Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Delay stabilization of periodic orbits in coupled oscillator systems

We study diffusively coupled oscillators in Hopf normal form. By introducing a non-invasive delay coupling, we are able to stabilize the inherently unstable anti-phase orbits. For the super- and subcritical cases, we state a condition on the oscillator’s nonlinearity that is necessary and sufficient to find coupling parameters for successful stabilization. We prove these conditions and review previous results on the stabilization of odd-number orbits by time-delayed feedback. Finally, we illustrate the results with numerical simulations.
Regulatory Design Governing Progression of Population Growth Phases in Bacteria

It has long been noted that batch cultures inoculated with resting bacteria exhibit a progression of growth phases traditionally labeled lag, exponential, pre-stationary and stationary. However, a detailed molecular description of the mechanisms controlling the transitions between these phases is lacking. A core circuit, formed by a subset of regulatory interactions involving five global transcription factors (FIS, HNS, IHF, RpoS and GadX), has been identified by correlating information from the well- established transcriptional regulatory network of Escherichia coli and genome-wide expression data from cultures in these different growth phases. We propose a functional role for this circuit in controlling progression through these phases. Two alternative hypotheses for controlling the transition between the growth phases are first, a continuous graded adjustment to changing environmental conditions, and second, a discontinuous hysteretic switch at critical thresholds between growth phases. We formulate a simple mathematical model of the core circuit, consisting of differential equations based on the power-law formalism, and show by mathematical and computer-assisted analysis that there are critical conditions among the parameters of the model that can lead to hysteretic switch behavior, which – if validated experimentally – would suggest that the transitions between different growth phases might be analogous to cellular differentiation. Based on these provocative results, we propose experiments to test the alternative hypotheses.
Randomized Extended Kaczmarz for Solving Least Squares

We present a randomized iterative algorithm that exponentially converges in the mean square to the minimum $\ell_2$-norm least squares solution of a given linear system of equations. The expected number of arithmetic operations required to obtain an estimate of given accuracy is proportional to the squared condition number of the system multiplied by the number of nonzero entries of the input matrix. The proposed algorithm is an extension of the randomized Kaczmarz method that was analyzed by Strohmer and Vershynin.
An Information-theoretic Approach for Argument Interpretation

We describe an information-theoretic argument-interpretation mechanism embedded in an interactive system. Our mechanism applies the Minimum Message Length principle to evaluate candidate interpretations and select the best candidate. It receives as input an argument entered through a web interface, and produces an interpretation in terms of its underlying knowledge representation -- a Bayesian network. The results of our preliminary evaluations are encouraging, with the system generally producing plausible interpretations of users' arguments.
ApoE genotype affects allele-specific apo[a] levels for large apo[a] sizes in African Americans: the Harlem-Basset Studys⃞ Published, JLR Papers in Press, December 15, 2006.

The genetic variability of apolipoprotein E (apoE) influences plasma lipoprotein levels, and allele frequencies differ between African Americans and Caucasians. As African Americans have higher lipoprotein [a] (Lp[a]) levels than Caucasians, we investigated the effects of the apoE gene on allele-specific apolipoprotein [a] (apo[a]) levels across ethnicity. We determined apo[a] sizes, allele-specific apo[a] levels (i.e., levels associated with alleles defined by size), and the apoE gene polymorphism in 231 African Americans and 336 Caucasians. African Americans, but not Caucasians, with the apo E2 genotype had lower levels of Lp[a] compared with those with the apo E4 genotype (9.6 vs. 11.2 nmol/l; P = 0.034, expressed as square root levels). Distribution of apo[a] alleles across apoE genotypes were similar between African Americans and Caucasians. Among African Americans with large apo[a], the allele-specific apo[a] level was significantly lower among ε2 carriers compared with ε3 or ε4 carriers (5.4 vs. 6.6 and 7.4 nmol/l, respectively; P < 0.005, expressed as square root levels). In contrast, there was no significant difference in allele-specific apo[a] levels across apoE genotypes among Caucasians. For large apo[a] sizes, apoE genotype contributed to the observed African American-Caucasian differences in allele-specific apo[a] levels.
Design and performance assessment of energy aware security enhancing strategy for PEGASIS protocol for MWSN

