Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adaptive Curvature-Sensitive Meshing of the Medial Axis

The medial axis transform provides an alternative r epresentation of geometric models that has many use ful properties for analysis modelling. Applications include decomposition of ge neral solids into sub regions for mapped meshing, i dentification of slender regions for dimensional reduction and recognition o f small features for suppression. In order to serve these purposes effectively, it is important to approximate the medial axis so that the curvatur e has been respected. This paper describes a genera l idea, which is based on equal distance criteria, for adaptive, curvature-sensitive mesh refinement on the medial a xis, after its topology has been defined. The completed set of theories and exa mples for 2-D planar objects and 3-D solid objects are presented.
Biological Crystallography Structural Insights into the Human Ryr2 N-terminal Region Involved in Cardiac Arrhythmias

Human ryanodine receptor 2 (hRyR2) mediates calcium release from the sarcoplasmic reticulum, enabling cardio-myocyte contraction. The N-terminal region of hRyR2 (amino acids 1–606) is the target of >30 arrhythmogenic mutations and contains a binding site for phosphoprotein phosphatase 1. Here, the solution and crystal structures determined under near-physiological conditions, as well as a homology model of the hRyR2 N-terminal region, are presented. The N-terminus is held together by a unique network of interactions among its three domains, A, B and C, in which the central helix (amino acids 410–437) plays a prominent stabilizing role. Importantly, the anion-binding site reported for the mouse RyR2 N-terminal region is notably absent from the human RyR2. The structure concurs with the differential stability of arrhythmogenic mutations in the central helix (R420W, I419F and I419F/R420W) which are owing to disparities in the propensity of mutated residues to form energetically favourable or unfavourable contacts. In solution, the N-terminus adopts a globular shape with a prominent tail that is likely to involve residues 545–606, which are unresolved in the crystal structure. Docking the N-terminal domains into cryo-electron microscopy maps of the closed and open RyR1 conformations reveals C atom movements of up to 8 A ˚ upon channel gating, and predicts the location of the leucine– isoleucine zipper segment and the interaction site for spinophilin and phosphoprotein phosphatase 1 on the RyR surface. PDB reference: N-terminal region of the human ryano-dine receptor 2, 4jkq
Enhancement of reverberant speech using LP residual signal

We propose a new method of processing speech degraded by reverberation. The method is based on analysis of short (2 ms) segments of data to enhance the regions in the speech signal having a high signal-to-reverberant component ratio (SRR). The short segment analysis shows that SRR is different in different segments of speech. The processing method involves identifying and manipulating the linear prediction residual signal in three different regions of the speech signal, namely, high SRR region, low SRR region, and only reverberation component region. A weight function is derived to modify the linear prediction residual signal. The weighted residual signal samples are used to excite a time-varying all-pole filter to obtain perceptually enhanced speech. The method is robust to noise present in the recorded speech signal. The performance is illustrated through spectrograms, subjective and objective evaluations.
Maximal Power Output and Perceptual Fatigue Responses During a Division I Female Collegiate Soccer Season

Abstract McLean, BD, Petrucelli, C, and Coyle, EF. Maximal power output and perceptual fatigue responses during a Division I female collegiate soccer season. J Strength Cond Res 26(12): 3189–3196, 2012—The purpose of this study was to investigate how maximal power output (PMAX), as measured via the inertial load cycling technique, changes throughout a collegiate soccer season in relation to training load completed. The current investigation took place throughout the 2010 Big XII soccer season. Nineteen Division I female collegiate soccer players (age: 19.9 ± 1.2 years, stature: 165.1 ± 6.6 cm, mass: 61.0 ± 6.8 kg) from the same team completed regular inertial load cycling tests and perceptual fatigue questionnaires throughout the season. Players were divided into STARTERS and NON-STARTERS based on percentage of matches started throughout the season. The results demonstrated that STARTERS experience much greater load throughout the season than NON-STARTERS (2247 ± 176 arbitrary units [AU] and 1585 ± 174 AU, p < 0.05), accounted for by increased load during matches. This increased load throughout the season was accompanied by decline in PMAX in STARTERS (to 92.3 ± 6.6%, p < 0.05), whereas PMAX was maintained in NON-STARTERS for the duration of the season (99.0 ± 4.9%). Furthermore, STARTERS experienced greater muscle soreness throughout the in-season period compared with NON-STARTERS. The main finding of this study is that PMAX declined throughout the middle and latter parts of the season in STARTERS, after experiencing significantly greater match loads than NON-STARTERS throughout the season. The current findings, combined with previous investigations, suggest that load needs to be carefully monitored throughout the in-season period to maintain optimal neuromuscular performance throughout a team's entire sporting season.
Schenk : „ Determinants of Bank Lending Performance “ 2 1

