Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Estimating Semantic Distance Using Soft Semantic Constraints in Knowledge-Source – Corpus Hybrid Models

Strictly corpus-based measures of semantic distance conflate co-occurrence information pertaining to the many possible senses of target words. We propose a corpus-thesaurus hybrid method that uses soft constraints to generate word-senseaware distributional profiles (DPs) from coarser "concept DPs" (derived from a Roget-like thesaurus) and sense-unaware traditional word DPs (derived from raw text). Although it uses a knowledge source, the method is not vocabulary-limited: if the target word is not in the thesaurus, the method falls back gracefully on the word's co-occurrence information. This allows the method to access valuable information encoded in a lexical resource, such as a thesaurus, while still being able to effectively handle domain-specific terms and named entities. Experiments on word-pair ranking by semantic distance show the new hybrid method to be superior to others.
Minimizing bugs in cognitive neuroscience programming

Rigorous data analysis is a cornerstone of empirical scientific research. In recent years, much attention in the field of cognitive neuroscience has been paid to the issue of correct statistical procedures (e.g., Kriegeskorte et al., 2009; Nieuwenhuis et al., 2011; Kilner, 2013). However, an additional essential aspect of data analysis, which has attracted relatively little attention, is the errors (bugs) in custom data analysis programming code. Whereas, in its broad definition a bug can be any type of an error, here I refer to it as a problem in the code that does not lead to a failure (error or crash) during execution; that is, code that contains a bug completes its execution properly, but the output result is incorrect. Notably, if an erroneous output result consists of reasonable values, then the programmer might have no indication that something went wrong. It is impossible to estimate how many published studies contain results with bugs; however, given the ubiquity of bugs in non-scientific (industrial) software (Zhivich and Cunningham, 2009), it is plausible that academic code is no exception. Furthermore, the quality of custom code in cognitive neuroscience field in particular, is probably even worse than in the industry because (a) code in the field of cognitive neuroscience is usually written by people with only basic programming training—after all, they are brain researchers and not software engineers; (b) the code most often is programmed by a single researcher, without any code peer-review procedure (Wiegers, 2002); and (c) the custom code is usually used by a single or few lab members only. This last point is critical, because when the code is used by many, as is the case with large open-source projects like SPM (http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/), FieldTrip (http://fieldtrip.fcdonders.nl/), EEGLab (http://sccn.ucsd.edu/eeglab/) or PyMVPA (http://www.pymvpa.org/), the likelihood is low that a serious bug would remain unnoticed for a long time. The goal of this paper is to give practical advice to cognitive neuroscientists on how to minimize bugs in their custom data analysis code. The advice is illustrated using MATLAB schematic samples; executable code examples can be found in the Supplementary Materials.
Solving the 3D watershed over-segmentation problem using the generic adjacency graph

The watershed transformation is a useful tool for the 3D segmentation. However, over segmentation have become the key problems for the conventional algorithm. This paper presents two new methods for solving these problems. The first method is to establish a generic-adjacencies graph of regions resulting from the application of watershed segmentation and to merge these regions according to a criterion of depth. The second method that works by pre-treatment uses the generic-adjacencies graph of minima to eliminate insignificant ones. In this process we have applied a hybrid criterion of depth and concavity/convexity to obtain the significant minima, these latter will subsequently pass to the watershed segmentation for a 3D object parting. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Indeed, the use of the adjacency graph allowed us to reduce processing time. Our ways permit therefore to get a fast and efficient segmentation of 3D mesh models.
Jointly PHY / MAC Capacity for Ultra-wideband Multi-hop Networks