Due to wide variety of applications, Wireless Sensor Networks have been extensively used and many researchers are engaged in research in this area including Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks (MWSN). The major issues in use of MWSN however are energy consumption, security, scalability, robustness etc. It is generally observed that clustered WSN networks using hierarchical routing protocols, significantly reduce the overall energy consumed. However, some of these protocols do not address the security issues related to different attacks. A security enhanced Sec-LEACH protocol results in higher security using random key predistribution and μTESLA. In this paper, an approach has been implemented to arrive at an energy aware security enhancing strategy for Power-Efficient GAthering in Sensor Information Systems (PEGASIS) and referred to as Sec-PEGASIS protocol. The performance evaluations have been done for three important metrics namely residual energy, packet delivery ratio and routing overheads. The performance comparison has been done with respect to LEACH, Sec-LEACH and normal PEGASIS protocol for different rounds of data collection. It is seen that energy aware security enhancing strategy proposed in this paper provides higher level of security, retaining the energy efficiency feature of PEGASIS protocol unaltered.
Efficient Object Recognition and Image Retrieval for Large-Scale Applications

Algorithms for recognition and retrieval tasks generally call for both speed and accuracy. When scaling up to very large applications, however, we encounter additional significant requirements: adaptability and scalability. In many real-world systems, large numbers of images are constantly added to the database, requiring the algorithm to quickly tune itself to recent trends so it can serve queries more effectively. Moreover, the systems need to be able to meet the demands of simultaneous queries from many users. In this thesis, I describe two new algorithms intended to meet these requirements and give an extensive experimental evaluation for both. The first algorithm constructs an adaptive vocabulary forest, which is an efficient image-database model that grows and shrinks as needed while adapting its structure to tune itself to recent trends. The second algorithm is a method for efficiently performing classification tasks by comparing query images to only a fixed number of training examples, regardless of the size of the image database. These two methods can be combined to create a fast, adaptable, and scalable vision system suitable for large-scale applications. I also introduce LIBPMK, a fast implementation of common computer vision processing pipelines such as that of the pyramid match kernel. This implementation was used to build several successful interactive applications as well as batch experiments for research settings. This implementation, in addition to the two new algorithms introduced by this thesis, are a step toward meeting the speed, adaptability, and scalability requirements of practical large-scale vision systems. Thesis Supervisor: Trevor J. Darrell Title: Associate Professor
Stability of FD-TD Schemes for Maxwell-Debye and Maxwell-Lorentz Equations

The stability of five finite difference-time domain (FD-TD) schemes coupling Maxwell equations to Debye or Lorentz models has been analyzed in [P. Petropoulos, Stability and phase error analysis of FD-TD in dispersive dielectrics, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag. , 42 (1994), pp. 62-69], where numerical evidence for specific media have been used. We use von Neumann analysis to give necessary and sufficient stability conditions for these schemes for any medium, in accordance with the partial results of [P. Petropoulos, Stability and phase error analysis of FD-TD in dispersive dielectrics, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag. , 42 (1994), pp. 62-69]. To make this approach tractable for two-dimensional and three-dimensional models, we have developed a computer algebra environment which has a wider range of applicability.
Encountering Selves and Others: Finding Meaning in Life Through Action and Reflection on a Social Service Learning Program

This article describes how a college social service learning centre at a Catholic university created an opportunity for researchers, college students and elementary school teachers to learn about meaning in life together, through a social service learning program in Taiwan. The participants’ involvement benefitted their learning, indicating that the meaning in life perceived by the younger generation has changed in response to the context of an evolving Chinese culture, and that participants constrained their callings by developing realistic plans consisting of goals emphasised in traditional Chinese culture. Challenges were identified: specifically, the participants’ callings did not directly reflect the lessons that they learned through involvement in the program, and implementing the service program as a one-time activity limited its effect on the participants’ ability to find meaning in life. Future development of the service program was discussed, based on the lessons learned through this action research.
Instrument Identification in Optical Music Recognition

We present a method for recognizing and interpreting the text labels for the instruments in an orchestra score, thereby associating staves with instruments. This task is one of many necessary in optical music recognition. Our approach treats the score system as the basic unit of processing. A graph structure describes the possible orderings of instruments in the system. Each instrument may apply to several staves, may be represented with several possible text strings, and may appear at several possible positions relative to the staves. We ﬁnd the optimal labeling of staves using a globally optimal dynamic programming approach that embeds simple template-based optical character recognition within the overall recognition scheme. When given an entire score, we simultaneously optimize on the text labeling for each system, as well as the character template models, thus adapting to the font at hand. Our implementation alternately optimizes over the text label identiﬁcation and re-estimates the character templates. Experiments are presented on 10 different scores showing a signiﬁcant improvement due to adaptation.
Nonrigid volume registration using second-order MRF model