During the last years the lending business has come under considerable competitive pressure and bank managers often express concern regarding its profitability vis-a-vis other activities. This paper tries to empirically identify factors that are able to explain the financial performance of bank lending activities. The analysis is based on the CFS-data-set that has been collected in 1997 from 200 medium-sized firms. Two regressions are performed: The first is directed towards relationships between the interest rate premiums and various determining factors, the second aims at detecting relationships between those factors and the occurrence of several types of problems during the course of a credit engagement. Furthermore, the results of both regressions are used to test theoretical hypotheses regarding the impact of certain parameters on credit terms and distress probabilities. The findings are somewhat “puzzling“: First, the rating is not as significant as expected. Second, credit contracts seem to be priced lower for situations with greater risks. Finally, the results do not fully support any of three hypotheses that are often advanced to describe the role of collateral and covenants in credit contracts.
Evaluation study of a distributed caching based on query similarity in a P2P network

Several caching techniques have been used to reduce the bandwidth consumption and to provide faster answers in P2P systems. In this paper, we address the problem of reducing unnecessary traffic in the Hybrid Overlay Network (HON), which consists in organizing peers and data in an n-dimensional feature space for efficient similarity search. We propose a distributed caching schema that group similar queries to increase the success hit and avoid redundancy. We show through extensive simulations that caching in HON decreases significantly the query scope improving search performance.
Privacy in the Genomic Era

Genome sequencing technology has advanced at a rapid pace and it is now possible to generate highly-detailed genotypes inexpensively. The collection and analysis of such data has the potential to support various applications, including personalized medical services. While the benefits of the genomics revolution are trumpeted by the biomedical community, the increased availability of such data has major implications for personal privacy; notably because the genome has certain essential features, which include (but are not limited to) (i) an association with traits and certain diseases, (ii) identification capability (e.g., forensics), and (iii) revelation of family relationships. Moreover, direct-to-consumer DNA testing increases the likelihood that genome data will be made available in less regulated environments, such as the Internet and for-profit companies. The problem of genome data privacy thus resides at the crossroads of computer science, medicine, and public policy. While the computer scientists have addressed data privacy for various data types, there has been less attention dedicated to genomic data. Thus, the goal of this paper is to provide a systematization of knowledge for the computer science community. In doing so, we address some of the (sometimes erroneous) beliefs of this field and we report on a survey we conducted about genome data privacy with biomedical specialists. Then, after characterizing the genome privacy problem, we review the state-of-the-art regarding privacy attacks on genomic data and strategies for mitigating such attacks, as well as contextualizing these attacks from the perspective of medicine and public policy. This paper concludes with an enumeration of the challenges for genome data privacy and presents a framework to systematize the analysis of threats and the design of countermeasures as the field moves forward.
From code centric to model centric software engineering: Practices, Implications and ROI

An integral use of the model driven development paradigm influences and changes an organization's software development division rather heavily. Such a paradigm reduces some tasks in complexity and costs, but also introduces new tasks and, if introduced seriously, has severe affects on activities and roles in the software development process. As the model becomes the most important development artifact, there are new challenges to the development team, e. g. assessing the model's quality, model partitioning and configuration management for distributed teams, setup of build management, tool chaining and tracing of information through the various artifacts. Organizations coping with model driven development need to successfully introduce new tools and new ways of thinking, they are challenged in adopting their processes and training their staff. This paper presents an ongoing research project on the assessment of the usability of modeling and model driven development at a global industrial organization with its headquarters in Germany. The matter of interest is the analysis of the usability of modeling (especially with the UML) and model driven development by accomplishing an empirical, quantitative survey.
The Tobacco Mosaic Virus 126-Kilodalton Protein , a Constituent of the Virus Replication Complex , Alone or within the Complex Aligns with and Traffics along Microfilaments 1 [ w ]

Virus-induced cytoplasmic inclusion bodies (referred to as virus replication complexes [VRCs]) consisting of virus and host components are observed in plant cells infected with tobacco mosaic virus, but the components that modulate their form and function are not fully understood. Here, we show that the tobacco mosaic virus 126-kD protein fused with green fluorescent protein formed cytoplasmic bodies (126-bodies) in the absence of other viral components. Usingmutant 126-kD:green fluorescent fusion proteins and viral constructs expressing the corresponding mutant 126-kD proteins, it was determined that the size of the 126-bodies and the corresponding VRCs changed in synchrony for each 126-kD protein mutation tested. Through colabeling experiments, we observed the coalignment and intracellular trafficking of 126-bodies and, regardless of size, VRCs, along microfilaments (MFs). Disruption of MFs with MF-depolymerizing agents or through virus-induced gene silencing compromised the intracellular trafficking of the 126-bodies and VRCs and virus cell-to-cell movement, but did not decrease virus accumulation to levels that would affect virus movement or prevent VRC formation. Our results indicate that (1) the 126-kD protein modulates VRC size and traffics along MFs in cells; (2) VRCs traffic along MFs in cells, possibly through an interaction with the 126-kD protein, and the negative effect of MF antagonists on 126-body and VRC intracellular movement and virus cellto-cell movement correlates with the disruption of this association; and (3) virus movement was not correlated with VRC size.
Cognitive recovery instead of decline after acute encephalitis: a prospective follow up study