Ultra-wideband (UWB) radio is a fast emerging technology with uniquely attractive features inviting major advances in wireless communications, networking, radar, imaging, and positioning systems. UWB radios offer great flexibility and shows enormous potential in view of future fourth generation (4G) broadband wireless access in dense multipath environments. In this paper jointly PHY and MAC layer lower bound and upper bound throughput capacity of ultra-wideband ad-hoc network has been found under Voronoi tessellation power control using second derivative UWB waveform. These bounds demonstrate that throughput increases with node density (n). In the simulation we take into account The FCC UWB and FCC Waiver grant regulations with bandwidth between (3.6–10.1 GHz) at maximum power spectrum density (PSD) -40dBm/MHz. with this large bandwidth, and power and interference control, we depict the significant of jointly (PHY/MAC) properties on capacity of UWB ad-hoc indoor environment networks.
Estimation of the amount of internalized ricin that reaches the trans- Golgi network

We have used a protocol for internalization of ricin, a ligand binding to plasma membrane glycoproteins and glycolipids with terminal galactosyl residues, and infection with the vesicular stomatitis virus ts 045 mutant in BHK-21 cells to determine whether internalized plasma membrane molecules tagged by ricin reach distinct compartments of the biosynthetic-exocytic pathway. At 39.5 degrees C newly synthesized G protein of ts 045 was largely prevented from leaving the endoplasmic reticulum. At the same temperature ricin was endocytosed and reached, in addition to endosomes and lysosomes, elements of the Golgi complex. When the temperature was lowered to 19.5 degrees C, no more ricin was delivered to the Golgi complex, but now G protein accumulated in the Golgi stacks and the trans-Golgi network (TGN). Double-labeling immunogold cytochemistry on ultracryosections was used to detect G protein and ricin simultaneously. These data, combined with stereological and biochemical methods, showed that approximately 5% of the total amount of ricin within the cells, corresponding to 6-8 X 10(4) molecules per cell, colocalized with G protein in the Golgi complex after 60 min at 39.5 degrees C. Of this amount approximately 70- 80% was present in the TGN. Since most of the ricin molecules remain bound to their binding sites at the low pH prevailing in compartments of the endocytic pathway, the results indicate that a fraction of the internalized plasma membrane molecules with terminal galactose are not recycled directly from endosomes or delivered to lysosomes, but are routed to the Golgi complex. Also, the results presented here, in combination with other recent studies on ricin internalization, suggest that translocation of the toxic ricin A-chain to the cytosol occurs in the TGN.
A Correlational Analysis of Empowerment and Experience with Resistance to Change

A Correlational Analysis of Empowerment and Experience with Resistance to Change by Rita E. Burgess MS, Keller Graduate School of Management, 2007 BS, Excelsior College, 2002 Doctoral Study Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Business Administration Walden University December 2014
Cortisol Response to Corticotropin Stimulation in Trauma Patients: Influence of Hemorrhagic Shock

Background An abnormal adrenocortical function and a vasopressor dependency have been demonstrated during septic shock. Because trauma and hemorrhage are the leading causes of noninfectious inflammatory syndromes, the goal of this study was to assess the adrenal reserve of trauma patients and its relation with clinical course. Methods Cortisol response to an intravenous corticotropin bolus was obtained in 34 young trauma patients (Injury Severity Score =29.1 ± 7.3) at the end of the resuscitative period (“early phase”) and at the end of the first posttraumatic week (“late period”). Cortisol response less than +9 g/dl defined an impaired adrenal function, and the corresponding patient was called a nonresponder. According to the early response, hemorrhagic shock, circulating interleukin-6, need for vasopressor therapy, subsequent organ dysfunction and infection, and outcomes were studied. Results Sixteen patients (47%) were nonresponders at the end of the early phase. Hemorrhagic shock was more frequent (69 vs. 28%;P = 0.037) and interleukin-6 concentrations were higher (728 ± 589 vs. 311 ± 466 pg/ml;P = 0.048) in these patients. The early cortisol responses were negatively correlated with the concomitant interleukin-6 serum concentrations (r2 = 0.298;P = 0.003). Four early nonresponders (and shock patients) remained nonresponders during the late phase (25%). Morbidity and mortality were similar in early nonresponders and responders. The duration of norepinephrine treatment and the total amount of infused drug were significantly higher in early nonresponders. Conclusions A sustained impairment of adrenal reserve is frequently observed in trauma patients. This abnormal cortisol response to corticotropin stimulation is related with the inflammatory consequences of hemorrhagic shock and is followed by a prolonged vasopressor dependency.
Measuring Lexical Cohesion: Beyond Word Repetition

