangshan (P < 0.01). Within these histological categories, advanced grades were found more often in Linqu than in Cangshan. The prevalences of IM and DYS were more common at each biopsy site in Linqu, where the lesions also tended to affect multiple sites. CONCLUSIONS The findings of this study support the concept that IM and DYS are closely correlated with risks of GC and represent late stages in the multistep process of gastric carcinogenesis.
Radiographic localization of the acetabular component of a hip prosthesis.

The degree of anterior or posterior tilt of the acetabular cup can be established using fluoroscopy in patients with total hip prostheses. Since the technique is fast, painless, and requires minimal cooperation, it can be performed immediately following surgery. This method is suitable for postoperative evaluation of patients with total hip replacement and is also reproducible for serial analysis.
Compact omnidirectional circularly polarized dielectric resonator antenna

In this paper, a compact omnidirectional circularly polarized (CP) cylindrical dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) is presented. The DRA is excited in its TM01δ mode by a probe located at the center, giving linearly polarized (LP) omnidirectional radiation patterns. Four interleaved strips serving as a wave polarizer are placed on the top of the DRA. By tuning the strips, the LP fields can be changed into CP fields. The idea was verified at ~ 2.4 GHz for WLAN applications. The impedance bandwidth (|S11|<;-10 dB) and the 3-dB axial-ratio (AR) bandwidth are 14.5% (2.36-2.73 GHz) and 8.6% (2.33-2.54 GHz), respectively. Their overlapping bandwidth is 7.3% (2.36- 2.54 GHz), which can entirely cover the designed frequency band.
Adaptive Network Intrusion Detection Learning: Attribute Selection and Classification

In this paper, a new learning approach for network intrusion detection using naive Bayesian classifier and ID3 algorithm is presented, which identifies effective attributes from the training dataset, calculates the conditional probabilities for the best attribute values, and then correctly classifies all the examples of training and testing dataset. Most of the current intrusion detection datasets are dynamic, complex and contain large number of attributes. Some of the attributes may be redundant or contribute little for detection making. It has been successfully tested that significant attribute selection is important to design a real world intrusion detection systems (IDS). The purpose of this study is to identify effective attributes from the training dataset to build a classifier for network intrusion detection using data mining algorithms. The experimental results on KDD99 benchmark intrusion detection dataset demonstrate that this new approach achieves high classification rates and reduce false positives using limited computational resources.
Beyond Contention: Extending Texture-Based Scheduling Heuristics

In order to apply texture measurement based heuristic commitment techniques beyond the unary capacity resource constraints of job shop scheduling, we extend the contention texture measurement to a measure of the probability that a constraint will be broken. We define three methods for the estimation of this probability and show that they perform as well or better than existing heuristics on job shop scheduling problems. Empirical insight into the performance is provided and we sketch how we have extended probability-based heuristics to more complicated scheduling constraints.
MapReduce vs. Pipelining Counting Triangles

In this paper we follow an alternative approach named pipeline, to implement a parallel implementation of the well-known problem of counting triangles in a graph. This problem is especially interesting either when the input graph does not fit in memory or is dynamically generated. To be concrete, we implement a dynamic pipeline of processes and an ad-hoc MapReduce version using the language Go. We explote the ability of Go language to deal with channels and spawned processes. An empirical evaluation is conducted on graphs of different size and density. Observed results suggest that pipeline allows for the implementation of an efficient solution of the problem of counting triangles in a graph, particularly, in dense and large graphs, drastically reducing the execution time with respect to the MapReduce implementation.
Learning and optimization of novel sensorimotor feedback loops : Internal models meet classical conditioning

We investigated how novel sensorimotor feedback loops can be formed in the course of learning. More specifically, we examined motor adaptation in an experiment which systematically paired a lateral force pulse at movement onset with a delayed visual target perturbation. Learning in this context means associating the cue and the perturbation, such that sensory feedback about the cue triggers a corrective action suitable for the upcoming perturbation. The data from the experiment reveals that human subjects gradually embraced the information content of the force impulse and used it to predict the forthcoming target displacement. Behaviorally adaptation manifested itself as (1) movements towards the anticipated target position (after the force pulse ended and before the target perturbation occurred), (2) reduction of the counter-productive stretch-reflex-like response to the force pulse, and (3) reduction in grip force (without change in arm impedance). To model the main effects of our study, we developed an extension to optimal control which uses a hedging approach to mix target-specific optimal feedback controllers weighted by an agent's belief in the plausibility of future goal outcomes. Using this method we accurately modeled the movement trajectories in the different phases of learning and observed that subject's beliefs converged to the true task statistics. We believe that our extension to optimal control is applicable to other tasks where the central nervous system (CNS) needs to maintain multiple hypotheses about future goals under consideration and prune them in an online fashion as novel information becomes available.
Exploring Differential Topic Models for Comparative Summarization of Scientific Papers

