Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Video Content Management in Consumer Devices

Methods for video content analysis are necessary for the growing amount of video information delivered to consumers today. In this paper, we present a system for video content analysis called Vitamin, which provides management of a home video library. The system presents the user with a visual table of contents that provides an overview of the video content and direct access to particular points in the stored video. In this process, we apply a computationally inexpensive, simple, yet powerful mechanism for cut detection and keyframe filtering. Our initial implementation and results show that this system can perform video content extraction in real time on a low-end platform that matches a visual table of contents extracted by an expert.
Predicting the Outcomes of NCAA Basketball Championship Games

This paper uses the difference in seeding ranks to predict the outcome of March Madness games. It updates the Boulier-Stekler method by predicting the outcomes by rounds. We also use the consensus rankings obtained from individuals, systems and poll. We conclude that the consensus rankings were slightly better predictors in the early rounds but had the same limitations as the seedings in the later rounds.
Study of the Koch fractal monopole in the frequency domain

The possibilities of miniaturization of fractal geometries are studied. The Koch fractal is taken as example to understand this behavior The performance of the Koch fractal will be also compared with other non-fractal configuration (zig-zag) , in order to evaluate which one is more suitable for the reduction of size of antennas. Keyword list: Koch fractal, zig-zag, miniaturization, resonant frequency, quality factor.
[Studies on c-myc gene expression and p16 gene inactivation in nasopharyngeal carcinoma].

OBJECTIVE The alterations of c-myc and p16 genes and their relationship with the development and progression of nasopharyngeal carcinoma were studied. METHODS Sixty-nine biopsies of nasopharyngeal carcinoma were examined for the homozygous deletion methylation and reduced expression of p16, and the overexpression of myc family oncogenes using multiple PCR, restriction endonuclease coupled PCR, reverse transcriptase PCR and immunohistochemistry. RESULTS The homozygous deletion and methylation of p16 gene were found in 7 and 11 cases respectively. The total inactivation rate was 26.1% (18/69). The negative expression of p16, as shown by immunohistochemical examination was found in 42 out of 69 cases (60.9%). The overexpression of myc family oncogenes was found in 51 cases (73.9%). CONCLUSION It suggests that the inactivation of anti-oncogene p16 and the activation of myc family oncogene may play an important role in the development of nasopharyngeal carcinoma.
Poor health is associated with use of anthropogenic resources in an urban carnivore

Rates of encounters between humans and wildlife are increasing in cities around the world, especially when wildlife overlap with people in time, space and resources. Coyotes (Canis latrans) can make use of anthropogenic resources and reported rates of conflict have increased in cities across North America. This increase may be linked to individual differences in the use of human food and developed areas. We compared the relationships between coyote age, sex or health and the use of anthropogenic resources, which we defined as using developed areas over large home ranges, being active during the day, and consuming anthropogenic food. To do so, we applied GPS collars to 19 coyotes and sampled hair for stable isotope analysis. Eleven coyotes appeared to be healthy and eight were visibly infested with sarcoptic mange (Sarcoptes scabiei), a mite that causes hair loss. Diseased coyotes used more developed areas, had larger monthly home ranges, were more active during the day, and assimilated less protein than coyotes that appeared to be healthy. We speculate that anthropogenic food provides a low-quality but easily accessible food source for diseased coyotes, which in turn may increase reliance on it and other anthropogenic resources to promote encounters with people.
Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm for Fuzzy Controller Design and Its FPGA Implementation

An ant colony optimization (ACO) application to a fuzzy controller (FC) design, called ACO-FC, is proposed in this paper for improving design efficiency and control performance, as well as ACO hardware implementation. An FC's antecedent part, i.e., the ldquoifrdquo part of its composing fuzzy if-then rules, is partitioned in grid-type, and all candidate rule consequent values are then listed. An ant trip is regarded as a combination of consequent values selected from every rule. A pheromone matrix among all candidate consequent values is constructed. Searching for the best one among all combinations of rule consequent values is based mainly on the pheromone matrix. The proposed ACO-FC performance is shown to be better than other metaheuristic design methods on simulation examples. The ACO used in ACO-FC is based on the known ant colony system and is hardware implemented on a field-programmable gate array chip. The ACO chip application to fuzzy control of a simulated water bath temperature control problem has verified the designed chip effectiveness.
Estudo dos principais indicadores edafológicos da transferência solo-planta para o iodo

