Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Snap-dragging in three dimensions

A large portion of the user interface in interactive solid modeling systems is devoted to the problem of placing and orienting objects in three dimensions. In particular, many operations must be provided for selecting control points, curves and surfaces, and for translating, rotating and scaling scene components into precise relationships with other scene components. By factoring these operations carefully, it is possible to provide the desired functionality so as to reduce both the size of the user interface and the time that it takes to use it. With snap-dragging, the user takes advantage of three main elements that work together: a general-purpose gravity function, alignment objects that can be created many at a time, and smooth-motion affine transformations. Scene composition is achieved in a single perspective view using a mouse and keyboard. With 19 mouse commands, 15 keyboard commands, 5 menus of numbers, and 1 single-level menu of numerical transformations, this user interface has fewer commands and requires fewer keystrokes than the skitters and jacks technique reported earlier.
Unsupervised extraction of knowledge from S-AIS data for maritime situational awareness

Automatic vessel behaviour analysis is a key factor for maritime surveillance and relies on an efficient representation of knowledge about vessels activity. Emerging technologies such as space-based AIS provides a new dimension of service and creates a need for new methods able to learn a maritime scene model at an oceanic scale. In this paper, we propose such a framework: a probabilistic normalcy model of vessel dynamics is learned using unsupervised techniques applied on historical S-AIS data and used for anomaly detection and prediction tasks, thus providing functionalities for high-level situational awareness (level 2 and 3 of the JDL).
Maspin plays an essential role in early embryonic development

Maspin (Mp) is a member of the serpin family with inhibitory functions against cell migration, metastasis and angiogenesis. To identify its role in embryonic development in vivo, we generated maspin knockout mice by gene targeting. In this study, we showed that homozygous loss of maspin expression was lethal at the peri-implantation stage. Maspin was specifically expressed in the visceral endoderm after implantation; deletion of maspin interfered with the formation of the endodermal cell layer, thereby disrupting the morphogenesis of the epiblast. In vitro, the ICM of the Mp–/– blastocysts failed to grow out appropriately. Data from embryoid body formation studies indicated that the Mp–/– EBs had a disorganized, endodermal cell mass and lacked a basement membrane layer. We showed that the embryonic ectoderm lineage was lost in the Mp–/– EBs, compared with that of the Mp+/+ EBs. Re-expression of maspin partially rescued the defects observed in the Mp–/– EBs, as evidenced by the appearance of ectoderm cells and a layer of endoderm cells surrounding the ectoderm. In addition, a maspin antibody specifically blocked normal EB formation, indicating that maspin controls the process through a cell surface event. Furthermore, we showed that maspin directly increased endodermal cell adhesion to laminin matrix but not to fibronectin. Mp+/– endodermal cells grew significantly slower than Mp+/+ endodermal cells on laminin substrate. We conclude that deletion of maspin affects VE function by reducing cell proliferation and adhesion, thereby controlling early embryonic development.
The Human Otubain2-Ubiquitin Structure Provides Insights into the Cleavage Specificity of Poly-Ubiquitin-Linkages

Ovarian tumor domain containing proteases cleave ubiquitin (Ub) and ubiquitin-like polypeptides from proteins. Here we report the crystal structure of human otubain 2 (OTUB2) in complex with a ubiquitin-based covalent inhibitor, Ub-Br2. The ubiquitin binding mode is oriented differently to how viral otubains (vOTUs) bind ubiquitin/ISG15, and more similar to yeast and mammalian OTUs. In contrast to OTUB1 which has exclusive specificity towards Lys48 poly-ubiquitin chains, OTUB2 cleaves different poly-Ub linked chains. N-terminal tail swapping experiments between OTUB1 and OTUB2 revealed how the N-terminal structural motifs in OTUB1 contribute to modulating enzyme activity and Ub-chain selectivity, a trait not observed in OTUB2, supporting the notion that OTUB2 may affect a different spectrum of substrates in Ub-dependent pathways.
A Procalcitonin-Based Algorithm to Guide Antibiotic Therapy in Secondary Peritonitis following Emergency Surgery: A Prospective Study with Propensity Score Matching Analysis