In this paper, we introduce a nonrigid registration method using a Markov Random Field (MRF) energy model with second-order smoothness priors. The registration determines an optimal labeling of the MRF energy model where the label corresponds to a 3D displacement vector. In the MRF energy model, spatial relationships are constructed between nodes using second-order smoothness priors. This model improves limitations of first-order spatial priors which cannot fully incorporate the natural smoothness of deformations. Specifically, the second-order smoothness priors can generate desired smoother displacement vector fields and do not suffer from fronto-parallel effects commonly occurred in first-order priors. The usage of second-order priors in the energy model enables this method to produce more accurate registration results. In the experiments, we will show comparative results using uni- and multi-modal Brain MRI volumes.
Rate adaptation for adaptive HTTP streaming

Recently, HTTP has been widely used for the delivery of real-time multimedia content over the Internet, such as in video streaming applications. To combat the varying network resources of the Internet, rate adaptation is used to adapt the transmission rate to the varying network capacity. A key research problem of rate adaptation is to identify network congestion early enough and to probe the spare network capacity. In adaptive HTTP streaming, this problem becomes challenging because of the difficulties in differentiating between the short-term throughput variations, incurred by the TCP congestion control, and the throughput changes due to more persistent bandwidth changes. In this paper, we propose a novel rate adaptation algorithm for adaptive HTTP streaming that detects bandwidth changes using a smoothed HTTP throughput measured based on the segment fetch time (SFT). The smoothed HTTP throughput instead of the instantaneous TCP transmission rate is used to determine if the bitrate of the current media matches the end-to-end network bandwidth capacity. Based on the smoothed throughput measurement, this paper presents a receiver-driven rate adaptation method for HTTP/TCP streaming that deploys a step-wise increase/ aggressive decrease method to switch up/down between the different representations of the content that are encoded at different bitrates. Our rate adaptation method does not require any transport layer information such as round trip time (RTT) and packet loss rates which are available at the TCP layer. Simulation results show that the proposed rate adaptation algorithm quickly adapts to match the end-to-end network capacity and also effectively controls buffer underflow and overflow.
Validation of a French-Canadian version of the Pain Disability Index.

OBJECTIVE To examine the psychometric properties of the Index de l'incapacité reliée à la douleur, a French-Canadian version of the Pain Disability Index (PDI). METHODS A total of 176 chronic pain patients (94 women, 82 men) completed the French-Canadian version of the PDI (PDI-CF), as well as other pain-related measures. A subset of 52 patients (27 women, 25 men) also completed a lifting task designed to assess physical tolerance and pain behaviour. RESULTS Confirmatory factor analysis of the PDI-CF supported the two-factor structure of the original PDI. Reliability analyses revealed that the PDI-CF total score had a high degree of internal consistency, comparable with the original PDI. The PDI-CF total score was significantly correlated with self-reported pain, pain catastrophizing, depressive symptoms, fear of movement or (re)injury, lift duration and pain behaviours. CONCLUSIONS The results suggest that the PDI-CF is a reliable and valid measure of self-reported disability that is psychometrically similar to the original scale.
Leishmaniasis in the Middle East: Incidence and Epidemiology

Leishmaniasis is a major health problem worldwide, with several countries reporting cases of leishmaniasis resulting in loss of human life or a lifelong stigma because of bodily scars. The Middle East is endemic for cutaneous leishmaniasis, with countries like Syria reporting very high incidence of the disease. Despite several countries establishing national control programs for containing the sandfly vector and treatment of infection, the disease continues to spread. In addition to the endemicity of the region for leishmaniasis, the Middle East has seen a great deal of human migration either for earning of livelihood or due to political upheaval in the region. These factors contribute to the spread and proliferation of the causative species Leishmania and its sandfly host. This review discusses the current epidemiological scenario in Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, emphasizing the number of cases reported, vector species, Leishmania species, and treatment available. The data is primarily from WHO reports for each country and current and old literature.
How important are updating schemes in multi-agent systems? An illustration on a multi-turmite model

It is to date an open question to know how the updating methods affect the evolution of a multi-agent system. This question has been tackled for various complex systems such as cellular automata, Boolean networks, neural networks but little is known for multi-agent systems, especially for the models with a complex behaviour which emerges from simple local rules. This paper focuses on a multi-turmite model, namely the multiple Langton's ants model. All the agents are updated simultaneously and the variation of the updating scheme consists only in choosing different strategies for solving the conflicts produced when two or more agents want to go on the same location. We show that for the same formulation of the agents' behaviour, and the same initial conditions, the use of different updating schemes may lead to qualitatively different evolutions of the system. As a positive spin-off of this study, we exhibit new phenomena of the multi-turmite model such as deadlocks or gliders.
Reflections on the Need for a Journal Devoted to Communication Research Methodologies: Ten Years Later

