Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Absence of Mutations in the Human OB Gene in Obese/Diabetic Subjects

The product of the obese (ob) gene, leptin, is a secreted protein that is important in the regulation of body weight. Mice with mutations in the ob gene are obese and diabetic and manifest reduced physical as well as metabolic activity. In this study, we tested the possibility that mutations in the OB gene may contribute to human obesity. We report the isolation and partial sequence of the human OB gene and the screening of 105 obese patients for mutations in the protein coding sequence using the technique of single-strand conformational polymorphism. No coding sequence polymorphism was found, suggesting that mutations in the coding sequence of the OB gene do not constitute a common cause of increased body weight in humans. We also identified a highly polymorphic simple dinucleotide repeat DNA polymorphism in this gene that will be useful for genetic studies.
A Factory of Comparable Corpora from Wikipedia

Multiple approaches to grab comparable data from the Web have been developed up to date. Nevertheless, coming out with a high-quality comparable corpus of a specific topic is not straightforward. We present a model for the automatic extraction of comparable texts in multiple languages and on specific topics from Wikipedia. In order to prove the value of the model, we automatically extract parallel sentences from the comparable collections and use them to train statistical machine translation engines for specific domains. Our experiments on the English‐ Spanish pair in the domains of Computer Science, Science, and Sports show that our in-domain translator performs significantly better than a generic one when translating in-domain Wikipedia articles. Moreover, we show that these corpora can help when translating out-of-domain texts.
Improving Stability and Compactness in Street Layout Visualizations

We present and evaluate improvements for Street Layout, a technique that can be used for visualizing evolving hierarchical data such as file structures or software systems. Street Layouts represent data as street networks, where each street represents a branch of the hierarchy and buildings around streets represent leaves. We extended the initial idea in various ways to increase compactness and visual stability. Our approaches are compared against the current methods in a conducted technical evaluation. A prototypic application shows the applicability of our improvements for visualizing a real world data set.
An Instrument for Measuring Perception Levels on TQM Practices among R&D Center Employees in Saudi Arabia

The purpose of the study is to develop and validate an instrument to measure perception on TQM practices among research and development (R&D) center employees. Empirical data were collected from 102 employees in a public R&D center in Saudi Arabia. The content validity, construct validity, criterion-related validity, and reliability were examined. Results showed that the instrument is a reliable and valid tool in measuring the employees’ perception on TQM practices. This produces a relatively compact instrument comprising four TQM variables with 22 items that allows researchers and practitioners to measure perceived TQM implementation among all types of employees and TQM program levels in public organizations. Suggestions for using the instrument are presented.
A Theory of Network Equivalence— Part I: Point-to-Point Channels

A family of equivalence tools for bounding network capacities is introduced. Given a network N with node set V, the capacity of N is a set of non-negative vectors with elements corresponding to all possible multicast connections in N; a vector ℜ is in the capacity region for N if and only if it is possible to simultaneously and reliably establish all multicast connections across N at the given rates. Any other demand type with independent messages is a special case of this multiple multicast problem, and is therefore included in the given rate region. In Part I, we show that the capacity of a network N is unchanged if any independent, memoryless, point-to-point channel in N is replaced by a noiseless bit pipe with throughput equal to the removed channel's capacity. It follows that the capacity of a network comprised entirely of such point-to-point channels equals the capacity of an error-free network that replaces each channel by a noiseless bit pipe of the corresponding capacity. A related separation result was known previously for a single multicast connection over an acyclic network of independent, memoryless, point-to-point channels; our result treats general connections (e.g., a collection of simultaneous unicasts) and allows cyclic or acyclic networks.
Third Molar Removal and Orofacial Pain: a Population-Based Survey

ABSTRACT Objectives The aim of the current study was to investigate whether there was a relationship between a history of third molar removal and the prevalence of orofacial pain in a sample of the general population. Material and methods A survey was conducted in South East Cheshire, United Kingdom (81% participation rate). Information was collected using postal questionnaires (n = 1510) and dental records (n = 809). Results Participants who reported third molar extractions were more likely to report orofacial pain (RR = 1.29; 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.01 - 1.65). Participants with a more recent history of extractions (< 8 years ago) as recorded in dental records were more likely to report orofacial pain compared to those who had all third molar present (RR = 1.91; 95% CI 1.10 - 3.32). Conclusions This research suggests that self-reported third molar removal is linked to self-reported orofacial pain, however evidence from one study is not sufficient to give an unequivocal answer.
A Decade of Research on TLR2 Discovering Its Pivotal Role in Glial Activation and Neuroinflammation in Neurodegenerative Diseases

