Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Recent Advances in On-Line Methods Based on Extraction for Speciation Analysis of Chromium in Environmental Matrices

The biological activity of Cr(III) and Cr(VI) species, their chemical behavior, and toxic effects are dissimilar. The speciation analysis of Cr(III) and Cr(VI) in environmental matrices is then of great importance and much research has been devoted to this area. This review presents recent developments in on-line speciation analysis of chromium in such samples. Flow systems have proved to be excellent tools for automation of sample pretreatment, separation/preconcentration of chromium species, and their detection by various instrumental techniques. Analytical strategies used in chromium speciation analysis discussed in this review are divided into categories based on selective extraction/separation of chromium species on solid sorbents and liquid-liquid extraction of chromium species. The most popular strategy is that based on solid-phase extraction. Therefore, this review shows the potential of novel materials designed and used for selective binding of chromium species. The progress in miniaturization of measurement systems is also presented.
Inpainting in Shape from Focus: Taking a Cue from Motion Parallax

Shape from focus (SFF) which uses a sequence of space-variantly defocused frames works under the constraint that there is ‘no magnification’ in the stack. In the presence of sensor damage and/or occlusions, there will be missing data in the observations and SFF cannot recover structure in those regions. In many applications, the capability of fillingin missing data is of critical importance. In this paper, we investigate the effect of motion parallax in SFF and demonstrate the interesting possibility of how it can be judiciously used to jointly inpaint image and depth profiles. When there is relative motion between the 3D specimen and the camera, by virtue of the inherent pixel motion in each of the frames, it is possible to obtain a focused image and depth map of the scene despite missing regions in the observations.
Evaluating clinicians' experience in a telemedicine application: a presence perspective

The Virtual Critical Care Unit, (ViCCU®) is a telemedicine system that allows a specialist at a major referral hospital to direct a team in a rural hospital. ViCC® allows remote consultation to take place based on the transmission of multiple channels of real-time video/audio information of the patient, the clinical team, x-ray/paper documents and patient vital signs from the remote site to the specialist. This paper explores clinicians' experience of presence in a telemedicine application. In this study we used a modified version of the Slater-Usoh-Steed (SUS) presence questionnaire to measure clinicians' sense of presence when using ViCC®. We also explored the relationship between presence felt when using ViCCU® and personal, usability and media factors. Initial results indicate that in this context, personal factors influenced clinicians experience of presence and that there was a positive relationship between presence and both usability and media factors. Reflection on some of the challenges in conducting this study in an emergency department and the appropriateness of the SUS presence measure in this real setting are also included.
The Advanced Computing Systems Association 5 Th Usenix Conference on Object-oriented Technologies and Systems (coots '99) Comprehensive Profiling Support in the Java Virtual Machine Comprehensive Profiling Support in the Java Tm Virtual Machine

Existing profilers for Java applications typically rely on custom instrumentation in the Java virtual machine, and measure only limited types of resource consumption. Garbage collection and multi-threading pose additional challenges to profiler design and implementation. In this paper we discuss a general-purpose, portable, and extensible approach for obtaining comprehensive profiling information from the Java virtual machine. Pro-filers based on this framework can uncover CPU usage hot spots, heavy memory allocation sites, unnecessary object retention, contended monitors, and thread deadlocks. In addition, we discuss a novel algorithm for thread-aware statistical CPU time profiling, a heap profiling technique independent of the garbage collection implementation, and support for interactive profiling with minimum overhead.
Sequence-Based Appraisal of the Genes Encoding Neck and Carbohydrate Recognition Domain of Conglutinin in Blackbuck (Antilope cervicapra) and Goat (Capra hircus)

Conglutinin, a collagenous C-type lectin, acts as soluble pattern recognition receptor (PRR) in recognition of pathogens. In the present study, genes encoding neck and carbohydrate recognition domain (NCRD) of conglutinin in goat and blackbuck were amplified, cloned, and sequenced. The obtained 488 bp ORFs encoding NCRD were submitted to NCBI with accession numbers KC505182 and KC505183. Both nucleotide and predicted amino acid sequences were analysed with sequences of other ruminants retrieved from NCBI GenBank using DNAstar and Megalign5.2 software. Sequence analysis revealed maximum similarity of blackbuck sequence with wild ruminants like nilgai and buffalo, whereas goat sequence displayed maximum similarity with sheep sequence at both nucleotide and amino acid level. Phylogenetic analysis further indicated clear divergence of wild ruminants from the domestic ruminants in separate clusters. The predicted secondary structures of NCRD protein in goat and blackbuck using SWISSMODEL ProtParam online software were found to possess 6 beta-sheets and 3 alpha-helices which are identical to the result obtained in case of sheep, cattle, buffalo, and nilgai. However, quaternary structure in goat, sheep, and cattle was found to differ from that of buffalo, nilgai, and blackbuck, suggesting a probable variation in the efficiency of antimicrobial activity among wild and domestic ruminants.
AVO Inversion Via Localized Migrations

