Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Robustness of IPSA optimized high-dose-rate prostate brachytherapy treatment plans to catheter displacements

Purpose Inverse planning simulated annealing (IPSA) optimized brachytherapy treatment plans are characterized with large isolated dwell times at the first or last dwell position of each catheter. The potential of catheter shifts relative to the target and organs at risk in these plans may lead to a more significant change in delivered dose to the volumes of interest relative to plans with more uniform dwell times. Material and methods This study aims to determine if the Nucletron Oncentra dwell time deviation constraint (DTDC) parameter can be optimized to improve the robustness of high-dose-rate (HDR) prostate brachytherapy plans to catheter displacements. A set of 10 clinically acceptable prostate plans were re-optimized with a DTDC parameter of 0 and 0.4. For each plan, catheter displacements of 3, 7, and 14 mm were retrospectively applied and the change in dose volume histogram (DVH) indices and conformity indices analyzed. Results The robustness of clinically acceptable prostate plans to catheter displacements in the caudal direction was found to be dependent on the DTDC parameter. A DTDC value of 0 improves the robustness of planning target volume (PTV) coverage to catheter displacements, whereas a DTDC value of 0.4 improves the robustness of the plans to changes in hotspots. Conclusions The results indicate that if used in conjunction with a pre-treatment catheter displacement correction protocol and a tolerance of 3 mm, a DTDC value of 0.4 may produce clinically superior plans. However, the effect of the DTDC parameter in plan robustness was not observed to be as strong as initially suspected.
Hybrid Modelling and Control of Obstacle-Aided Snake Robot Locomotion

A snake can traverse cluttered and irregular environments by using irregularities around its body as push points to aid the propulsion. This characteristic feature of biological snake locomotion, which is denoted as obstacle-aided locomotion, is investigated for snake robot locomotion purposes in this paper. The paper presents a hybrid model of the dynamics of a planar snake robot interacting with obstacles in its environment. Obstacle contact forces are calculated by formulating and solving a linear complementarity problem (LCP). The existence and uniqueness properties of the state evolution of the hybrid model are investigated. The paper also presents a hybrid control strategy employing measured contact forces to maintain propulsion while simultaneously preventing the snake robot from being jammed between obstacles in its path. The simulation results validate the hybrid modelling approach and the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.
Automatic Registration of Panoramic 2.5D Scans and Color Images

Here we present an approach for a registration framework to fuse the 2.5D data from a laserscanner and the color information from a digital camera to 2.5D color images. The spatial resolution of the scanner is very dense, which emphasizes the need for precision during the calibration of both sensors as well as in the registration of the data streams. To achieve the same visual field for the digital camera, it is mounted on a vertical tilt unit. Overlapping color images are acquired by rotating the entire system horizontally and the tilt unit vertically by predefined angle increments. Using these angle increments as fixed input parameters, the calibration of the camera as well as the registration between both sensors can be simplified enormously. We use the Sift method and Ransac to find homologous points between the scanner and the camera data automatically and marker-free. In our results the marker-free approach is compared against marker-based registration.
Bent-beam electrothermal actuators-Part I: Single beam and cascaded devices

This paper describes electrothermal microactuators that generate rectilinear displacements and forces by leveraging deformations caused by localized thermal stresses. In one manifestation, an electric current is passed through a V-shaped beam anchored at both ends, and thermal expansion caused by joule heating pushes the apex outward. Analytical and finite element models of device performance are presented along with measured results of devices fabricated using electroplated Ni and p/sup ++/ Si as structural materials. A maskless process extension for incorporating thermal and electrical isolation is described. Nickel devices with 410-/spl mu/m-long, 6-/spl mu/m-wide, and 3-/spl mu/m-thick beams demonstrate 10 /spl mu/m static displacements at 79 mW input power; silicon devices with 800-/spl mu/m-long, 13.9-/spl mu/m-wide, and 3.7-/spl mu/m-thick beams demonstrate 5 /spl mu/m displacement at 180 mW input power. Cascaded silicon devices using three beams of similar dimensions offer comparable displacement with 50-60% savings in power consumption. The peak output forces generated are estimated to be in the range from 1 to 10 mN for the single beam devices and from 0.1 to 1 mN for the cascaded devices. Measured bandwidths are /spl ap/700 Hz for both. The typical drive voltages used are /spl les/12 V, permitting the use of standard electronic interfaces that are generally inadequate for electrostatic actuators.
he mediating role of trust and commitment on members ’ continuous nowledge sharing intention : A commitment-trust theory perspective