Toll-like receptors (TLRs) belong to a class of pattern recognition receptors that play an important role in host defense against pathogens. TLRs on innate immune cells recognize a wide variety of pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) and trigger innate immune responses. Later, it was revealed that the same receptors are also utilized to detect tissue damage to trigger inflammatory responses in the context of non-infectious inflammation. In the nervous system, different members of the TLR family are expressed on glial cells including astrocytes, microglia, oligodendrocytes, and Schwann cells, implicating their putative role in innate/inflammatory responses in the nervous system. In this regard, we have investigated the function of TLRs in neuroinflammation. We discovered that a specific member of the TLR family, namely TLR2, functions as a master sentry receptor to detect neuronal cell death and tissue damage in many different neurological conditions including nerve transection injury, intracerebral hemorrhage, traumatic brain injury, and hippocampal excitotoxicity. In this review, we have summarized our research for the last decade on the role of TLR2 in neuroinflammation in the above neurological disorders. Our data suggest that TLR2 can be an efficient target to regulate unwanted inflammatory response in these neurological conditions.
Screen-Camera Calibration using a Spherical Mirror

Developments in the consumer market have indicated that the average user of a personal computer is likely to also own a webcam. With the emergence of this new user group will come a new set of applications, which will require a user-friendly way to calibrate the position of the camera with respect to the location of the screen. This paper presents a fully automatic method to calibrate a screen-camera setup, using a single moving spherical mirror. Unlike other methods, our algorithm needs no user intervention other then moving around a spherical mirror. In addition, if the user provides the algorithm with the exact radius of the sphere in millimeters, the scale of the computed solution is uniquely defined.
Ensemble Filtering for High Dimensional Non-linear State Space Models

We consider non-linear state space models in high-dimensional situations, where the two common tools for state space models both have difficulties. The Kalman filter variants are seriously biased due to non-Gaussianity and the particle filter suffers from the “curse of dimensionality”. Inspired by a regression perspective on the Kalman filter, a novel approach is developed by combining the Kalman filter and particle filter, retaining the stability of the Kalman filter in large systems as well as the accuracy of particle filters in highly non-linear systems. Its theoretical properties are justified under the Gaussian linear models as an extension of the Kalman filter. Its performance is tested and compared with other methods on a simulated chaotic system which is used widely in numerical weather forecasting.
Branching processes of communication structured PT-nets

Communication structured occurrence nets (CSON) are an extension of occurrence nets. They can be used to represent the execution behaviours of complex evolving systems. Communication structured place transition nets (CSPT-nets) provide a system-level model for describing the interaction between different systems, and CSONs can model individual runs of CSPT-nets. In this paper, we investigate branching processes of CSPT-nets which provide a complete information about their behaviours. We also outline an algorithm for the construction of unfoldings of CSPT-nets. © 2013 Newcastle University. Printed and published by Newcastle University, Computing Science, Claremont Tower, Claremont Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, England. Bibliographical details
Describing Video Contents in Natural Language

This contribution addresses generation of natural language descriptions for human actions, behaviour and their relations with other objects observed in video streams. The work starts with implementation of conventional image processing techniques to extract high level features from video. These features are converted into natural language descriptions using context free grammar. Although feature extraction processes are erroneous at various levels, we explore approaches to putting them together to produce a coherent description. Evaluation is made by calculating ROUGE scores between human annotated and machine generated descriptions. Further we introduce a task based evaluation by human subjects which provides qualitative evaluation of generated descriptions.
Idempotence and automatic linear contrast enhancements

We investigate the natural requirement that an automated contrast enhancement algorithm be idempotent. We show that in a restricted but natural setting, it leads to a binding of the contrast changes with the decision procedure. We obtain: a natural decision procedure for the standard gamma-transformations; a class of contrast changes generalizing these; a procedure to "learn" an algorithm from a set of good images.
A Pragmatics-First Approach to the Analysis and Generation of Discourse Relations

In this paper, we present some key issues of our dialogue system for spoken language1 which has been designed to enable quick configurability to various applications and to apply deep syntactic and semantic analysis, discourse processing, and language generation. It features a complex semantics-pragmatics interface in the sense of (Brietzmann and Görz, 1982): Discourse and application pragmatics are considered independent from each other; user utterances affect application pragmatics in that they are translated into speech acts which, in turn, indicate a user request to the application. The system’s behaviour is specified in a special programming language interpreted by the dialogue manager. The semantics of this language is defined in terms of an extended version of DRT.
Development of paraplegic quadriceps muscle model using ANN and ANFIS