Os modelos radioecologicos computacionais utilizados para fins de seguranca ambiental, dependem de valores de parâmetros nem sempre disponiveis com a especificidade ambiental requerida. Dentro do cenario agricola, o fator de transferencia solo-planta ( Fv ) e uma informacao crucial para a avaliacao do risco radiologico, devido a ingestao de alimentos. A transferencia solo-planta esta diretamente relacionada com a fenologia e fisiologia das plantas, propriedade dos solos e propriedades fisico-quimica dos radionuclideos. Este trabalho teve por objetivo identificar, atraves da revisao sistematica da literatura, as propriedades dos solos que afetam os valores de Fv para o iodo; e a partir dessas, propor indicadores edafologicos potencialmente capazes de prever valores de Fv atraves do uso de ferramentas de inteligencia artificial. A analise da literatura permitiu selecionar o teor de materia orgânica e o pH dos solos como potenciais indicadores edafologicos de valores de Fv . Apesar do numero consideravel de artigos publicados sobre o tema, foram levantados e estruturados em um banco de dados, somente 135 valores de Fv para o iodo, que puderam ser associados a pelo menos uma propriedade do solo. Desse banco de dados, somente 2 “learning sets” puderam ser estruturados para a o treinamento de uma rede neural artificial; e somente para o 125 I: uma para trigo (n=38) e outra para alface (n=14). Esse resultado aponta que os registros de valores Fv para o iodo, nao reportam as informacoes ambientais adequadas para a analise desse parâmetro, sendo que a maioria das informacoes foram restritas a solos de clima temperado.
Freeze & Crypt: Linux Kernel Support for Main Memory Encryption

We present Freeze & Crypt, a framework for RAM encryption. Our goal is to protect the sensitive data the processes keep in RAM against memory attacks, such as coldboot, DMA, or JTAG attacks. This goal is of special significance when it comes to protect unattended or stolen devices, such as smartphones, tablets and laptops, against physical attackers. Freeze & Crypt makes use of the kernel’s freezer, which allows freezing a group of processes by holding them firm in the so-called refrigerator. Inside, frozen processes inescapably rest at a point in kernel space where they cannot access their memory from user space. We extend the freezer to make arbitrary process groups transparently and dynamically encrypt their full memory space with a key only present during enand decryption. When thawing a process group, each process decrypts its memory space, leaves the refrigerator and resumes normal execution. We develop a prototype and deploy it onto productively used mobile devices running Android containers. With this application scenario, we show how our mechanism protects the sensitive data in RAM against physical attackers when a container or device is not in active use.
Neuroprotective effects of carnosine and homocarnosine on pheochromocytoma PC12 cells exposed to ischemia

The development of neuroprotective drugs against ischemic insults is hampered by the lack of pharmacological in vitro models. We developed an ischemic model using PC12 cell cultures exposed to oxygen‐glucose‐deprivation (OGD) followed by reoxygenation (18 hr) under regular atmospheric oxygen level. The toxicity induced in this model, that is partially caused by generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS), was measured morphologically as well as by the release of lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) and the prostaglandin PGE2 from the cells. Carnosine and homocarnosine, histidine dipeptides antioxidants, found in high concentration in the brain, have been suggested to provide neuroprotection. Using the OGD model we found that 5 mM carnosine and 1 mM homocarnosine provided maximal neuroprotection of about 50% against OGD insult. This neuroprotective effect was similar to that of a known antioxidant, 4‐hydroxy‐2,2,6,6‐tetramethylpiperidine‐1‐oxyl (tempol), and was not observed in a serum‐deprivation toxicity model of PC12 cells, indicating that carnosine and homocarnosine may act as antioxidant‐neuroprotective agents in the brain. Our ischemic model may provide a useful tool for investigating the mechanisms involved in the neuroprotection afforded by histidine dipeptides. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
The Influence of Task Formats on the Accuracy of Medical Students' Self‐assessments