The inaugural issue of Communication Methods and Measures was published in 2007. At that time, publications related to research methodology and measures were fragmented across a wide range of communication journals. In the first issue of Communication Methods and Measures, the editors accordingly asked whether there was a need for a journal focused on communication research methodologies (Roskos-Ewoldsen, Aakhus, Hayes, Heider, & Levine, 2007). It is known that other disciplines within the social and behavioral sciences have methods journals, and these journals are typically highly ranked according to various citation indices. But this alone is not a strong argument. Because communication is a multidisciplinary and cross-cutting field (see Donsbach, 2006), scholars may simply draw from other disciplines such as psychology, sociology, political science, or marketing in order to answer their methodological questions. However, as Roskos-Ewoldsen et al. (2007) have argued, there are many important methodological issues unique to the study of communication, and “our methods and measures need continuing refinement as developments in communication technologies impact the validity of our research because we may be using outdated methodologies to study these new technologies” (p. 2). With this spirit in mind, the founders of Communication Methods and Measures sought to
Attenuation of DNA charge transport by compaction into a nucleosome core particle

The nucleosome core particle (NCP) is the fundamental building block of chromatin which compacts ∼146 bp of DNA around a core histone protein octamer. The effects of NCP packaging on long-range DNA charge transport reactions have not been adequately assessed to date. Here we study DNA hole transport reactions in a 157 bp DNA duplex (AQ-157TG) incorporating multiple repeats of the DNA TG-motif, a strong NCP positioning sequence and a covalently attached Anthraquinone photooxidant. Following a thorough biophysical characterization of the structure of AQ-157TG NCPs by Exonuclease III and hydroxyl radical footprinting, we compared the dynamics of DNA charge transport in ultraviolet-irradiated free and NCP-incorporated AQ-157TG. Compaction into a NCP changes the charge transport dynamics in AQ-157TG drastically. Not only is the overall yield of oxidative lesions decreased in the NCPs, but the preferred sites of oxidative damage change as well. This NCP-dependent attenuation of DNA charge transport is attributed to DNA–protein interactions involving the folded histone core since removal of the histone tails did not perturb the charge transport dynamics in AQ-157TG NCPs.
About Two Physical Interaction Metaphors: Narrowing the Gap between the Real and the Virtual World

In this paper we present ideas that can help to close the gap between virtual reality and embedded interaction, which are usually assumed to be the two extremes of a dimension that describes mixed reality interaction. We present our preliminary ideas on surface interaction with stereoscopic data as well as our work on mobile camera-projector units. While the first line of research tries to increase the degree of the interaction experience in virtual worlds, the second uses the physical properties of the real world to enhance the augmented reality experience. The first idea uses the physical world to constraint the interaction in the virtual world. The second idea embeds virtual information into the physical world by respecting its physical properties.
Optimizing hepatic venous outflow reconstruction for hepatic vein stenosis with indwelling stent in living donor liver retransplantation

The patient was a boy of 7 years and 5 months of age, who underwent LDLT for acute liver failure at 10 months of age. HV stent placement was performed 8 months after LDLT because of intractable HV stenosis. At 7 years of age, his liver function deteriorated due to chronic rejection. The patient therefore underwent living donor liver retransplantation from his father. The HV was transected with the stent in situ. The IVC was resected due to stenosis. The pericardial cavity was opened and detached around the IVC to elongate the IVC. The divided ends of the IVC were joined by suturing to the posterior wall of the IVC. A new triangular orifice was made by adding an incision on the anterior wall of the IVC. The graft HV was then anastomosed to the new orifice with continuous sutures in the posterior wall and interrupted sutures in the anterior wall using 5‐0 non‐absorbable sutures. Doppler ultrasound showed a triphasic waveform. We successfully performed HV reconstruction without a vascular graft. This is a feasible procedure for overcoming HV stenosis in LDLT patients with an indwelling stent.
Premature birth affects the degree of airway dysanapsis and mechanical ventilatory constraints

What is the central question of this study? Adult survivors of preterm birth without (PRE) and with bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) have airflow obstruction at rest and significant mechanical ventilatory constraints during exercise compared with those born at full term (CON). Do PRE/BPD have smaller airways, indexed via the dysanapsis ratio, than CON? What is the main finding and its importance? The dysanapsis ratio was significantly smaller in BPD and PRE compared with CON, with BPD having the smallest dysanapsis ratio. These data suggest that airflow obstruction in PRE and BPD might be because of smaller airways than CON.