Background Procalcitonin (PCT)-based algorithms have been used to guide antibiotic therapy in several clinical settings. However, evidence supporting PCT-based algorithms for secondary peritonitis after emergency surgery is scanty. In this study, we aimed to investigate whether a PCT-based algorithm could safely reduce antibiotic exposure in this population. Methods/Principal Findings From April 2012 to March 2013, patients that had secondary peritonitis diagnosed at the emergency department and underwent emergency surgery were screened for eligibility. PCT levels were obtained pre-operatively, on post-operative days 1, 3, 5, and 7, and on subsequent days if needed. Antibiotics were discontinued if PCT was <1.0 ng/mL or decreased by 80% versus day 1, with resolution of clinical signs. Primary endpoints were time to discontinuation of intravenous antibiotics for the first episode and adverse events. Historical controls were retrieved for propensity score matching. After matching, 30 patients in the PCT group and 60 in the control were included for analysis. The median duration of antibiotic exposure in PCT group was 3.4 days (interquartile range [IQR] 2.2 days), while 6.1 days (IQR 3.2 days) in control (p < 0.001). The PCT algorithm significantly improves time to antibiotic discontinuation (p < 0.001, log-rank test). The rates of adverse events were comparable between 2 groups. Multivariate-adjusted extended Cox model demonstrated that the PCT-based algorithm was significantly associated with a 87% reduction in hazard of antibiotic exposure within 7 days (hazard ratio [HR] 0.13, 95% CI 0.07–0.21, p < 0.001), and a 68% reduction in hazard after 7 days (adjusted HR 0.32, 95% CI 0.11–0.99, p = 0.047). Advanced age, coexisting pulmonary diseases, and higher severity of illness were significantly associated with longer durations of antibiotic use. Conclusions/Significance The PCT-based algorithm safely reduces antibiotic exposure in this study. Further randomized trials are needed to confirm our findings and incorporate cost-effectiveness analysis. Trial Registration Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry ACTRN12612000601831
An Attentional Model for Autonomous Mobile Robots

The increase of applications that use autonomous robots has endowed them with a high number of sensors and actuators that are sometimes redundant. This new highly complex systems and the type of environment where they are expected to operate require them to deal with data overload and data fusion. In humans that face the same problem when sounds, images, and smells are presented to their sensors in a daily scene, a natural filter is applied: attention. Although there are many computational models that apply attentive systems to robotics, they usually are restricted to two classes of systems: 1) those that have complex biologically based attentional visual systems and 2) those that have simpler attentional mechanisms with a larger variety of sensors. This work proposes an attentional model inspired from biological systems and that supports a variety of robotics sensors. Furthermore, it discusses the possibility of using multiple sensors to define multiple features, with feature extraction modules that can handle exogenous and endogenous attentional processes. The experiments were performed in a simulated high-fidelity environment, and results have shown that the model proposed can account for detecting salient (bottom-up) and desired (top-down) stimuli according to the modeled features.
Measurements of aerosol optical properties ( aerosol optical depth , scattering and backscattering coe ffi

Climatological aspects of aerosol optical properties in Northern Greece E. Gerasopoulos , M. O. Andreae, C. S. Zerefos, T. W. Andreae, D. Balis, P. Formenti, P. Merlet, V. Amiridis, and C. Papastefanou Laboratory of Atmospheric Physics, Physics Department, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, P. O. Box 149, 54124 Thessaloniki, Greece Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Biogeochemistry Department, P.O. Box 3060, 55020 Mainz, Germany Centre of Geophysics of Évora, Universidade de Évora, Rua R. Ramalho, 59, 7000-532 Évora, Portugal Nuclear Physics Department, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 54124 Thessaloniki, Greece Received: 27 November 2002 – Accepted: 21 March 2003 – Published: 15 April 2003 Correspondence to: E. Gerasopoulos (egera@skiathos.physics.auth.gr)
The Narrative and Its Place in the New Accounting History: The Rise of the Counternarrative

Traditional history has sought to provide narrative accounts of the past which can be accepted as factual, devoid of fictions and therefore true. This image has come under strong attack from new historians who denounce the narrative as a literary convention which mixes fiction (myth) and fact rather than being a model of an extant, discoverable reality. The narrative is also accused of being the means of privileging some accounts of history and thereby enhancing the position of social elites. This paper rejects condemnation of the ability of narrative history to provide reliable renditions of accounting’s past and promotes the role of narrativity in the “new” accounting history. It is shown that new accounting history, whilst critical of the results of traditional accounting history, currently still finds merit in the narrative as both the form in which historical events occur and as a means of telling alternative stories or counternarratives.
Enhancing Algebraic Query Relaxation with Semantic Similarity

Cooperative database systems support a database user by searching for answers that are closely related to his query and hence are informative answers. Common operators to relax the user query are Dropping Condition, Anti-Instantiation and Goal Replacement. In this article, we provide an algebraic version of these operators. Moreover we propose some heuristics to assign a degree of similarity to each tuple of an answer table; this degree can help the user to determine whether this answer is relevant for him or not.
Monuments of cyberspace: Designing the Internet beyond the network framework

