Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Strong and Weak orderings for an accurate resource dimensioning

End to end QoS (Quality of Service) is crucial in computer networks, but very hard to study as the systems are in general very complex. We suppose that systems can be modeled by multidimensional Markov processes, which could be very hard to analyse if there is no specific solution form. We propose to apply stochastic comparisons of Markov processes in order to solve this problem. We provide new processes, easier to analyze and representing stochastic bounds (upper or lower) for the original model. In this paper, we propose strong and weak bounding processes for a general queueing network model, and discuss their accuracy for QoS constraints.
Implementing privacy sensitive governmental systems based on the concept of the Austrian data retention exchange service

With April 1st, 2012 the implementation of Directive 2006/24/EC on the retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of publicly available electronic communications services, or of public communications networks came into effect in Austria. With this implementation, not only the obligations of the providers of telecommunications services are controlled with respect to the retention of communications data, but also the powers of the security and law enforcement authorities with respect to request both retention data as well as traditional connection data (e.g., security police in the course of fulfilment of affairs). To make the retrieval of such data as transparent as possible, legally secure and traceable, all requests (with only few exceptions) must be carried out only via the so-called DLS, a central exchange service. This allows preventing unauthorized or hidden inquiries practically and not just legally. Both requests and replies must be transmitted only over HTTPS connections to the DLS and must further be secured using end-2-end encryption, enforcing a blind central service.
Posterior Tibial Slope and Further Anterior Cruciate Ligament Injuries in the Anterior Cruciate Ligament–Reconstructed Patient

Background: An injury to the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) is a multifactorial event influenced by intrinsic and extrinsic risk factors. Recently, the geometry of the proximal tibia has come under focus as a possible risk factor for an ACL injury. Hypothesis: An increased posterior tibial slope is associated with an increased risk of further ACL injuries in the previously ACL-reconstructed patient. Study Design: Case-control study; Level of evidence, 3. Methods: A total of 200 consecutive patients with isolated ACL ruptures who underwent primary reconstruction with hamstring autografts were enrolled in a prospective longitudinal study over 15 years. The posterior tibial slope was measured from a lateral knee radiograph by 2 blinded observers. The data were analyzed for the association between an increased posterior tibial slope and the incidence of further ACL injuries. Interobserver reliability of the posterior tibial slope measurements was assessed. Results: Radiographs and follow-up were available for 181 of the 200 enrolled patients. Fifty patients had a further injury to either the ACL graft or the contralateral knee. The mean posterior tibial slope of those with a further ACL injury was 9.9° compared with 8.5° for those with no further injury (P = .001). The mean posterior tibial slope for those with both an ACL graft and contralateral ACL rupture was 12.9°. The odds of further ACL injuries after reconstruction were increased by a factor of 5, to an incidence of 59%, in those with a posterior tibial slope of ≥12°. Conclusion: An increased posterior tibial slope is associated with increased odds of a further ACL injury after ACL reconstruction. The increased risk is most pronounced in those with a posterior tibial slope of ≥12°.
Intracellular signals and cytoskeletal elements involved in oligodendrocyte progenitor migration

We have examined the potential roles of intracellular Ca2+ regulation and of multiple cytoskeletal elements in control of the directed migration of cultured oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPs). OPs were found to migrate in response to platelet‐derived growth factor (PDGF) or to a lesser extent to basic fibroblast growth factor (FGF) in a non‐additive manner. This response was inhibited by chelation of intracellular Ca2+ by using BAPTA‐AM. OP migration was not evoked by the neurotransmitter agonists phenylephrine or methacholine, which elevate OP Ca2+ levels. Inhibition of the MAP kinase pathway with PD 098059 did not affect OP migration to PDGF. Within growth cone‐like leading edges of migratory OP processes, monomeric and filamentous actin were found to be colocalized with myosin and filamentous actin was prominent in filopodia extending beyond the leading edge. Tubulin was distributed throughout OP processes and cell bodies. Inhibition of actin or tubulin polymerization, by using cytochalasin B or nocodazole, respectively, altered OP morphology and markedly impaired migration. Inhibition of the myosin ATPase by BDM, which prevents force‐generating actin/myosin interactions, greatly inhibited the chemotaxic response at concentrations that did not disrupt cell morphology. These results indicate that growth factors stimulate OP migration by activating pathways which include intracellular Ca2+ regulation, and characterize the distribution of multiple cytoskeletal elements involved in the generation of directed OP movement. GLIA 26:22–35, 1999. © 1999 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Lower extremity burns and Unna paste: can we decrease health care costs without compromising patient care?