This paper considers the problem of finding topical shifts in documents and in particular at what information can be leveraged to identify them. Recent research on topical segmentation usually assumes that topical shifts in discourse are signalled by changes in vocabulary. This information, however, is not always a sufficient indicator of a topical shift, especially for certain genres. This paper explores an additional source of information. Our hypothesis is that the type of a referring expression is an indicator of how accessible its antecedent is. The shorter and less informative the expression (e.g., a personal pronoun versus a lengthy post-modified noun phrase), the more accessible the antecedent is likely to be and the more likely it is that the topic under discussion has remained constant between the two mentions. We explore how this information can be used to augment a lexically-based topical segmenter. We test our hypothesis on two types of data, literary narratives and lecture notes. The results suggest that our similarity metric is useful: depending on the settings it either slightly improves the performance or leaves it unchanged. They also suggest that certain types of referring expressions are more useful than others.
The Effect of Dynamic and Non-Dynamic Assessment on Acquisition of Apology Speech Act among Iranian EFL Learners

The current study has aimed to explore the effect of dynamic and non-dynamic assessment on acquisition of apology speech act among Iranian EFL learners. One-hundred forty-three male and female intermediate Iranian learners, who were selected randomly, were assigned to high and low groups based on their score in OPT. Then, each group was divided into two DA and NDA groups randomly. Both groups participated in pretest and posttest, six treatment tests during fifteen sessions, also an instruction part about different apology strategies based on Olshatain and Cohen (1983). DA groups, the experimental ones, received different types of mediation in tests based on Lantolf and Poehner's (2011) scale and their ZPDs. NDA groups, the control ones, were assessed in traditional method. T-test was used to analyze the data, which revealed that DA group significantly outperformed NDA group. The main result of this study showed that dynamic assessment helps learners to improve their apology speech act acquisition. The findings of this study provide insights to assessment of pragmatics.
Maestro: Replica-Aware Map Scheduling for MapReduce

MapReduce has emerged as a leading programming model for data-intensive computing. Many recent research efforts have focused on improving the performance of the distributed frameworks supporting this model. Many optimizations are network-oriented and most of them mainly address the data shuffling stage of MapReduce. Our studies with Hadoop demonstrate that, apart from the shuffling phase, another source of excessive network traffic is the high number of map task executions which process remote data. That leads to an excessive number of useless speculative executions of map tasks and to an unbalanced execution of map tasks across different machines. All these factors produce a noticeable performance degradation. We propose a novel scheduling algorithm for map tasks, named Maestro, to improve the overall performance of the MapReduce computation. Maestro schedules the map tasks in two waves: first, it fills the empty slots of each data node based on the number of hosted map tasks and on the replication scheme for their input data, second, runtime scheduling takes into account the probability of scheduling a map task on a given machine depending on the replicas of the task's input data. These two waves lead to a higher locality in the execution of map tasks and to a more balanced intermediate data distribution for the shuffling phase. In our experiments on a 100-node cluster, Maestro achieves around 95% local map executions, reduces speculative map tasks by 80% and results in an improvement of up to 34% in the execution time.
Antibodies against PfEMP 1 , RIFIN , MSP 3 and GLURP Are Acquired during Controlled Plasmodium falciparum Malaria Infections in Naı̈ve Volunteers