OBJECTIVE Follow up of cognitive sequelae of acute encephalitis and estimation of the frequency of persisting dementia. METHODS Out of a series of 45 consecutive patients with acute encephalitis prospectively studied in 1990–95, 40 were screened for difficulty in everyday life using the Blessed dementia scale (BDS) 3.7 (1.4), mean (SD), years after onset. Eight patients had had herpes simplex encephalitis (HSVE), 16 some other identified aetiology, and in 21 the aetiology was unknown. All, except two patients with a non-herpetic encephalitis, were treated with acyclovir. All patients with disability in BDS (12/40), were invited to a neuropsychological reassessment, and the results of this assessment were compared with those of a similar assessment done after the acute stage. At follow up one patient could not complete the tests due to intractable epilepsy. RESULTS In six of 11 cases the symptoms causing disability were mainly psychiatric. Five patients (two with HSVE) had a pronounced memory impairment together with other cognitive deficits, indicating dementia (frequency of 12.8%). In eight of the 11 testable cases cognitive performance had improved over the years, in two cases a decline was found and one patient with severe deficits showed no change. Intractable epilepsy was found in four of 12 cases. CONCLUSION Cognitive decline had taken place already at the acute stage, and further deterioration was uncommon. Considerable improvement occurred in most patients during follow up. Also in patients with HSVE treated with acyclovir the cognitive recovery was substantial and of a magnitude not expected based on previous literature. Intractable epilepsy contributed to the cognitive deterioration in some cases. Affective disorders also had a surprisingly important role for the long term outcome.
Autobiographical Memory and Conceptions of Self

We examine links between self-assessment and autobiographical memory. People generally view themselves as improving over time, relative to their peers. We suggest that this sense of improvement is sometimes illusory, and motivated by the desire to enhance the current self. Our research focuses on people's subjective feeling of temporal distance between an earlier period and the present, a feeling that is only modestly associated with actual time. Research participants praise or criticize the same former self, depending on how far away it feels. An equally distant episode feels close or remote, depending on whether it has favorable or damaging implications for evaluations of the current self. The identical achievement boosts evaluations of the current self or has little impact, depending on how far away it feels. The same failure does or does not harm appraisals of the current self, depending on how far away it feels.
Automatically Determining a Proper Length for Multi-Document Summarization: A Bayesian Nonparametric Approach

Document summarization is an important task in the area of natural language processing, which aims to extract the most important information from a single document or a cluster of documents. In various summarization tasks, the summary length is manually defined. However, how to find the proper summary length is quite a problem; and keeping all summaries restricted to the same length is not always a good choice. It is obviously improper to generate summaries with the same length for two clusters of documents which contain quite different quantity of information. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian nonparametric model for multidocument summarization in order to automatically determine the proper lengths of summaries. Assuming that an original document can be reconstructed from its summary, we describe the ”reconstruction” by a Bayesian framework which selects sentences to form a good summary. Experimental results on DUC2004 data sets and some expanded data demonstrate the good quality of our summaries and the rationality of the length determination.
cpSRP43 Is a Novel Chaperone Specific for Light-harvesting Chlorophyll a,b-binding Proteins*

The biosynthesis of most membrane proteins is directly coupled to membrane insertion, and therefore, molecular chaperones are not required. The light-harvesting chlorophyll a,b-binding proteins (LHCPs) present a prominent exception as they are synthesized in the cytoplasm, and after import into the chloroplast, they are targeted and inserted into the thylakoid membrane. Upon arrival in the stroma, LHCPs form a soluble transit complex with the chloroplast signal recognition particle (cpSRP) consisting of an SRP54 homolog and the unique cpSRP43 composed of three chromodomains and four ankyrin repeats. Here we describe that cpSRP43 alone prevents aggregation of LHCP by formation of a complex with nanomolar affinity, whereas cpSRP54 is not required for this chaperone activity. Other stromal chaperones like trigger factor cannot replace cpSRP43, which implies that LHCPs require a specific chaperone. Although cpSRP43 does not have an ATPase activity, it can dissolve aggregates of LHCPs similar to chaperones of the Hsp104/ClpB family. We show that the LHCP-cpSRP43 interaction is predominantly hydrophobic but strictly depends on an intact DPLG motif between the second and third transmembrane region. The cpSRP43 ankyrin repeats that provide the binding site for the DPLG motif are sufficient for the chaperone function, whereas the chromodomains are dispensable. Taken together, we define cpSRP43 as a highly specific chaperone for LHCPs in addition to its established function as a targeting factor for this family of membrane proteins.
Dynamic modeling of flexible manipulator based on a large number of finite elements