OBJECTIVE To compare an alternative treatment for lower extremity burns with the standard in-hospital treatment, in an attempt to shorten hospital stay. DESIGN A case-control series. SETTING A university-affiliated hospital. PATIENTS All patients with a burn isolated to a lower extremity were treated over an 8-month period with split-thickness skin grafting (STSG), Unna paste dressing, immediate mobilization and early discharge. This group was compared with matched controls from the preceding 8 years treated with STSG, occlusive burn gauze dressing, bed rest and hospitalization. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Duration of hospital stay and graft viability. RESULTS Thirteen patients with an average wound size of 131 cm2 were treated with Unna paste and had a graft viability of greater than 95% and a burn-scar rating equivalent to that of patients treated with the earlier regimen. The duration of hospital stay decreased from a mean of 12.9 days to 1.4 days, with no complications. This translated into a saving of $10,350 per patient. CONCLUSIONS This alternative treatment is safe, inexpensive and effective and is recommended as the treatment of choice for uncomplicated, noncircumferential lower extremity burns.
Noises removal for images by wavelet-based Bayesian estimator via Levy process analysis

There are many noise sources for images. Images are, in many cases, degraded even before they are encoded. Previously, we focused on Poisson noise (Huang, X. et al., IEEE Int. Conf. on Multimedia and Expo, vol.1, p.593, 2003). Unlike additive Gaussian noise, Poisson noise is signal-dependent and separating signal from noise is a difficult task. A wavelet-based maximum likelihood method for a Bayesian estimator that recovers the signal component of the wavelet coefficients in the original images by using an alpha-stable signal prior distribution is demonstrated for Poisson noise removal. The paper extends, via Levy process analysis, our previous results to more complex cases of noise comprised of compound Poisson and Gaussian. As an example, an improved Bayesian estimator that is a natural extension of other wavelet denoising (soft and hard threshold methods) via a colour image is presented to illustrate our discussion; even though computers did not know the noise, this method works well.
Regional brain activations differ for semantic features but not categories

Is human semantic knowledge neurally organised according to either category (e.g. living vs non-living) or attribute type (e.g. perceptual vs non-perceptual information)? Normal subjects were scanned using PET during a novel semantic production task, in which they generated either perceptual or non-perceptual information in response to names of living or non-living concepts. Analyses of blood flow in the temporal lobes revealed no significant differences associated with responses to living vs non-living concepts. Comparisons between retrieval of perceptual vs non-perceptual information, however, revealed significantly greater blood flow in left posterior inferior temporal cortex and right fusiform cortex associated with perceptual information and in left middle temporal cortex with non-perceptual information. These findings support a primarily attribute-based neural organisation of semantic knowledge.
Cultivation Effects of Video Games: A Longer-Term Experimental Test of First- and Second-Order Effects

This experiment examined cultivation effects resulting from a repeated, longer-term exposure to a violent video game, Grand Theft Auto IV. Over a period of three weeks, participants in the treatment condition played a violent video game in a controlled laboratory setting for a total of 12 hours. Following this period, participants completed a questionnaire which included demographics as well as first- and second-order cultivation measures and their scores were compared with the control group of participants who did not play the game. The findings provide some support for first-order effects, but only very limited support for second-order cultivation effects. Unexpectedly, second-order effects were in the opposite direction from a theorized one, suggesting a possible counter-cultivation mechanism at work. The theoretical implications of the findings for cultivation research are discussed.
Analysis of Ferroresonance Modes in Power Transformers Using Preisach-Type Hysteretic Magnetizing Inductance

The magnetic hysteresis phenomenon plays an important role in the ferroresonance behavior of a transformer. However, most existing transformer models for the analysis of the ferroresonance phenomenon either ignore the hysteresis effects or represent it based on the hysteresis major loop and scale it for lower current levels. Such a modeling approach does not reflect the actual physical behavior of the magnetic core with respect to the ferroresonance phenomenon. This paper, based on Preisach theory, introduces an accurate model of hysteretic inductor to represent a single-phase transformer for the investigation of the ferroresonance phenomenon. Based on the developed model, time-domain simulation studies show that even in the case of a single-phase transformer where no magnetic coupling exists between the three-phases, all known types of ferroresonance, including fundamental, sub-harmonic, quasi-periodic and chaotic modes, may occur. The effects of hysteresis and its initial conditions, grading capacitors and transformer winding capacitance on occurrence of ferroresonance and its change of mode are also discussed
ON THE UTILITY OF A SYLLABLE-LIKE SEGMENTATION FOR LEARNING A TRANSLITERATION FROM ENGLISH TO AN INDIC LANGUAGE