This paper presents the development of Quadriceps muscle model by using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) based on Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES). The impacts of the output torque with different stimulation parameters (frequency, pulse width and sampling time) are investigated. These parameters will be used to develop the paraplegic muscle models. Muscle models developed are validated with the clinical data to evaluate the accuracy of the output torque predicted compare to the actual paraplegic muscle torque. From the study, ANN is found to be the most accurate model compare to ANFIS with the value of mean squared error of 0.3758. Both developed models in this study can be used in a various control strategies to control FES parameters during rehabilitation proses using FES.
Mining brain features from schizophrenia studies with Shift-And pattern matching

An efficient prospect to medical procedures such as diagnosis and therapy is by obtaining knowledge of medical experts from formal reports. Several studies have been carried out on finding differences in brain connectivity between schizophrenia patients and healthy controls with their results reported in natural language with tables and figures. In the area of biomedical research, natural language processing can be employed to retrieve relevant information from articles by scientific and medical experts, based on which a brain network characterizing schizophrenia could be built. Hence, this study presents suitable text mining model for retrieving information about brain region. Meta-analysis is employed to integrate knowledge from different, while relevant information is retrieved from scientific publications with Shift-And Pattern Matching. Evaluation on a set of 1,525 scientific literatures on schizophrenia shows the model has good recall of 73.7%.
SPOT: A System for Detecting Projected Outliers From High-dimensional Data Streams

In this paper, we present a new technique, called stream projected ouliter detector (SPOT), to deal with outlier detection problem in high-dimensional data streams. SPOT is unique in a number of aspects. First, SPOT employs a novel window-based time model and decaying cell summaries to capture statistics from the data stream. Second, sparse subspace template (SST), a set of top sparse subspaces obtained by unsupervised and/or supervised learning processes, is constructed in SPOT to detect projected outliers effectively. Multi-Objective genetic algorithm (MOGA) is employed as an effective search method in unsupervised learning for finding outlying subspaces from training data. Finally, SST is able to carry out online self- evolution to cope with dynamics of data streams. This paper provides details on the motivation and technical challenges of detecting outliers from high-dimensional data streams, present an overview of SPOT, and give the plans for system demonstration of SPOT.
Section Ii-exercise Physiology & Sports Medicine Damage to Liver and Skeletal Muscles in Marathon Runners during a 100 Km Run with Regard to Age and Running Speed

The purpose of this study was to determine: (1) whether damage to liver and skeletal muscles occurs during a 100 km run; (2) whether the metabolic response to extreme exertion is related to the age or running speed of the participant; (3) whether it is possible to determine the optimal running speed and distance for long-distance runners' health by examining biochemical parameters in venous blood. Fourteen experienced male amateur ultra-marathon runners, divided into two age groups, took part in a 100 km run. Blood samples for liver and skeletal muscle damage indexes were collected from the ulnar vein just before the run, after 25, 50, 75 and 100 km, and 24 hours after termination of the run. A considerable increase in alanine aminotransferase (ALT) and aspartate aminotransferase (AST) was observed with the distance covered (p < 0.05), which continued during recovery. An increase in the mean values of lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), creatine kinase (CK) and C-reactive protein (CRP) (p < 0.05) was observed with each sequential course. The biggest differences between the age groups were found for the activity of liver enzymes and LDH after completing 75 km as well as after 24 hours of recovery. It can be concluded that the response to extreme exertion deteriorates with age in terms of the active movement apparatus.
The Translator’s Discourse and Voice in Chimamanda N. Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun

En este trabajo nos proponemos explorar la presencia discursiva del Traductor (Hermans, 1996; Schiavi, 1996; Suchet, 2013) en la novela Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) de la escritora nigeriana Chimamanda N. Adichie (1977—). En este sentido y siguiendo la definicion de estereotipo que plantea Amossy (1999, 2009, 2012) para dar cuenta de la perspectiva argumentativa del ethos, nuestro analisis intentara dar cuenta de las caracteristicas hibridas, interlingues e interculturales que se manifiestan en el texto “original” a partir de las marcas de la heterogeneidad como expresion de la estrategia enunciativa-discursiva del ethos del Autor. De manera complementaria, analizamos los procesos de (auto) traduccion (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin, [1989] 2002; Tymoczko, 1999; Spoturno, [2010] 2014) que intervienen en la version en ingles y en la traduccion espanola de la obra realizada por Laura Rins Calahorra (2014). Mas especificamente, nos interesa establecer la naturaleza de la presencia discursiva del Traductor como estrategia textual en relacion con la (re) configuracion del ethos del Autor. Finalmente, con el proposito de analizar las formas de la heterogeneidad (principalmente en la alternancia de lenguas ingles-igbo, en el uso de los proverbios y el cambio de codigo, entre otras variables) y evaluar la manera en que la traductora traslada estas marcas al espanol, examinamos si las elecciones traductologicas del Traductor tienden a la homogeneizacion o a la heterogeneidad del texto original (Berman, 1985; van Leuven-Zwart, 1989; 1990; Bandia, 2006; Rodriguez Murphy, 2010) tanto en el nivel de la microestructura como de la macroestructura.
More than a black and white issue: ethnic identity, social dominance orientation, and support for the black lives matter movement