This paper investigates differential topic models (dTM) for summarizing the differences among document groups. Starting from a simple probabilistic generative model, we propose dTM-SAGE that explicitly models the deviations on group-specific word distributions to indicate how words are used differen-tially across different document groups from a background word distribution. It is more effective to capture unique characteristics for comparing document groups. To generate dTM-based comparative summaries, we propose two sentence scoring methods for measuring the sentence discriminative capacity. Experimental results on scientific papers dataset show that our dTM-based comparative summari-zation methods significantly outperform the generic baselines and the state-of-the-art comparative summarization methods under ROUGE metrics.
Prefrontal/accumbal catecholamine system determines motivational salience attribution to both reward- and aversion-related stimuli

Recent evidence suggests that rewarding and aversive stimuli affect the same brain areas, including medial prefrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens. Although nucleus accumbens is known to respond to salient stimuli, regardless of their hedonic valence, with selective increased dopamine release, little is known about the role of prefrontal cortex in reward- and aversion-related motivation or about the neurotransmitters involved. Here we find that selective norepinephrine depletion in medial prefrontal cortex of mice abolished the increase in the release of norepinephrine by prefrontal cortex and of dopamine by nucleus accumbens that is induced by food, cocaine, or lithium chloride and impaired the place conditioning induced by both lithium chloride (aversion) and food or cocaine (preference). This is evidence that prefrontal cortical norepinephrine transmission is necessary for motivational salience attribution to both reward- and aversion-related stimuli through modulation of dopamine in nucleus accumbens, a brain area involved in all motivated behaviors.
Long term follow up after meningitis in infancy: behaviour of teenagers

Aims: To determine the effects of meningitis in infancy on subsequent teenage behaviour. Methods: A national postal survey of parents and teachers using an established standard behavioural questionnaire. Subjects were 739 of the surviving children from the national incidence study of infantile meningitis in England and Wales carried out between 1985 and 1987, together with a group of 606 matched controls that had been recruited when the index cases were 5 years old. Results: 46% of parents of children who had had meningitis with complications in infancy, compared with 21% of parents of control children rated their children as having behavioural problems. When the children were rated by their teachers, 37% and 23% respectively, were scored as having behavioural problems. There was no significant difference in behaviour between the 103 children who had had meningitis during the first month of life and the 634 who had had postneonatal meningitis. Eight of the index children had been excluded from school compared to none from the control group. Conclusions: The behaviour of teenage children who had meningitis in infancy is worse than that of control children who did not have infantile meningitis when rated by parents and teachers.
Molecular analysis of mutations in the Caenorhabditis elegans collagen gene dpy‐7.

Collagens are a family of proteins contributing to the body structure of eukaryotes. They are encoded by a large and diverse gene family in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans but by only a few genes in vertebrates. We have studied mutant alleles of the C. elegans dpy‐7 gene, one of a large group of genes whose mutant phenotype is altered body form and several of which have previously been shown to encode cuticular collagens. We made use of the C. elegans physical map to screen specifically for collagen genes in the region of the X chromosome to which dpy‐7 maps. This yielded a wild‐type collagen gene clone which we showed, by micro‐injection, could repair the dpy‐7 mutant phenotype in transgenic animals. We cloned the homologous sequence from four dpy‐7 mutant strains and by sequence analysis identified a single mutation in each case. All four mutations result in the substitution of a glycine with a larger residue in the conserved Gly‐X‐Y collagen domains. Similar substitutions in vertebrate collagens cause the heritable brittle bone disorder osteogenesis imperfecta. Whereas the human mutations are dominant, the dpy‐7 mutations are recessive, and this may reflect different levels of complexity of collagenous macromolecular structures in the two organisms.
Ultrasonographic Measurements of the Achilles Tendon in Elderly Athletes and Sedentary Men

Ultrasonography was performed on the Achilles tendon of the dominant limb of 18 male elderly athletes and 11 sedentary men, aged 70 to 80 years. The tendons were examined with a real-time linear array scanner using a 7.5 MHz transducer. Both longitudinal and transverse images were taken. The mean width of the Achilles tendon was significantly larger in the athletes than in the control subjects. The tendon thickness and cross-sectional area did not differ significantly between the groups, but the figures may indicate a tendency for larger cross-sectional area in the athletes. The results suggest tendon hypertrophy following long-term training.
Examination of tourism undergraduates’ industry commitment, in the context of China