Purpose Accurate self-assessment is an essential skill for the self-directed learning activities and appropriate patient referral decisions of practicing physicians. However, many questions about the characteristics of self-assessment remain unanswered. One is whether self-assessment is a generalizable skill or dependent on the characteristics of the task. This study examines the self-assessment skills of medical students across two task formats: performancebased and cognitive-based. Method In 1997 and 1998, fourth-year medical students at the University of Michigan assessed their own performances on ten stations of a clinical examination. The examination used two formats: performance tasks (the examination or history taking of standardized patients) and cognitive tasks (interpreting vignettes or test results and then answering paper-and-pencil questions). Three measures of self-assessment accuracy were used: a bias index (average difference between the students' estimates of their performances and their actual scores), a deviation index (average absolute difference between estimate and actual score), and an actual score-estimate-of-performance correlation (the correlation between the estimate and actual scores). Results The student bias and deviation indices were similar on the cognitive and the performance tasks. The correlations also indicated similarity between the two types of tasks. Conclusion The results indicate that the format of the task does not influence students' abilities to self-assess their performances, and that students' self-assessment abilities are consistent over a range of skills and tasks. The authors also emphasize the importance of sampling tasks while conducting self-assessment research.
Systems Change Resulting from HIV/AIDS Education and Training

An evaluation of nine diverse HIV/AIDS training programs assessed the degree to which the programs produced changes in the ways that health care systems deliver HIV/AIDS care. Participants were interviewed an average of 8 months following completion of training and asked for specific examples of a resulting change in their health care system. More than half of the trainees gave at least one example of a systems change. The examples included the way patient referrals are made, the manner in which agency collaborations are organized, and the way care is delivered.
Canine parvovirus 2c infection in a cat with severe clinical disease

Canine parvovirus 2 (CPV-2) is considered the main pathogen responsible for acute gastroenteritis in dogs, causing vomiting and hemorrhagic enteritis mainly. However, infection in cats by CPV variants causes clinical signs similar to Feline panleukopenia virus. The current study reports a case of CPV-2c in a domestic cat, in Portugal. The findings suggest that more surveys are needed to know the true prevalence and significance of cats in CPV epidemiology worldwide.
Genome Sequences of SAT 2 Foot-and-Mouth Disease Viruses from Egypt and Palestinian Autonomous Territories (Gaza Strip)

ABSTRACT Two foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) genome sequences have been determined for isolates collected from recent field outbreaks in North Africa (Egypt) and the Middle East (Palestinian Autonomous Territories). These data represent the first examples of complete genomic sequences for the FMDV SAT 2 topotype VII, which is thought to be endemic in countries immediately to the south of the Sahara desert. Further studies are now urgently required to provide insights into the epidemiological links between these outbreaks and to define the pathogenicity of this emerging lineage.
Inhibition of Gammaherpesvirus Replication by RNA Interference

ABSTRACT RNA interference (RNAi) is a conserved mechanism in which double-stranded, small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) trigger a sequence-specific gene-silencing process. Here we describe the inhibition of murine herpesvirus 68 replication by siRNAs targeted to sequences encoding Rta, an immediate-early protein known as an initiator of the lytic viral gene expression program, and open reading frame 45 (ORF 45), a conserved viral protein. Our results suggest that RNAi can block gammaherpesvirus replication and ORF 45 is required for efficient viral production.
MonoTrans: Statistical Machine Translation from Monolingual Data