In light of the challenges entailed by the (re)design of the Internet, this paper develops the concept of “monuments of cyberspace”, to address the lack of clarity in current debates and more particularly in the use of the conceptual frameworks of “networks” and “communities”. To do so, I revisit the conceptual grounds of network approaches in different disciplines and those of communities of practice, using as an entry point the debate on personal data. To illustrate the value of the concept introduced, the article reviews the design of the “datagram” and that of an online communication setting for developers.
Satisfaction with a gender realignment service

Many components make up a successful comprehensive gender realignment service. These components vary throughout the different UK-based services. We argue that it is essential to incorporate the views of patients using such services to ensure that these meet expectations and needs as well as eliminate post-operative regret where possible. Early age for surgery in accurately diagnosed patients with meaningful support, equality in access to services and reducing post-operative complications were all considered to be important factors by our patients. Incorporating these factors should contribute to improved services for this specialist group of patients.
Robust Smart Card based Password Authentication Scheme against Smart Card Security Breach ⋆

As the most prevailing two-factor authentication mechanism, smart card based password authentication has been a subject of intensive research in the past decade and hundreds of this type of schemes have been proposed. However, most of them were found severely flawed, especially prone to the smart card security breach problem, shortly after they were first put forward, no matter the security is heuristically analyzed or formally proved. In SEC’12, Wang pointed out that, the main cause of this issue is attributed to the lack of an appropriate security model to fully identify the practical threats. To address the issue, Wang presented three kinds of security models, namely Type I, II and III, and further proposed four concrete schemes, only two of which, i.e. PSCAV and PSCAb, are claimed to be secure under the harshest model, i.e. Type III security model. However, in this paper, we demonstrate that PSCAV still cannot achieve the claimed security goals and is vulnerable to an offline password guessing attack and other attacks in the Type III security mode, while PSCAb has several practical pitfalls. As our main contribution, a robust scheme is presented to cope with the aforementioned defects and it is proven to be secure in the random oracle model. Moreover, the analysis demonstrates that our scheme meets all the proposed criteria and eliminates several hard security threats that are difficult to be tackled at the same time in previous scholarship, which highly indicates the settlement of an open problem raised by Madhusudhan and Mittal in 2012. Beyond our cryptanalysis of current schemes and our proposal of the new scheme, the proposed adversary model and criteria set provide a benchmark for the systematic evaluation of future two-factor authentication proposals.
Property Based Attestation and Trusted Computing: Analysis and Challenges

Trusted computing attestation mechanism relies on hash measurements to realize remote party attestation in distributed systems. Property based attestation enables more meaningful attestation by abstracting low level binary values to high level security properties or functions of systems. The contribution of this paper is two fold. In the first part of the paper, we provide an analysis of the different types of property based attestation mechanisms that have been proposed in the recent years. We categorize these mechanisms as derivation based, delegation based and enforcement based and analyze each of them with a particular focus on their limitations. In the second part, we provide a list of challenges for property based attestation. We believe this to be an useful exercise to help better understand the issues that limit the practical applicability of property based attestation in real world systems.
A Cluster-based Personalized Item Recommended Approach on the Educational Assessment System

Personalized item recommendation enables the educational assessment system to make deliberate efforts to perform appropriate assessment strategies that ﬁt the needs, purposes, preferences, and interests of individual teachers. This study presents a dynamically personalized item-recommendation approach that is based on clustering in-serve teachers with assessment compiling interest and preference characteristics to recommend available, best-fit candidate items to support teachers to construct their classroom assessment. A two-round assessment constructing activity was being adopted to collect and extract these teacher’ assessment knowledge (item selected preference behaviors), and through the designed item-recommendation mechanism to facilitate IKMAAS [1] to recommend proper items to meet different individual in-serve teachers. To evaluate the effectiveness and usability for the cluster-based personalized item-recommendation, the assessment system log analysis and the questionnaire collected from participating teachers’ perceptions were being used. The results showed the proposed item-recommendation approach based on clustered teachers’ assessment knowledge can effectively improve their educational assessment construction.
Detecting Item BIAS in Affective Scales

The purpose of the study was to demonstrate the use of confirmatory factor analysis to investigate the existence of item bias in an affective scale measuring self-concept. The data were collected from three ethnic groups (Black, Hispanic, and White) in grade eight (N = 1264). The factor structure and item uniqueness were simultaneously compared across ethnic groups by using the LISREL program. A differential response pattern found across the three groups indicated potential bias in score interpretation. The study illustrated that structural analysis may be a useful methodology in the investigation of item bias in affective scales.
Active Vibration Control of Magnetically Suspended Wheel Using Active Shaft Deflection