ABSTRACT The Black Lives Matter (BLM) Movement is the civil rights issue of our time, with opinions being fractured along racial lines. We examine how the relationship between identity constructs and BLM support operates differently among African Americans and White Americans. Our findings show ethnic identity predicts African Americans’ attitudes on BLM, but is a poor predictor of White Americans’ beliefs. Conversely, social dominance orientation better predicts White Americans’ opinions of BLM, but does not associate with BLM attitudes among African Americans. The interaction of these constructs among White American respondents suggests that as White Americans discuss racial issues, the impact of social dominance is negated – leading to positive evaluations of BLM. These processes have implications for communication about racial issues.
Hey Stress, I Stress to De-Stress Me from Distress: A Study on Indian Police Constables

"Objective – What are the work-related issues which contribute to police constables stress? How do police constables get rid of their stress? Because stress and copings are the two most important factors that influence work-related wellbeing. This paper aims to understand the theoretical framework of police stress and coping procedures. The ideas that make up this system can be used in the appraisal, intervention, and assessment of the police stress reaction and the coping forms utilised after stressful situations. Methodology/Technique – 492 Tamil Nadu state police constables were chosen randomly. Information was gathered utilising two self-report questionnaires which include questionnaire related to police stress and coping strategies. Researcher measured the reliability and validity of the multiple-item research scales by analysing the measurement model using confirmatory factor analysis. Correlation analysis investigative the relationship between police stress and coping strategies, it found that it was positive and significant. Further, the researcher used the SEM approach to testing the relationship between police stress and coping strategies. Findings – SEM approach concludes that overall police stress influences self-supported emotional focused coping strategies positively and that overall police stressors have a positive impact on social supported emotional focused coping strategies. Furthermore, there is a positive impact on overall stress and problem-focused coping and avoidant coping strategies. Novelty – The outcomes can be utilised to help researchers and policy makers foresee police work execution and aid government consider police's identity attributes. "
Experimental assessment of imbalance conditions in a tripolar cuff for ENG recordings

Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) may be improved by the use of naturally occurring nerve signals as feedback signals. However, the usefulness of the recorded electroneurogram (ENG) signals from nerve cuff electrodes depends on the amount of electromyogram (EMG) interference and stimulus artefact present. Tripolar cuff electrodes reduce interference but suffer from imbalance, which degrades the performance of amplifier recording configurations. Previously cuff imbalance has been mainly associated with impedance variations inside the cuff and cuff asymmetry. In this paper, imbalance is associated with additional factors, including cuff orientation and distance from the interference source. The findings are based on in-vivo and in-vitro experiments performed using a true-tripole amplifier recording system.
Gazing Into the Crystal Ball: Are Majority Groups Threatened by a Minority-Majority Future?

By the mid to late 21st century, it is projected that ethnic European majority groups will account for less than half the total populations of many Western countries. As a result of this projected ethnic shift, these countries will become “minority-majority” nations. Three experiments were conducted in New Zealand to investigate how present-day majority group members (New Zealand Europeans) perceive and react to a projected minority-majority future. It was found that those exposed to a minority-majority future expressed greater feelings of ingroup sympathy than those presented with present-day demographic information. However, contrary to the findings of similar research conducted in North America, the minority-majority future was not associated with negative attitudes towards migrants or greater ingroup serving biases. When comparing two projected future conditions (New Zealand European-majority future vs. a minority-majority future), participants in the minority-majority condition expressed greater belief that the nation would possess more positive characteristics than those in the New Zealand European-majority condition. Additionally, the experimental condition was found to moderate the relationship between future expectations and present-day attitudes and action intentions. Depending on the strength of expectations for future societal dysfunction, development, and benevolence, participants in the minority-majority condition were more or less likely to engage in present-day pro-diversity actions or perceive diversity as threatening. Implications for theoretical research and New Zealand intergroup dynamics are discussed.
Detecting and Excluding Misbehaving Nodes in a P2P Network

Given their fully distributed architecture, P2P networks allow the design of low cost and high availability systems but also pose new security problems. In these collaborative networks, security properties need to be ensured by the participants themselves. In this paper, we propose to detect and exclude misbehaving nodes to allow honest participants to enforce security properties. The proposed scheme is fully distributed.