Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sequential Monte Carlo algorithms for joint target tracking and classification using kinematic radar information

This paper considers the problem of joint maneuvering target tracking and classification. Based on recently proposed Monte Carlo techniques, a multiple model (MM) particle filter and a mixture Kalman filter (MKF) are designed for two-class identification of air targets: commercial and military aircraft. The classification task is carried out by processing radar measurements only, no class (feature) measurements are used. A speed likelihood function for each class is defined using a priori information about speed constraints. Class-dependent speed likelihoods are calculated through the state estimates of each class-dependent tracker. They are combined with the kinematic measurement likelihoods in order to improve the process of classification. The two designed estimators are compared and evaluated over a rather complex target trajectory. The results are demonstrating the usefulness of the proposed scheme for the incorporation of an additional speed information. Both filters illustrate the opportunity of the particle filtering and MKF to incorporate constraints in a natural way, providing reliable tracking and correct classification.
Effects of Different Concurrent Resistance and Aerobic Training Frequencies on Muscle Power and Muscle Quality in Trained Elderly Men: A Randomized Clinical Trial

Muscle power is a strong predictor of functional status in the elderly population and is required to perform different daily activities. To compare the effects of different weekly training frequencies on muscle power and muscle quality induced by concurrent training (resistance + aerobic) in previously trained elderly men. Twenty-four trained elderly men (65 ± 4 years), previously engaged in a regular concurrent training program, three times per week, for the previous five months, were randomly allocated to concurrent training programs in which training was performed either twice a week (2·week-1, n = 12) or three times per week (3·week-1, n = 12). The groups trained with an identical exercise intensity and volume per session for 10 weeks. Before and after the exercise training, we examined muscle power, as estimated by countermovement jump height; knee extensor isokinetic peak torque at 60 and 180o.s-1; and muscle quality, a quotient between the one-repetition maximum of the knee extensors and the sum of quadriceps femoris muscle thickness determined by ultrasonography. Additionally, as secondary outcomes, blood pressure and reactive hyperemia were evaluated. Two-way ANOVA with repeated measures were used and statistical significance was set at α = 0.05. Muscular power (2·week-1: 7%, and 3·week-1: 10%) and muscle quality (2·week-1: 15%, and 3·week-1: 8%) improved with the concurrent exercise training (p < 0.001) but with no differences between groups. The isokinetic peak torque at 60 (2·week-1: 4%, and 3·week-1: 2%) and 180o.s-1 (2·week-1: 7%, and 3·week-1: 1%) increased in both groups (p = 0.036 and p=0.014, respectively). There were no changes in blood pressure or reactive hyperemia with the concurrent training. Concurrent training performed twice a week promotes similar adaptations in muscular power and muscle quality when compared with the same program performed three times per week in previously trained elderly men.
Determination of blood glucose using an oxidase-peroxidase system with a non-carcinogenic chromogen

Manual and automated methods for the determination of blood glucose have been devised using an oxidase/peroxidase system, with dl adrenaline, a non-carcinogen, as oxygen acceptor. The manual technique employs a stable single solution protein precipitant and the other reagents used are also stable. The automated methods are operated at 40/hr sample speed and washover between samples, over a very wide concentration range, is negligible.
Thin film photovoltaic devices and related manufacturing methods

Being described herein is a thin film photovoltaic devices and related manufacturing methods. In one embodiment, a photovoltaic device, (1) a structured substrate including an array of structure features, (2) is disposed adjacent to the structured substrate, and substantially in the array of structure features is shaped to compatible, a first electrode layer, (3) the positioned adjacent the first electrode layer and shaped to substantially conform to the first electrode layer is, an active layer, including a set of photoactive materials, active layer and, (4) is disposed adjacent to said active layer and said first electrode layer and the second electrode layer it is shaped to have a interlocking configuration, and a second electrode layer.
Evaluating the Learning Curve of Domain Adaptive Statistical Machine Translation Systems