We present MonoTrans, a statistical machine translation system which only uses monolingual source language and target language data, without using any parallel corpora or language-specific rules. It translates each source word by the most similar target word, according to a combination of a string similarity measure and a word frequency similarity measure. It is designed for translation between very close languages, such as Czech and Slovak or Danish and Norwegian. It provides a lowquality translation in resource-poor scenarios where parallel data, required for training a high-quality translation system, may be scarce or unavailable. This is useful e.g. for cross-lingual NLP, where a trained model may be transferred from a resource-rich source language to a resourcepoor target language via machine translation. We evaluate MonoTrans both intrinsically, using BLEU, and extrinsically, applying it to cross-lingual tagger and parser transfer. Although it achieves low scores, it does surpass the baselines by respectable margins.
Regional methionine and glucose uptake in high-grade gliomas: a comparative study on PET-guided stereotactic biopsy.

UNLABELLED Gliomas are regionally heterogeneous tumors. The local relationship between histologic features and radiotracer uptake evaluated by PET should therefore influence analysis and interpretation of PET results on gliomas. This study explored this local relationship as a result of PET guidance of stereotactic biopsies. METHODS Local histology was confronted to the regional uptake of 18F-2-fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose (18F-FDG) and 11C-methionine (11C-MET) in 14 patients with high-grade glioma diagnosed during a procedure of PET-guided stereotactic biopsies. We analyzed the uptake of both tracers in regions of interest centered on the stereotactic coordinates of 93 biopsy samples. RESULTS A semiquantitative analysis revealed a significant regional correlation between 11C-MET and 18F-FDG uptakes. Uptake of both tracers was significantly higher on the site of tumor samples showing anaplastic changes than in the rest of the tumor. Presence of necrosis in anaplastic areas of the tumor significantly reduced the uptake of 11C-MET. CONCLUSION PET with 11C-MET and 18F-FDG may help to evaluate, in vivo, the metabolic heterogeneity of human gliomas. Anaplasia is a factor of increased uptake of both tracers, but microscopic necrosis in anaplastic areas influences their uptake differently. This finding probably relates to the differences in tracer uptake by non-neoplastic components of necrotic tumors. These results underline the complementary role of 18F-FDG and 11C-MET for the study of brain tumors and favors their use for stereotactic PET guidance of diagnostic or therapeutic procedures.
Optical flow localisation and appearance mapping (OFLAAM) for long-term navigation

This paper presents a novel method to use optical flow navigation for long term navigation. Unlike standard SLAM approaches for augmented reality, OFLAAM is designed for Micro Air Vehicles (MAV). It uses a optical flow camera pointing downwards, a IMU and a monocular camera pointing frontwards. That configuration avoids the computational expensive mapping and tracking of the 3D features. It only maps these features in a vocabulary list by a localization module to tackle the optical flow drift and the lose of the navigation estimation. That module, based on the well established algorithm DBoW2, will be also used to close the loop and allow long-term navigation in previously visited areas. The combination of high speed optical flow navigation with a low rate localization algorithm allows fully autonomous navigation for MAV, at the same time it reduces the overall computational load. This framework is implemented in ROS (Robot Operating System) and tested attached to a laptop. A representative scenario is used to validate and analyze the performance of the system.
Patch testing in cases of eczema and dermatitis in Beijing, China

Of 124 patients with eczema and dermatitis patch tested by the European standard series of allergens in the period Horn April to October 1989, 59 cases showed sensitivity to 1 or more allergens, Potassium dichromate, nickel sulphate and cobalt chloride were the 3 major sensitizers with a frequency of 17.9%. 13.8% and 10.6%, respectively. The office and factory workers showed higher incidence of positive reactions than the student group. The environment of the office and the factory seems to be the potential Source of exacerbating factors of eczematous skin disease.
Examining the antecedents of persuasive eWOM messages in social media

Purpose – Numerous electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) studies have been conducted to examine the effectiveness of persuasive eWOM messages. Despite the impact of eWOM messages in decision-making processes, few researches have directly tested potential antecedents of persuasive eWOM messages among message recipients in social media context. The purpose of this paper is to critically discuss and examine the determinants of persuasive eWOM messages when message recipients intend to accept and use eWOM messages. Design/methodology/approach – The authors reviewed extant literature of eWOM and proposed hypotheses regarding persuasive eWOM messages in social media context. A survey of 78 respondents was conducted and the data were analysed using SmartPLS. Findings – This study found that argument quality, source credibility, source attractiveness, source perception and source style are critical antecedents of persuasive eWOM messages. The PLS results suggested that source credibility (trustworthiness), source perce.
[The efficiency and safety of adalimumab treatment in patients with active rheumatoid arthritis unresponsive to standard therapy: Russian national study results].