Source and target word segmentation and alignment is a primary step in the statistical learning of a Transliteration. Here, we analyze the benefit of a syllable-like segmentation approach for learning a transliteration from English to an Indic language, which aligns the training set word pairs in terms of sub-syllable-like units instead of individual character units. While this has been found useful in the case of dealing with Out-of-vocabulary words in English-Chinese in the presence of multiple target dialects, we asked if this would be true for Indic languages which are simpler in their phonetic representation and pronunciation. We expected this syllable-like method to perform marginally better, but we found instead that even though our proposed approach improved the Top-1 accuracy, the individual-character-unit alignment model somewhat outperformed our approach when the Top-10 results of the system were re-ranked using language modeling approaches. Our experiments were conducted for English to Telugu transliteration (our method will apply equally well to most written Indic languages); our training consisted of a syllable-like segmentation and alignment of a large training set, on which we built a statistical model by modifying a previous character-level maximum entropy based Transliteration learning system due to Kumaran and Kellner; our testing consisted of using the same segmentation of a test English word, followed by applying the model, and reranking the resulting top 10 Telugu words. We also report the dataset creation and selection since standard datasets are not available.
Peripheral nerve regeneration in interleukin 6-deficient mice.

BACKGROUND Interleukin 6 (IL-6) is a multifunctional cytokine with effects on central and peripheral neurons. OBJECTIVE To investigate the role of IL-6 in peripheral nerve regeneration by comparing IL-6 knockout and wild-type mice in a sciatic nerve model of injury and repair. DESIGN/SUBJECTS Forty C57/BL6 (wild-type) and 40 IL-6 knockout mice were randomly assigned to 1 of 4 groups: sham surgery, sciatic nerve crush injury, sciatic nerve transection without repair, and sciatic nerve transection with epineurial suture repair. Walking tracks were assessed preoperatively and postoperatively at 10-day intervals for 50 days by means of a previously described mouse sciatic functional index. Distal segments of the sciatic nerves were harvested at the completion of the study for histomorphometric evaluation. RESULTS The wild-type and knockout mice that underwent sham surgery showed similarly unimpaired function (P =.64 on day 50). The IL-6 knockout mice with the crush injury demonstrated decreased function on day 10 compared with the wild-type mice (P<.01) but completely recovered by day 40 (P =.55). Both IL-6 knockout and wild-type mice that underwent nerve transection without repair failed to recover function (P =.06 on day 50). There was no statistical difference in recovery between wild-type and IL-6 knockout mice that underwent nerve transection with epineurial suture repair (P =.30 on day 50). The morphometric data showed no significant differences in distal axon count between the wild-type and knockout mice after suture repair or crush injury (P>.32). CONCLUSIONS The absence of IL-6 does not appear to impair peripheral nerve recovery after sciatic nerve injury. Although in vitro and in vivo studies suggest a role for IL-6 in peripheral nerve physiology, this cytokine does not appear to have a substantial effect on functional recovery in a mouse sciatic nerve injury and repair model.
Age Differences in Emotion Regulation During a Distressing Film Scene

Recent research has emphasized age differences in emotion regulation strategies. However, not much is known about age differences in the use of different regulation strategies during a highly distressing film scene that evokes strong negative emotions of anger and sadness. Therefore, we examined age differences in four situation-specific emotion regulation strategies – namely, rumination, distraction, suppression, and mediality (a form of media-specific reappraisal). A sample of 99 older and 108 younger participants reported their current emotional state, then watched a highly distressing film scene, and finally reported their emotional reactions to the scene and the emotion regulation strategies they used. The manipulation check indicated that the film was successful in eliciting strong negative emotions of sadness and anger. Furthermore, after securing measurement invariance, we found that older adults reported higher scores in mediality and suppression than younger adults. No differences were found con.
A shared-subspace learning framework for multi-label classification

Multi-label problems arise in various domains such as multi-topic document categorization, protein function prediction, and automatic image annotation. One natural way to deal with such problems is to construct a binary classifier for each label, resulting in a set of independent binary classification problems. Since multiple labels share the same input space, and the semantics conveyed by different labels are usually correlated, it is essential to exploit the correlation information contained in different labels. In this paper, we consider a general framework for extracting shared structures in multi-label classification. In this framework, a common subspace is assumed to be shared among multiple labels. We show that the optimal solution to the proposed formulation can be obtained by solving a generalized eigenvalue problem, though the problem is nonconvex. For high-dimensional problems, direct computation of the solution is expensive, and we develop an efficient algorithm for this case. One appealing feature of the proposed framework is that it includes several well-known algorithms as special cases, thus elucidating their intrinsic relationships. We further show that the proposed framework can be extended to the kernel-induced feature space. We have conducted extensive experiments on multi-topic web page categorization and automatic gene expression pattern image annotation tasks, and results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed formulation in comparison with several representative algorithms.
A Short Form of the Teacher Rating Scale of School Adjustment