The new frontier of computer assisted translation technology is the effective integration of statistical MT within the translation workflow. In this respect, the SMT ability of incrementally learning from the translations produced by users plays a central role. A still open problem is the evaluation of SMT systems that evolve over time. In this paper, we propose a new metric for assessing the quality of an adaptive MT component that is derived from the theory of learning curves: the percentage slope.
Microneedle Vaccination Elicits Superior Protection and Antibody Response over Intranasal Vaccination against Swine-Origin Influenza A (H1N1) in Mice

Influenza is one of the critical infectious diseases globally and vaccination has been considered as the best way to prevent. In this study, immunogenicity and protection efficacy between intranasal (IN) and microneedle (MN) vaccination was compared using inactivated swine-origin influenza A/H1N1 virus vaccine. Mice were vaccinated by MN or IN administration with 1 μg of inactivated H1N1 virus vaccine. Antigen-specific antibody responses and hemagglutination-inhibition (HI) titers were measured in all immunized sera after immunization. Five weeks after an immunization, a lethal challenge was performed to evaluate the protective efficacy. Furthermore, mice were vaccinated by IN administration with higher dosages (> 1 μg), analyzed in the same manner, and compared with 1 μg-vaccine-coated MN. Significantly higher antigen-specific antibody responses and HI titer were measured in sera in MN group than those in IN group. While 100% protection, slight weight loss, and reduced viral replication were observed in MN group, 0% survival rate were observed in IN group. As vaccine dose for IN vaccination increased, MN-immunized sera showed much higher antigen-specific antibody responses and HI titer than other IN groups. In addition, protective immunity of 1 μg-MN group was similar to those of 20- and 40 μg-IN groups. We conclude that MN vaccination showed more potential immune response and protection than IN vaccination at the same vaccine dosage.
The Joy of Parallelism with CzEng 1.0

CzEng 1.0 is an updated release of our Czech-English parallel corpus, freely available for non-commercial research or educational purposes. In this release, we approximately doubled the corpus size, reaching 15 million sentence pairs (about 200 million tokens per language). More importantly, we carefully filtered the data to reduce the amount of non-matching sentence pairs. CzEng 1.0 is automatically aligned at the level of sentences as well as words. We provide not only the plain text representation, but also automatic morphological tags, surface syntactic as well as deep syntactic dependency parse trees and automatic co-reference links in both English and Czech. This paper describes key properties of the released resource including the distribution of text domains, the corpus data formats, and a toolkit to handle the provided rich annotation. We also summarize the procedure of the rich annotation (incl. co-reference resolution) and of the automatic filtering. Finally, we provide some suggestions on exploiting such an automatically annotated sentence-parallel corpus.
Outer membrane protein F preparation of Pseudomonas aeruginosa as a vaccine against chronic pulmonary infection with heterologous immunotype strains in a rat model

Outer membrane protein F (porin) was purified by extraction from polyacrylamide gels of cell envelope proteins of the Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1 strain. Rats were immunized intramuscularly with 25 micrograms of protein F on days 1 and 14 and then challenged on day 28 via intratracheal inoculation of bacterium-containing agar beads. On day 35 the lungs were either fixed for histological examination or submitted for quantitation of the bacteria present. protein F immunization afforded significant protection against challenge with six of six heterologous lipopolysaccharide immunotype strains of P. aeruginosa. By an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, the protein F-immunized rats had both immunoglobulin G and M antibody responses to cell envelopes of all six of the heterologous immunotype strains. Protein F immunization greatly enhanced the ability of the rats to clear the inoculated P. aeruginosa from the lungs and significantly reduced the incidence and severity of pulmonary lesions as compared with those in bovine serum albumin-immunized control rats. These data show the efficacy of outer membrane protein F as a protective vaccine in a rat model of chronic pulmonary infection.
Extracting features with structural skeleton framework for semantic image classification by using supporting vector machine