Antibodies to polymorphic antigens expressed during the parasites erythrocytic stages are important mediators of protective immunity against P. falciparum malaria. Therefore, polymorphic blood stage antigens like MSP3, EBA-175 and GLURP and variant surface antigens PfEMP1 and RIFIN are considered vaccine candidates. However, to what extent these antibodies to blood stage antigens are acquired during naive individuals’ first infections has not been studied in depth. Using plasma samples collected from controlled experimental P. falciparum infections we show that antibodies against variant surface antigens, PfEMP1 and RIFIN as well as MSP3 and GLURP, are acquired during a single short low density P. falciparum infection in non-immune individuals including strain transcendent PfEMP1 immune responses. These data indicate that the immunogenicity of the variant surface antigens is similar to the less diverse merozoite antigens. The acquisition of a broad and strain transcendent repertoire of PfEMP1 antibodies may reflect a parasite strategy of expressing most or all PfEMP1 variants at liver release optimizing the likelihood of survival and establishment of chronic infections in the new host. Citation: Turner L, Wang CW, Lavstsen T, Mwakalinga SB, Sauerwein RW, et al. (2011) Antibodies against PfEMP1, RIFIN, MSP3 and GLURP Are Acquired during Controlled Plasmodium falciparum Malaria Infections in Naı̈ve Volunteers. PLoS ONE 6(12): e29025. doi:10.1371/journal.pone. 0029025 Editor: Georges Snounou, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, France Received August 18, 2011; Accepted November 18, 2011; Published December 12, 2011 Copyright: 2011 Turner et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: LT was funded by Copenhagen University Star program. CWW was supported by The Danish Medical Research Council (grant reference number 27108-0540). TL was supported by the Grand Challenges in Global Health program and The Danish Medical Research Council. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: cwang@sund.ku. dk
P2X7 Receptor-mediated Scavenger Activity of Mononuclear Phagocytes toward Non-opsonized Particles and Apoptotic Cells Is Inhibited by Serum Glycoproteins but Remains Active in Cerebrospinal Fluid*

Background: Clearance of insoluble debris and apoptotic cells occurs via phagocytosis of non-opsonized particles, i.e. innate phagocytosis. Results: A group of serum glycoproteins was found to inhibit phagocytosis of non-opsonized beads and apoptotic cells by monocyte/macrophages. Conclusion: Certain metal-interacting glycoproteins are able to inhibit the scavenger activity. Significance: This is the first time to show serum glycoproteins associated with Alzheimer disease inhibit innate phagocytosis. Rapid phagocytosis of non-opsonized particles including apoptotic cells is an important process that involves direct recognition of the target by multiple scavenger receptors including P2X7 on the phagocyte surface. Using a real-time phagocytosis assay, we studied the effect of serum proteins on this phagocytic process. Inclusion of 1–5% serum completely abolished phagocytosis of non-opsonized YG beads by human monocytes. Inhibition was reversed by pretreatment of serum with 1–10 mm tetraethylenepentamine, a copper/zinc chelator. Inhibitory proteins from the serum were determined as negatively charged glycoproteins (pI < 6) with molecular masses between 100 and 300 kDa. A glycoprotein-rich inhibitory fraction of serum not only abolished YG bead uptake but also inhibited phagocytosis of apoptotic lymphocytes or neuronal cells by human monocyte-derived macrophages. Three copper- and/or zinc-containing serum glycoproteins, ceruloplasmin, serum amyloid P-component, and amyloid precursor protein, were identified, and the purified proteins were shown to inhibit the phagocytosis of beads by monocytes as well as phagocytosis of apoptotic neuronal cells by macrophages. Human adult cerebrospinal fluid, which contains very little glycoprotein, had no inhibitory effect on phagocytosis of either beads or apoptotic cells. These data suggest for the first time that metal-interacting glycoproteins present within serum are able to inhibit the scavenger activity of mononuclear phagocytes toward insoluble debris and apoptotic cells.
Design of Optimized 64 Bit MAC Unit for DSP Applications