ABSTRACT Grounded in the Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT), this study developed a comprehensive research framework that encapsulated both personal and contextual factors in terms of tourism undergraduates’ commitment to career choice in the context of China’s social and vocational contexts. Applying structural equation modeling (SEM) to the data collected from 446 undergraduate students studying tourism in China, this study shows that “self-interest,” “others’ support,” “social status,” “outcome expectation” and “nature of work” exert significant effects on students’ commitment to career choice. Implications of the findings include suggested interventions in attracting tourism students to persist in their career path.
Class-Based Smoothing to Estimate the Probability of Domain Terms

This paper proposes a method to estimate the probability of a special kind of domain term, namely the probability of an anatomy noun appearing as a part or modifier of a disease named phrase, which is used for the sparse data smoothing of disease named phrase recognition. The method is to estimate the probabilities in terms of senses from a semantic hierarchy, and exploit the fact that the terms can be grouped into classes based on interrelated semantic senses. The class-based smoothing re-creates terms co-occurrence frequencies based on the information provided by a semantic hierarchy, in order to estimate the frequencies of candidate string occurring in an argument position. In this paper, the semantic hierarchy comes from the modularizing or partitioning of anatomy ontology. The modularizing method is to extract maximum spanning sub-trees, under restrictions, from the ontology that expresses foundational anatomical objects and relations. Through the partitioning, some sub-models are extracted. The sub-models form the foundation of the semantic hierarchy. A procedure is carried out that makes a "tree cut" model on the hierarchy structure as a back-off model to estimate probability distribution of terms. The determinative criterion of the "tree cut" is introduced according to chi-squared statistic and freedom degree two parameters.
FGF2 secreting human fibroblast feeder cells: A novel culture system for human embryonic stem cells

Human embryonic stem cell (hESC) lines are traditionally derived and maintained on mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEF) which are xenogeneic and enter senescence rapidly. In view of the clinical implications of hESCs, the use of human fibroblast as feeders has been suggested as a plausible alternative. However, use of fibroblast cells from varying sources leads to culture variations along with the need to add FGF2 in cultures to sustain ES cell pluripotency. In this study we report the derivation of FGF2 expressing germ layer derived fibroblast cells (GLDF) from hESC lines. These feeders could support the pluripotency, karyotypes and proliferation of hESCs with or without FGF2 in prolonged cultures as efficiently as that on MEF. GLDF cells were derived from embryoid bodies and characterized for expression of fibroblast markers by RT‐PCR, Immunofluorescence and by flow cytometry for CD marker expression. The expression and secretion of FGF2 was confirmed by RT‐PCR, Western blot, and ELISA. The hESC lines cultured on MEF and GLDF were analyzed for various stemness markers. These feeder cells with fibroblast cells like properties maintained the properties of hESCs in prolonged culture over 30 passages. Proliferation and pluripotency of hESCs on GLDF was comparable to that on mouse feeders. Further we discovered that these GLDF cells could secrete FGF2 and maintained pluripotency of hESC cultures even in the absence of supplemental FGF2. To our knowledge, this is the first study reporting a novel hESC culture system which does not warrant FGF2 supplementation, thereby reducing the cost of hESC cultures. Mol. Reprod. Dev. 75: 1523–1532 © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
The Effect of EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) on Psychological Symptoms in Addiction Treatment: A Pilot Study

Objective:Studies have found a frequent co -occurrence of psychological symptoms such as anxiety and depression with addiction. This pilot study examined the effect of EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques), a widely practiced form of energy psychology, on 39 adults self-identified with addiction issues attending an EFT weekend workshop targeting addiction. Measures: Subjects completed the SA-45, a well-validated questionnaire measuring psychological distress. It has two global scales assessing intensity and breadth of psychological symptoms and 9 symptom subscales including anxiety and depression. The SA-45 was administered before and after the workshop. Twenty -eight participants completed a 90-day follow-up. Results:A statistically significant decrease was observed in the two global scales and all but one of the SA-45 subscales after the workshop, indicating a reduction in psychological distress (positive symptom total -38%, P<.000). Improvements on intensity and breadth of psychological symptoms, and anxiety and obsessive-compulsive subscales were maintained at the 90day follow-up (P<.001). Conclusion: These findings are consistent with those noted in studies of other populations, and suggest that EFT may be an effective adjunct to addiction treatment by