Searching images their semantic is an active problem in multimedia image retrieval. Many researchers have attempted to improve semantic models by using high-level concept based on keyword annotation. However, the annotation is tedious, in consistent, and erroneous. The retrieval process of such approaches is done by keyword searching. This model is rather rudimentary and it does not specific enough for representing the actual meaning. In this paper, we present a technique of the semantic image classification by using the human perception. The structural skeleton is used to extract the object components and image meaning. The feature selection methods are introduced to select the essential features from existing features. The experimental results indicate that our proposed approach offers significant performance improvements in the interpretation of semantic image classification, compare with other features, with the maximum of 93.80%
Placenta-Derived Fetal Specific mRNA Is More Readily Detectable in Maternal Plasma than in Whole Blood

Background Placental mRNA was detected in maternal whole blood, raising the possibility of using maternal blood for noninvasive prenatal diagnosis. We investigated fetal mRNA detection in maternal whole blood and determined if it offered advantages over maternal plasma analysis. Methodology The concentrations of placental expressed genes, CSH1, KISS1, PLAC4 and PLAC1 in plasma and whole blood from healthy pregnant and non-pregnant individuals were compared by real-time quantitative reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction analysis. Their fetal specificity was investigated by comparing the transcript concentrations in pre- and post-delivery samples and through SNP genotyping by matrix-assisted laser-desorption and ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry. The gene expression profiles of pregnant and non-pregnant whole blood were investigated by microarray analysis. Upregulated genes in pregnant whole blood were selected for further quantitative analysis. Principal Findings The concentrations of the four transcripts were significantly higher in third trimester maternal whole blood than corresponding plasma without significant correlations. KISS1, PLAC4 and PLAC1 were detected in non-pregnant whole blood but not plasma. The transcripts remained detectable in some postpartum whole blood samples. The PLAC4 mRNA in maternal plasma showed fetal genotype while that in corresponding whole blood indicated both fetal and maternal contributions. Microarray analysis revealed upregulation of genes involved in neutrophil functions in pregnant whole blood including DEFA4, CEACAM8, OLFM4, ORM1, MMP8 and MPO. Though possibly pregnancy-related, they were not pregnancy-specific as suggested by the lack of post-delivery reduction in concentrations. Conclusions Maternal plasma is preferred over maternal whole blood for placenta-derived fetal RNA detection. Most studied ‘placental’ mRNA molecules in maternal whole blood were of maternal origin and might be derived from processes such as ‘illegitimate transcription’.
Seasonal pattern of apoplastic solute accumulation and loss of cell turgor during ripening of Vitis vinifera fruit under field conditions

Using a novel pressure membrane (PM) apparatus for the extraction of apoplastic fluid from field-grown grape (Vitis vinifera L.) berries, our hypothesis that significant apoplast solutes accumulate at the beginning of the ripening process (i.e. veraison), and that this accumulation might contribute to progressive berry softening due to a progressive loss of mesocarp cell turgor pressure (P) was tested. It was necessary to correct the solute potential (Ψs) of fluid collected with the PM for dilution due to the presence of a dead volume in the apparatus, but after correction, the Ψs obtained with the PM agreed with that obtained by low speed centrifugation. A clear decline in fruit apoplastic solute potential (ψSA) began approximately 10 d prior to fruit coloration, and it was found to be coincident with a decline in mesocarp cell P and fruit elasticity (E). By late in fruit development when berry growth ceased (90 d after anthesis), both apoplast and fruit Ψs reached almost –4 MPa. These results support the hypothesis that a decrease in ψSA is responsible for the observed loss in mesocarp cell P, and is the mechanistic cause of berry softening.
Rolling Tachyon