A Design Of Optimized 64 Bit MULTIPLIER AND ACCUMULATOR (MAC) Unit Is Implemented In This Paper. MAC Unit Plays Major Role in Many of The Digital Signal Processing (DSP) Applications. The MAC Unit Is Designed With The Combinations Of Multipliers And Adders. In the proposed Method MAC Unit Is Implemented Using Vedic Multiplier And The Adder Is Done With ripple Carry Adder . The Components Are Reduced By Implementing Vedic Multiplier using the techniques of Vedic Mathematics that have been modified to improve performance. A high speed processor depends significantly on the multiplier as it is one of the key hardware blocks in most digital signal processing systems as well as in general processors. The Area Is Optimized Effectively Using Vedic Multiplier . The Total Design Implemented Using Xilinx .
Gesture recognition based on hand postures and trajectories by using dataglove: A fuzzy probability approach – A review

Many deaf people communicate with hearing people either through interpreter or text writing. However, some of them are able to use sign language (SL). SL is a language which determines a form of nonverbal communication in which visible bodily actions are used to communicate particular messages, either in place of speech or together and in parallel with spoken words. Nowadays, many facilities for the deaf and could not speak person was created. Among them are quite popular right now is Data glove. A device capable of recording hand movements, both the position of the hand and its orientation as well as finger movements; it is capable of simple gesture recognition and general tracking of three-dimensional hand orientation. Keywords-component; sign language; SL; nonverbal communication; Data Glove; Gesture Recognition and General tracking of three-dimensional hand orientation
Privacy-preserving group data access via stateless oblivious RAM simulation

Motivated by cloud computing applications, we study the problem of providing privacy-preserving access to an outsourced honest-but-curious data repository for a group of trusted users. We show how to achieve efficient privacy-preserving data access using a combination of probabilistic encryption, which directly hides data values, and stateless oblivious RAM simulation, which hides the pattern of data accesses. We give a method with O(log n) amortized access overhead for simulating a RAM algorithm that has a memory of size n, using a scheme that is data-oblivious with very high probability. We assume that the simulation has access to a private workspace of size O(nv), for any given fixed constant v > 0, but does not maintain state in between data access requests. Our simulation makes use of pseudorandom hash functions and is based on a novel hierarchy of cuckoo hash tables that all share a common stash. The method outperforms all previous techniques for stateless clients in terms of access overhead. We also provide experimental results from a prototype implementation of our scheme, showing its practicality. In addition, we show that one can eliminate the dependence on pseudorandom hash functions in our simulation while having the overhead rise to be O(log2 n).
Oxygen-induced retinopathy in the mouse.

PURPOSE To develop oxygen-induced retinopathy in the mouse with reproducible and quantifiable proliferative retinal neovascularization suitable for examining pathogenesis and therapeutic intervention for retinal neovascularization in retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) and other vasculopathologies. METHODS One-week-old C57BL/6J mice were exposed to 75% oxygen for 5 days and then to room air. A novel fluorescein-dextran perfusion method has been developed to assess the vascular pattern. The proliferative neovascular response was quantified by counting the nuclei of new vessels extending from the retina into the vitreous in 6 microns sagittal cross-sections. Cross-sections were also stained for glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP). RESULTS Fluorescein-dextran angiography delineated the entire vascular pattern, including neovascular tufts in flat-mounted retinas. Hyperoxia-induced neovascularization occurred at the junction between the vascularized and avascular retina in the mid-periphery. Retinal neovascularization occurred in all the pups between postnatal day 17 and postnatal day 21. There was a mean of 89 neovascular nuclei per cross-section of 9 eyes in hyperoxia compared to less than 1 nucleus per cross-section of 8 eyes in the normoxia control (P < 0.0001). Proliferative vessels were not associated with GFAP-positive astrocyte processes. CONCLUSIONS The authors have described a reproducible and quantifiable mouse model of oxygen-induced retinal neovascularization that should prove useful for the study of pathogenesis of retinal neovascularization as well as for the study of medical intervention for ROP and other retinal angiopathies.