We present a one-step 2.5-D inversion method that estimates AVO parameter intercept and slope by minimizing data misfit over a range of CMPs in the least-square sense. Represented by either the 2.5-D Born or the 2.5-D Kirchhoff approximation, the predicted data are parameterized in terms of intercept and slope of the angle-dependent reflection coefficient. Minimization with respect to the intercept and slope leads to two five-fold integral equations. Application of multi-dimensional stationary phase approximation reduces these integral equations to manageable algebraic form. The final algorithm locally migrates and stacks the data with two special weight functions, followed by a 2 2 matrix inversion at each image point. Synthetic example validates the proposed methodology. Field data examples demonstrate the superior performance of our algorithm over conventional approaches.
Japanese Advanced Meteorological Imager: a next generation GEO imager for MTSAT-1R

The Japanese Advanced Meteorological Imager (JAMI) introduces next generation technology geosynchronous earth orbit (GEO) imagers for operational meteorological remote sensing. Raytheon Santa Barbara Remote Sensing is building JAMI for Space Systems/Loral as the imager subsystem for Japan's MTSAT-1R system. JAMI represents the best balance between heritage and newer space-qualified technology and meets all Japan Ministry of Transport MTSAT requirements from beginning to end of life with considerable margin, using a simple, inherently low risk design. The advanced technology built into this imager benefits operational meteorological imaging for Japan, East Asia and Australia by enabling significantly better radiometric sensitivity and absolute accuracy, higher spatial resolution and faster full disk coverage times than available from current GEO imagers. JAMI is on schedule for an on time or early delivery to Space Systems/Loral.
Children's estimates of food portion size: the effect of timing of dietary interview on the accuracy of children's portion size estimates

For food intakes to be converted into nutrient intakes a measure or estimate of the amount of food consumed is required. A number of methods have been developed to assist subjects in providing an estimate of portion size. Children's ability to use perception, conceptualisation and memory skills to estimate food portion size has not been investigated systematically. The aim of the present study was to test the effect of the timing of a dietary interview on the accuracy of estimates of food portion sizes made by children, using food photographs, food models and an interactive portion size assessment system, developed for use with children and based on portion sizes of foods consumed by children. Children (n 108) aged 4–14 years were supplied with known quantities of foods and asked to estimate the portion size of each food using each of the three portion size assessment tools. Interviews took place (a) with the food in view, (b) just after the child had eaten the food or (c) 24 h after the child had eaten the food. There were no significant differences in children's ability to estimate food portion size (either as served or as eaten) with timing of interview. That is, children were as accurate in their estimates of portion size 24 h after consuming the food as when the food was in view. Under these conditions many children were able to estimate food portion size utilising perception, conceptualisation and memory skills.
Spin and valence states of iron in (Mg0.8Fe0.2)SiO3 perovskite

The spin and valence states of iron in (Mg0.8Fe0.2)SiO3 perovskite were measured between 0 and 65 GPa using synchrotron Mössbauer spectroscopy. Samples were synthesized in situ in the laser‐heated diamond cell under reducing conditions. The dominant spin state of iron in perovskite is high spin at pressures below 50 GPa. Above 50 GPa, the spectra shows severe changes which can be explained by appearance of two distinct iron sites with similar site weightings. One site has Mössbauer parameters consistent with high spin Fe2+, while the other has the parameters previously interpreted as intermediate spin. The latter intermediate‐spin assignment is not unique, as similar Mössbauer parameters have been reported for high spin Fe2+ in almandine at ambient pressure. However, our data do not rule out the existence of low‐spin iron, which may exist with a smaller fraction and explain the observation of lower spin moments in the X‐ray emission spectroscopy of perovskite at high pressure. From these considerations, our preferred interpretation is that iron in perovskite is mixed or high spin to at least 2000 km depths in the mantle, consistent with computational results. Our study also reveals that reducing conditions do not inhibit the formation of Fe3+ in perovskite at deep‐mantle pressures.
Dynamic Teaching in Sequential Decision Making Environments

We describe theoretical bounds and a practical algorithm for teaching a model by demonstration in a sequential decision making environment. Unlike previous efforts that have optimized learners that watch a teacher demonstrate a static policy, we focus on the teacher as a decision maker who can dynamically choose different policies to teach different parts of the environment. We develop several teaching frameworks based on previously defined supervised protocols, such as Teaching Dimension, extending them to handle noise and sequences of inputs encountered in an MDP.We provide theoretical bounds on the learnability of several important model classes in this setting and suggest a practical algorithm for dynamic teaching.
Heterogeneous Cerebral Vasoreactivity Dynamics in Patients with Carotid Stenosis