We discuss construction of classical time dependent solutions in open string (field) theory, describing the motion of the tachyon on unstable D-branes. Despite the fact that the string field theory action contains infinite number of time derivatives, and hence it is not a priori clear how to set up the initial value problem, the theory contains a family of time dependent solutions characterized by the initial position and velocity of the tachyon field. We write down the world-sheet action of the boundary conformal field theories associated with these solutions and study the corresponding boundary states. For D-branes in bosonic string theory, the energy momentum tensor of the system evolves asymptotically towards a finite limit if we push the tachyon in the direction in which the potential has a local minimum, but hits a singularity if we push it in the direction where the potential is unbounded from below.
An implementation of private cloud's service model (IaaS) using lightweight virtualization

The interest on traditional technologies is decreasing with the increasing demand on new technologies. The world of cloud market is changing with emergence of new technologies. In this paper we used a new virtualization method known as lightweight virtualization or containerization for the implementation of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in private cloud rather than traditional hypervisor approach because in containerization bootup time of VMs is in seconds, Size is in Mb's and have negligible CPU overhead. Cloud providers have already used this approach for making PaaS and SaaS but not IaaS. With this implementation network administrator/ System Administrator may get ready to think for the deployment of their hypervisor based cloud to Container based cloud.
Complement Activation and Prognosis in Patients With Type 2 Diabetes and Myocardial Infarction

OBJECTIVE The activation of the complement system may be involved in the pathology of myocardial infarction (MI) and type 2 diabetes. To explore their potential as prognostic markers, we characterized two factors in the complement cascade, the end product sC5b-9 and the mannose-binding lectin–associated Ser protease-2 (MASP-2), in type 2 diabetic patients with suspected MI. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Plasma sC5b-9 and MASP-2 were determined in patients with MI and type 2 diabetes (n = 397; median age 70; male 68%). The adjudicated end points were cardiovascular events (CVEs), including cardiovascular mortality and nonfatal MI or stroke. RESULTS The median sC5b-9 was 134 μg/L (interquartile range [IQR] 101–190 μg/L) and the median MASP-2 was 333 μg/L (IQR 235–463 μg/L), with no significant correlation between them. Women had higher sC5b-9 than men (median 152 vs. 130 μg/L; P = 0.02). Both sC5b-9 and MASP-2 were correlated to age and creatinine clearance, while MASP-2 was also correlated to BMI. During a median follow-up of 2.4 years, CVEs occurred in 141 patients (36%). Both sC5b-9 (hazard ratio 1.37 [95% CI 1.13–1.65]; P < 0.01) and MASP-2 (0.68 [0.51–0.92]; P = 0.01) predicted CVEs in unadjusted analyses. After multiple adjustments, the predictive capacity remained for sC5b-9 (1.30 [1.02–1.66]; P = 0.04) but not for MASP-2. CONCLUSIONS In type 2 diabetic patients with MI, high levels of sC5b-9 predict future CVE. This indicates that the complement system may play a significant role in the pathology of the subsequent myocardial damage and that the pathways leading to complement activation warrant further exploration as potential therapeutic targets to improve the prognosis for these patients.
Local bifurcation analysis of some dual congestion control algorithms

We perform the necessary calculations to determine the stability and asymptotic forms of solutions bifurcating from steady state in a nonlinear delay differential equation with a single discrete delay. The results are used to examine the loss of local stability in a selection of congestion control algorithms employed over a single link. In particular, we analyze the fair and the delay-based dual algorithms. Explicit conditions are derived to ensure the onset of stable limit cycles as these algorithms just lose local stability. Further, we are able to quantify the effect parameters of the system have on the amplitude of the bifurcating periodic solutions.
On Diagnosis of Violations of Constraints in Petri Net Models of Discrete Event Systems

Failure detection in partially observable model based Discrete Event Systems requires modelling failures as unobservable events within the system. Representing failures as events is not always realistic. For example, some classes of failure are in form of violations of constraints such as Service Level Agreement (SLA) and Quality of Service (QoS). These forms of failures do not represent events by themselves. They have to be modelled as additional events. Modifying the plant model is not always acceptable. Firstly, this may make the models large, causing extra computational complexity. Secondly, adding extra transitions is not always acceptable from engineers' perspective, because these constraints may change over the time leading to alternations of models every time these constraints are changed. To address this issue, this paper presents a new definition of diagnosability which extends the existing definition. In the new definition, a formalism has been introduced which captures failures as logical constraints instead of events. We show that starting from a Petri net, if the failure is expressed in Yen's logic, we can create a new Petri net with additional transitions, including transitions modelling failure, such that detection of violation of the constraint in the first Petri net is converted to diagnosis of failure in the second.
Design criteria for reduced-complexity joint multiuser detection and group decoding