A novel method is proposed to actively attenuate the synchronous vibration of a magnetically suspended wheel (MSW) on the basis of shaft deflection. Considering the nonparallelism of the rotary axis and the inertial axis of the rotor, a precise dynamic model of the MSW is established as a linear model with synchronous disturbances. To reduce the synchronous vibration torques transferred to the base, the rotor shaft is actively deflected. A reference deflection angle is scheduled according to the synchronous disturbances, and a new tracking error dynamic model is established. Then, a composite control method is designed by combining a state feedback method and a disturbance observer. The stabilities of the disturbance observer and the closed-loop system are proven by Lyapunov's stability theorem. The parameters of the disturbance observer and the state feedback controller can be obtained by solving several linear matrix inequalities. The feasibility of vibration reduction due to the proposed method is analyzed. Finally, numerical simulations and experiments are performed. The results indicate that the proposed method significantly reduces the synchronous vibration torques of the MSW.
Total Hip Replacement after Failed Internal Fixation of Trochanteric Femoral Fractures

Background: Failure of fixation of trochanteric fractures of the femur results in great disability and pain. Hip arthroplasty is a helpful reconstructive procedure in patients with poor bone stock, avascular necrosis of the femoral head, associated with damaged acetabular articular cartilage. Objective: This prospective study is to evaluate clinically and radiologically, the early results of total hip arthroplasty in a group of patients with failed internal fixation of trochanteric femoral fractures. Patients and Methods: Total hip replacement was done for fifty patients with failed treatment of proximal femoral fractures, only forty two patients 29 males and 13 females completed the follow up and eight were lost. The procedure was carried out through a lateral exposure in all cases. Harris Hip Score (HHS) was used for clinical evaluation preoperatively, postoperatively. Radiographic evaluation comprising anteroposterior radiographic views of the pelvis and femur and a lateral view of the femur were performed at follow-up visits. Results: The mean time of follow up was 42 months (range from 30-72 months). The mean Harris Hip Score was improved from a mean of 24 points preoperative to 88 points at final follow up. Pain relief and gait correction were noted at the final follow up. Thirty patients (72%) could freely walk outdoors using a cane or elbow crutch; eight patients (19%) had a limited walking ability using two axillary crutches, and four patients (9%) were able to walk indoors only. Conclusion: Total hip arthroplasty is an accepted procedure after failed internal fixation of trochanteric femoral fractures. Individualization of the implant selection according to patient age, level of activity, the bone stock of proximal femur, and the condition of the acetabulum.
Myocardial Bradykinin Following Acute Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme Inhibition, AT1 Receptor Blockade, or Combined Inhibition in Congestive Heart Failure

Background: The present study examined the effects of acute angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibition (ACEI), AT, receptor blockade (AT, block), or combined treatment on in vitro and in vivo bradykinin (BK) levels. Methods: BK levels were measured in isolated porcine myocyte preparations (n = 13) in the presence of exogenous BK (10-8 M); with an ACEI (benezaprilat; 0.1 mM) and BK; an AT, block (valsartan; 10-5 M) and BK; and combined treatment and BK. In a second study, myocardial microdialysis was used to measure porcine interstitial BK levels in both normal (n = 14) and pacing-induced congestive heart failure (CHF) (240 beats/min, 3 weeks, n = 16) under the following conditions: baseline, following ACEI (benezaprilat, 0.0625 mg/kg) or AT, block (valsartan, 0. I mg/kg), and a combined treatment (benezaprilat, 0.0625 mg/kg; valsartan, 0.1 mg/kg). Results: In the left ventricular myocyte study, BK levels increased over 93% with all treatments compared to untreated values (P < 0.05). In the in vivo study, basal interstitial BK values were lower in the CHF group than in controls (2.64 ± 0.57 vs 5.91 + 1.4 nM, respectively, P < 0.05). Following acute infusion of the ACEI, BK levels in the CHF state increased from baseline (57% ± 22; P < 0.05). Following combined ACEIIAT, block, BK levels increased from baseline in both control (42% ± 11) and CHF groups (60% ± 22; P < 0.05 for both). Conclusion: These findings suggest that ACEI, or combined ACEI/AT, block increased BK at the level of the myocyte and potentiated BK levels in the CHF myocardial interstitium.
Nonconforming, Anisotropic, Rectangular Finite Elements of Arbitrary Order for the Stokes Problem

The numerical solution of the Stokes problem is analyzed for four families of rectangular, nonconforming finite elements of arbitrary order. While two of them become unstable as the maximum aspect ratio of the finite elements increases, the other two remain stable. A complete convergence analysis is given for these two families on two-level triangulations with isotropic rectangular macroelements and certain anisotropic refinement strategies within the macros.