Cerebral vasoreactivity (CVR) can be assessed by functional MRI (fMRI) using hypercapnia challenges. In normal subjects, studies have shown temporal variability of CVR blood oxygenation level-dependent responses among different brain regions. In the current study, we analyzed the variability of BOLD CVR dynamics by fMRI with a breath-holding task in 17 subjects with unilateral carotid stenosis before they received carotid stenting. Great heterogeneity of CVR dynamics was observed when comparing BOLD responses between ipsilateral and contralateral hemispheres in each patient, especially in middle cerebral artery (MCA) territories. While some subjects (n=12) had similar CVR responses between either hemisphere, the others (n=5) had a poorly correlated pattern of BOLD changes between ipsilateral and contralateral hemispheres. In the latter group, defined as impaired CVR, post-stenting perfusion tended to be more significantly increased. Our data provides the first observation of divergent temporal BOLD responses during breath holding in patients with carotid stenosis. The development of collateral circulation and the derangement of cerebral hemodynamics can be detected through this novel analysis of the different patterns of BOLD changes. The results also help in prediction of robust increase of perfusion or hyperperfusion after carotid stenting.
Status of re-registered patients for tuberculosis treatment under DOTS programme.

OBJECTIVE To assess the proportion of patients re-registered after default, failure or successful treatment, completion and evaluate their treatment outcome. SETTING Tuberculosis patients diagnosed were registered for treatment under DOTS in rural area, South India. Patients reregistered during 1999-2004 identified from the TB register were considered for analysis. RESULTS Among 273 Category-I patients 'defaulted' 23% and among 112 'failure' cases 68% were re-registered. After 'successful treatment completion' of 1796 cases 6.5% were re-registered as relapse. Corresponding figures for Category II were 20% of 281 defaulters; 23% of 60 failures; 12.9% of 302 'successful treatment completion' patients. Among patients re-registered as 'default', subsequent default was also high (57% vs 37%). Failure in Category II treatment was similar among patients who were re-registered for Category II and initially registered in it for treatment. Median delay for reregistration was >200 days for 'defaulters' and 18 days for 'failures'. CONCLUSION Our findings emphasise the need for continuing motivation and prompt defaulter retrieval action to reduce default at all stages of treatment. 'Defaulters' need to be contacted so that they can be started on treatment without delay. Patients declared as 'successful treatment completion' should be encouraged to report if chest symptoms recur.
Fully-trainable deep matching

Deep Matching (DM) is a popular high-quality method for quasi-dense image matching. Despite its name, however, the original DM formulation does not yield a deep neural network that can be trained end-to-end via backpropagation. In this paper, we remove this limitation by rewriting the complete DM algorithm as a convolutional neural network. This results in a novel deep architecture for image matching that involves a number of new layer types and that, similar to recent networks for image segmentation, has a U-topology. We demonstrate the utility of the approach by improving the performance of DM by learning it end-to-end on an image matching task.
An alternative approach for auditory attention tracking using single-trial EEG

Auditory selective attention plays a central role in the human capacity to reliably process complex sounds in multi-source environments. Stimulus reconstruction has been widely used for the investigation of selective auditory attention using multichannel electroencephalography (EEG). In particular, the influence of attention on sound representations in the brain has been modeled by linear time-variant filters and have been used to track the attentional state of individuals in multi-source environments. Detection of auditory attention is of interest and is important in the study of attention-related disorders and has potential application in the hearing aid and advertising industries. In analogy with the rake receiver from wireless communications, we propose a new strategy, adapting principles from minimum variance beamforming, to reconstruct stimuli for decoding the at-tentional state of listeners in a competing speaker environment. We show through experiments with real electrophysiological data how decoding accuracies can be improved using our proposed scheme.
Apportionment of emission source strengths using optical remote sensing and dispersion modeling

At the beginning of an air pollution event, pollutants are emitted into the atmosphere by a variety of sources. The knowledge of the emissions of every source is inevitable to carry out adequate reduction measures. Sometimes, the estimation of source strengths from afar is necessary due to the lack of accessibility to the source (e.g.: aircraft in use) or due to the diffuse character of the source (e.g. area sources). Source strengths and concentration measurements are connected by the transport of the pollutant, which can be estimated using a dispersion model. The underlying idea to determine the source strength is to run the dispersion model varying the input parameters as long as needed to obtain the least possible difference of measured and modelled concentrations. The model input is then assumed to be the best estimation of the emission rates. Assuming a passive pollutant, the transport and dispersion can be condensed into a set of linear equations and hence, linear algebra can be used to solve for the source strength (e.g. Singular Value Decomposition). The advantage of concentration measurements along a horizontal path (e.g. by FTIR, DOAS) is to reduce the degree of uncertainty regarding the horizontal dispersion. So the main interest of the modelling approach is to estimate the amount of vertical dispersion that accounts for the dilution of the pollutants. Applying this method to a real case with highly heterogeneous source characteristics in time and space, measurements at an international airport were performed. Some results of these measurements are presented here.
Crustal thickness map of the western United States by partitioned waveform inversion