This paper discusses the issue of dynamic modeling for a flexible robot. The case of a flexible single-link manipulator is considered. Modeling work, which is limited to the reduced number of finite elements, represents some problems like the non-reality of dynamic behavior and the degradation of control performance. In order to remedy these problems, we the determination of the dynamic model based on Lagrange's equation and finite element method with a number of six finite elements has been proposed.
Relationship Between the Middle Genicular Artery and the Posterior Structures of the Knee

Background: The middle genicular artery (MGA) is responsible for the blood supply to the cruciate ligaments and synovial tissue. Traumatic sports injuries and surgical procedures (open and arthroscopic) can cause vascular damage. Little attention has been devoted to establish safe parameters for the MGA. Purpose: To investigate the anatomy of the MGA and its relation to the posterior structures of the knees, mainly the posterior capsule and femoral condyles, and to establish safe parameters to avoid harming the MGA. Study Design: Descriptive laboratory study. Methods: Dissection of the MGA was performed in 16 fresh, unpaired adult human cadaveric knees with no macroscopic degenerative or traumatic changes and no previous surgeries. The specimens were meticulously evaluated with emphasis on preservation of the MGA. The distances from the MGA to the medial and lateral femoral condyles were measured. The Mann-Whitney test was used for statistical analysis. Results: In all specimens, the MGA emerged from the anterior aspect of the popliteal artery, distal to the superior genicular arteries, and had a short distal trajectory toward the posterior capsule where it entered proximal to the oblique popliteal ligament. The artery lay in the midportion between the condyles. The distance between the posterior aspect of the tibia and the point of entry of the MGA into the posterior joint capsule was 23.8 ± 7.3 mm (range, 14.72-35.68 mm). There was no correlation between an individual’s height and the distance of the entrance point of the MGA into the posterior joint capsule to the posterior superior corner of the tibia. Conclusion: The middle genicular artery lies in the midportion between the medial and lateral femoral condyles. Clinical Relevance: This knowledge is important for the preservation of the blood supply during posterior knee surgical procedures and to settle a secure distance between the posterior aspect of the tibia and the MGA input. This could decrease and prevent iatrogenic vascular injury risk to the MGA.
Musical instrument classification using non-negative matrix factorization algorithms

In this paper, a class of algorithms for automatic classification of individual musical instrument sounds is presented. Several perceptual features used in general sound classification applications were measured for 300 sound recordings consisting of 6 different musical instrument classes (piano, violin, cello, flute, bassoon and soprano saxophone). In addition, MPEG-7 basic spectral and spectral basis descriptors were considered, providing an effective combination for accurately describing the spectral and timbral audio characteristics. The audio files were split using 70% of the available data for training and the remaining 30% for testing. A classifier was developed based on non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) techniques, thus introducing a novel application of NMF. The standard NMF method was examined, as well as its modifications: the local, the sparse, and the discriminant NMF. Experimental results are presented to compare MPEG-7 spectral basis representations with MPEG-7 basic spectral features alongside the various NMF algorithms. The results indicate that the use of the spectrum projection coefficients for feature extraction and the standard NMF classifier yields an accuracy exceeding 95%
OF EVALUATION AND IMPROVEMENT OF CONSISTENCY OF EXPERT PAIRWISE COMPARISON JUDGMENTS

The notion of consistency is used to evaluate the contradiction level of expert pairwise comparison judgments and their suitability for the purpose of calculation of weights of decision alternatives. Several consistency coefficients and criteria are used to measure inconsistency of a pairwise comparison matrix (PCM). Traditional approach to increase consistency of expert information is to organize a feedback with an expert. However, it is not always possible due to financial and time limitations. The paper deals with methods of improvement (increase) PCM consistency without participation of an expert. Computer simulation is used to provide a comparative study of these methods. It is shown that taking an inadmissibly inconsistent PCM, for example, with the consistency ratio equal to CR=0.2 or CR=0.3, methods of improvement PCM consistency help to decrease inconsistency up to admissible level CR≤0.1 for n≥5. Results reveal that these methods, unfortunately, are not always effective, that is, drawing near to admissible inconsistency does not ensure closeness to the vector of real weights of decision alternatives. Also an analysis of coefficients and criteria of consistency of expert pairwise comparison judgments depending on PCM properties and level of its consistency is carried out.