A total of 278 children at Time 1 (144 male and 134 female) from School Years 1 and 2 in the United Kingdom serve as participants. The children complete self-rated scales of school adjustment, and their teachers complete the Teacher Rating Scale of School Adjustment (TRSSA) twice across a 1-year period. At Time 1, children's performance on Standardized Achievement Tests are available for children in School Year 2. An exploratory factor analysis of the TRSSA at Time 1 yielded a viable short form of the scale composed of three associated factors (On-Task Classroom Involvement, Positive Orientation, and Maturity). Confirmatory factor analyses of the Short Form TRSSA yield evidence for these three factors at Time 2. The Short Form TRSSA demonstrates acceptable internal consistency and stability across time. As evidence for validity of the scale, the Short Form TRSSA is associated with children's self-reported school adjustment and academic performance.
Automated detection of paroxysmal gamma waves in meditation EEG

Meditation is a fascinating topic, yet has received limited attention in the neuroscience and signal processing community so far. A few studies have investigated electroencephalograms (EEG) recorded during meditation. Strong EEG activity has been observed in the left temporal lobe of meditators. Meditators exhibit more paroxysmal gamma waves (PGWs) in active regions of the brain. In this paper, a method is proposed to automatically detect PGWs from meditation EEG. The proposed algorithm is able to identify multiple sources in the brain that generate PGWs, and the sources associated with different types of PGWs can be distinguished. The effectiveness of the proposed method is assessed on 3 subjects possessing different degrees of expertise in practicing a yoga type meditation known as Bhramari Pranayama.
Math computation, error patterns and stimulant effects in children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

This study compared the math performance, error patterns, and concurrent overt behavior of 14 children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and 15 typically developing peers, matched in age, IQ and arithmetic achievement. Subsequently, the group with ADHD participated in a double-blind placebo-controlled trial of methylphenidate (MPH) to determine the effects of stimulant medication on academic efficiency, error pattern, and overt behavior. In comparison with their non-affected peers, children with ADHD had lower levels of academic efficiency, used more immature computation strategies, made substantially more trading errors in subtraction and exhibited increased levels of inattention and disruptive behavior. MPH exerted a significant positive effect on all measures. The possible interplay between a faulty memory system and poor academic achievement is discussed.
A self-start power management circuit for the piezoelectric energy harvester of speed bump

A self-start and self-powered power management circuit for impact-type piezoelectric energy harvester for speed bump is proposed. The piezoelectric impact-type cantilever was used to harvest the energy from speed bump as it is suitable for converting the low-frequency mechanical impact to high-frequency vibrations. Considering that vehicles passing through the speed bump are intermittent and random, a start-up circuit for this power management circuit is designed to save energy during the vacancy of electric energy. This start-up circuit also realizes the self-start and self-powered functions, when rechargeable battery is completely empty, the power management circuit can still transfer energy to load side. The experimental results show that the efficiency of the energy harvesting circuit is approximately 72% for the vehicle speeds of 5–20 km/h, and the controller of the energy harvesting circuit consumes only 3.7% of input energy for the vehicle speed of 20 km/h in active mode, and it doesn't loss any power in sleep mode.
Validation of Reference Genes for Relative Quantitative Gene Expression Studies in Cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz) by Using Quantitative Real-Time PCR

Reverse transcription quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (real-time PCR, also referred to as quantitative RT-PCR or RT-qPCR) is a highly sensitive and high-throughput method used to study gene expression. Despite the numerous advantages of RT-qPCR, its accuracy is strongly influenced by the stability of internal reference genes used for normalizations. To date, few studies on the identification of reference genes have been performed on cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz). Therefore, we selected 26 candidate reference genes mainly via the three following channels: reference genes used in previous studies on cassava, the orthologs of the most stable Arabidopsis genes, and the sequences obtained from 32 cassava transcriptome sequence data. Then, we employed ABI 7900 HT and SYBR Green PCR mix to assess the expression of these genes in 21 materials obtained from various cassava samples under different developmental and environmental conditions. The stability of gene expression was analyzed using two statistical algorithms, namely geNorm and NormFinder. geNorm software suggests the combination of cassava4. 1_017977 and cassava4. 1_006391 as sufficient reference genes for major cassava samples, the union of cassava4. 1_014335 and cassava4. 1_006884 as best choice for drought stressed samples, and the association of cassava4. 1_012496 and cassava4. 1_006391 as optimal choice for normally grown samples. NormFinder software recommends cassava4. 1_006884 or cassava4. 1_006776 as superior reference for qPCR analysis of different materials and organs of drought stressed or normally grown cassava, respectively. Results provide an important resource for cassava reference genes under specific conditions. The limitations of these findings were also discussed. Furthermore, we suggested some strategies that may be used to select candidate reference genes.