The partitioned waveform inversion method [Nolet, 1990] was used to obtain a new crustal thickness map of the western United States. We fitted 200 seismograms containing higher- and fundamental mode Rayleigh waves for events and stations in the western United States, which provided average crustal thickness constraints between each source-receiver pair. All these constraints were combined in a linear inversion to obtain a crustal thickness map. Local crustal thickness estimates from published seismic reflection/refraction work were used as additional constraints to overcome deficiencies of path coverage in some areas. The resulting crustal thickness map shows thicker (∼45 km) crust beneath the Cascades, thick (∼40 km) crust beneath the Sierra Nevada, thin (∼30 km) crust beneath the Basin and Range, and thick (greater than 45 km) crust beneath the Colorado Plateau. The boundary between the Colorado Plateau and the southern leg of the Basin and Range is a prominent feature of the model. Thick crust is seen at the bend of the San Andreas fault near Los Angeles. Our model is broadly consistent with the crustal thickness map of Mooney and Weaver [1989]. A quantitative comparison with the crustal thickness model 3SMAC [Nataf and Ricard, 1996] was performed by inverting for a model that deviates least from it. Results show that we are able to retain most of the features of that model while maintaining a good fit to the surface wave and point constraint data.
A distributed diffusive heuristic for clustering a virtual P2P supercomputer

For the management of a virtual P2P supercomputer one is interested in subgroups of processors that can communicate with each other efficiently. The task of finding these subgroups can be formulated as a graph clustering problem, where clusters are vertex subsets that are densely connected within themselves, but sparsely connected to each other. Due to resource constraints, clustering using global knowledge (i. e., knowing (nearly) the whole input graph) might not be permissible in a P2P scenario, e. g. , because collecting the data is not possible or would consume a high amount of resources. That is why we present a distributed heuristic using only limited local knowledge for clustering static and dynamic graphs. Based on disturbed diffusion, our algorithm DIDIC implicitly optimizes cut-related quality measures such as modularity. It thus settles between distributed clustering algorithms for other quality measures (e. g., energy efficiency in the field of ad-hoc-networking) and graph clustering algorithms optimizing cut-related measures with global knowledge. Our experiments with graphs resembling a virtual P2P supercomputer show the promising potential of the new approach: Although each node starts with a random cluster number, may communicate only with its direct neighbors within the graph, and requires only a small amount of additional memory space, the solutions computed by DIDIC converge to clusterings that are comparable in quality to those computed by the established non-distributed graph clustering library mcl, whose main algorithm uses global knowledge.
Occurrence of the northern short-tailed shrew (Mammalia: Soricomorpha: Soricidae: Blarina brevicauda) in Oklahoma

Three species of shrews of the genus Blarina inhabit the central and eastern U.S. —B. brevicauda, B. hylophaga, and B. carolinensis. These shrews are quite similar morphologically, and prior to 1972 they were considered a single species (B. brevicauda). Genoways and Choate (1972) and Genoways et al. (1972) separated B. brevicauda into two species (B. brevicauda and B. carolinensis) by elevating B. brevicauda carolinensis. Later, George et al. (1981, 1982) split B. carolinensis into two species (B. carolinensis and B. hylophaga) based on karyotypic and morpholologic data. They described the distribution of B. brevicauda as extending south to Platte, Randolph, and Ralls counties of Missouri (George et al. 1982), with a broad area of sympatry with B. hylophaga occurring across southern Iowa and northern Missouri. Thompson et al. (2011) examined this purported area of sympatry (using karyotypic and nuclear DNA markers) and found that the two species occurred parapatrically rather than sympatrically. Within their study area, B. hylophaga was found to occur in two counties of southern Iowa (Fremont and Page) and three counties of northern Missouri (Atchison, Holt, and Nodoway). Since shrews from the southernmost extent of their study area (Platte, Clay, and Ray counties) were identified as B. brevicauda, the southern limit of the range of B. brevicauda must be south of those counties. Additionally, Webster et al. (2011) extended the distribution of B. brevicauda into northeastern Kansas (based on morphologic data)