AIM To confirm the efficacy and safety of adalimumab (ADA) added to the standard antirheumatic therapy performed in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) of moderate and high activities. SUBJECTS AND METHODS The open-labeled multicenter study enrolled 100 adult patients (11 men, 89 women; mean age 50.9 +/- 11.1 years) with active RA according to the ACR criteria (1987) despite their treatment with disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs, the average number of which in the history was 2.1 per man. At baseline, DAS28 CRP was as many as 6.2 +/- 0.84 scores; C-reactive protein (CRP) was 37.1 +/- 34.7 mg/l. In accordance with the indications officially registered in the European Union and the Russian Federation, ADA was given in a dose of 40 mg 2 weeks. Before administration of the drug, every patient underwent screening examination for tuberculosis, which used a tuberculin test and chest X-ray. The screening covered a period of the treatment up to 24 weeks and its subsequent period within 70 days after administration of the last dose of ADA in order to study its safety. RESULTS DAS28-CRP scores decreased from 6.14 +/- 0.86 (at baseline) to 3.39 +/- 1.1 (by the end of the study). At 12 weeks, 22% of the patients achieved a low RA activity (DAS28-CRP < or = 3.2 scores); 14% achieved clinical remission (DAS28-CRP < or = 2.6 scores); at 24 weeks, these were 37 and 25% of the patients, respectively. There were differences in effectiveness in terms of the baseline disease activity. At 24 weeks, ACR20, ACR50, and ACR 70 responses were achieved in 88, 67, and 26% of the patients, respectively. The HAQ functional index reduced from 1.9 +/- 0.6 (at baseline) to 1.081 +/- 0.64 (at 12 weeks) and 1.04 +/- 0.68 (at 24 weeks) scores. Twenty-four patients were recorded as having 40 adverse reactions (AR), including only one severe AR (septic arthritis). There were no cases of tuberculosis. CONCLUSION The Russian multicenter study demonstrated the high clinical efficacy of ADA in patients with the moderate and high activity of RA unresponsive to standard therapy, as well as its satisfactory safety.
Bacillus cereus and bacillus subtilis used as probiotics in rotifer (Brachionus plicatilis) cultures

Since live food is a key factor in fish and invertebrate larvae rearing, the objective of this study was to evaluate the probiotic potential of two Gram positive Bacillus species: Bacillus cereus (CCBM-2) and Bacillus subtilis (CCBM- 64), originally isolated from marine sediments in the Colombian Caribbean, in rotifer Brachionus plicatilis cultures. The enzymatic activity and antibacterial activity against pathogens of B. cereus and B. subtilis were measured in vitro. Direct supplementation of the rotifer culture water with both bacteria was also carried out and the effect was measured in vivo by estimating the density of rotifers and bacterial counts in the culture. The results indicated that extracellular products of both bacteria strongly inhibited the growth of AeromonA. hydrophila and Vibrio alginolyticus isolated from diseased fish. Enzyme API ZYM assays showed that both bacteria have esterase lipase, leucine arylamidase, acid phosphatase, lipase, and Naphthol-AS-BI- phosphohydrolase activities. Furthermore, it was observed that the addition of B. subtilis to the rotifer culture water resulted in a significant increase in rotifer numbers and a reduction of Vibrio levels. B. subtilis appears to be a promising probiotic for rotifer cultures, but further research is required to determine the capacity in controlling A. hydrophila and V. alginolyticus when administered via rotifers to fish larvae.