Decision feedback multiuser detection with trellis code modulation (TCM) has been proposed to increase the spectral efficiency of bandlimited multiple-access channel (MAC) [(S. Marinkovic et al., 1999), (G. Corrall-Briones et al., 2001)]. In this paper, we investigate the design criteria to achieve good tradeoffs between performance and complexity for joint multiuser detection and group decoding (MD-GD) [(G. Corrall-Briones et al., 2001), (G. Corrall-Briones and M. Hueda, 2003)]. Two approaches are considered to improve the performance: reduced state algorithms and generalized Viterbi (GV) algorithms. In channels where the main perturbation is multiple-access interference, we show that performance can be further improved increasing the number of states of the channel rather than exploiting the coding information of more users. However, if error propagation is mitigated, additional coding information significantly improves performance. Numerical results show the good performance and low complexity of the MD-GD schemes designed from the new criteria introduced in this paper
Evolutionary Analysis of Mitogenomes from Parasitic and Free-Living Flatworms

Mitochondrial genomes (mitogenomes) are useful and relatively accessible sources of molecular data to explore and understand the evolutionary history and relationships of eukaryotic organisms across diverse taxonomic levels. The availability of complete mitogenomes from Platyhelminthes is limited; of the 40 or so published most are from parasitic flatworms (Neodermata). Here, we present the mitogenomes of two free-living flatworms (Tricladida): the complete genome of the freshwater species Crenobia alpina (Planariidae) and a nearly complete genome of the land planarian Obama sp. (Geoplanidae). Moreover, we have reanotated the published mitogenome of the species Dugesia japonica (Dugesiidae). This contribution almost doubles the total number of mtDNAs published for Tricladida, a species-rich group including model organisms and economically important invasive species. We took the opportunity to conduct comparative mitogenomic analyses between available free-living and selected parasitic flatworms in order to gain insights into the putative effect of life cycle on nucleotide composition through mutation and natural selection. Unexpectedly, we did not find any molecular hallmark of a selective relaxation in mitogenomes of parasitic flatworms; on the contrary, three out of the four studied free-living triclad mitogenomes exhibit higher A+T content and selective relaxation levels. Additionally, we provide new and valuable molecular data to develop markers for future phylogenetic studies on planariids and geoplanids.
Human Rights in History and Civics Textbooks: The Case of Israel

AbstractHuman rights education, as reflected in the presentation of “the others” and relations with them in forty-four history textbooks, twenty-three civics texts, and five “peace education” manuals, published in Israel from the 1950s on, are analyzed and evaluated. Attitudes toward Gentiles, Arabs, Oriental Israelis, and newcomers have improved immensely during the past half century, but nevertheless the “hidden” textbooks portray the cultural loftiness and prejudice of Israelis who are still a nation of people trapped by their own siege mentality.
Towards vocabulary-independent speech indexing for large-scale repositories

The Out-Of-Vocabulary problem remains a challenge for word-lattice-based speech indexing. Sub-word-based approaches address this problem effectively for small-scale tasks, but suffer from poor precisions on large-scale databases due to lack of strong language model constraints. We propose a method for searching OOV queries with large-scale databases in two steps. First, result candidates are extracted from a subword-based system, ensuring a high recall. The candidates are then refined by word-lattice rescoring aiming at a high precision. Experiments on a 160-hours lecture set show that the proposed approach achieves a relative improvement of 8.7% over the sub-word-based baseline, and 19.7% for only single-word queries.