Although continuous knowledge sharing behaviour is acknowledged as important by scholars, the understanding of what influence this continuous behaviour remains limited. Thus, this paper fills the gap by examining the mediating role of identification trust and affective commitment on members’ continuous knowledge sharing intention within business online communities. 220 experienced online community members participated in the web survey. Structural equation modelling technique is used to analyze the data together with Baron and Kenny’s (1986) mediating analysis procedure. The research findings reveal that, besides user’s level of satisfaction, continuous knowledge sharing intention is partially mediated by affective commitment and identification trust. This paper ends by providing some insights on how to encourage continuous knowledge sharing intention within business online communities from the perspective of commitment-trust theory. Understanding the determinants of this behaviour is important as it helps to build an active community and also provides the opportunities for consumers to channel their ideas and suggestions in co-creating the products in which they are interested in. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Leontief versus Ghosh: two faces of the same coin

In this paper we explore the sectoral and aggregate implications of some endogeneization rules (i.e. on value-added and final demand) which have been common in the Leontief model and have been recently proposed in the Ghosh model. We detect that these rules may give rise in both models to some allegedly pathological behavior in the sense that sectoral or aggregate output, very often, may not follow the logical and economically expected direct relationship with some underlying endogenous variables—namely, output and value-added in the Ghosh model and output and consumption in the Leontief model. Because of the common mathematical structure, whatever is or seems to be pathological in the Ghosh model also has a symmetric counterpart in the Leontief model. These would not be good news for the inner consistency of these linear models. To avoid such possible inconsistencies, we propose new and simple endogeneization rules that have a sound economic interpretation.
Structural MAP adaptation in GMM-supervector based speaker recognition

In recent years, adaptation techniques have been given special focus in speaker recognition tasks, mainly targeting speaker and session variation disentangling under the Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) criterion. For these techniques, unseen mixtures are usually adapted in a global manner, if ever. In this paper, we explore Structural MAP (SMAP), Maximum a Posteriori adaptation using hierarchical structures of the acoustic space that allow data scarceness issues to be tackled with different precision levels. We explore this approach in a speaker verification system using a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier and Gaussian mean supervectors (GMM-SVM). We show that this is an effective approach that considerably outperforms its relevance MAP counterpart in the 2006 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation. We also show that using a speaker-adapted Universal Background Model can improve the stability of the clustering algorithm besides obtaining further improvements.
Revokable and versatile electronic money (extended abstract)

We present an e-money system where both value of funds and user anonymity can be revoked or suspended unconditionally , but only by the cooperation of banks and consumer rights organizations. We introduce the "ultimate crime," where an active attacker gets the bank's key or forces the bank to give "unmarked bank notes". Our system, unlike all current anonymous systems, can prevent such a crime from successfully being perpetrated, and employs revocation to do so. The mechanisms introduced to balance the need for anonymity against the need to be able to revoke it, together with the notion of challenge semantics that we introduce, provide us with a very versatile system, a second important goal of our investigation. The proposed scheme is efficient and easily extends the basic needs of a practical payment scheme to allow for coin divisibility, checks, credit card purchases and surety bonds. Moreover, the system (unlike some previous ones) is robust against problems arising from spurious equipment.
The making of a gradient: IcsA (VirG) polarity in Shigella flexneri

The generation and maintenance of subcellular organization in bacteria is critical for many cell processes and properties, including growth, structural integrity and, in pathogens, virulence. Here, we investigate the mechanisms by which the virulence protein IcsA (VirG) is distributed on the bacterial surface to promote efficient transmission of the bacterium Shigella flexneri from one host cell to another. The outer membrane protein IcsA recruits host factors that result in actin filament nucleation and, when concentrated at one bacterial pole, promote unidirectional actin‐based motility of the pathogen. We show here that the focused polar gradient of IcsA is generated by its delivery exclusively to one pole followed by lateral diffusion through the outer membrane. The resulting gradient can be modified by altering the composition of the outer membrane either genetically or pharmacologically. The gradient can be reshaped further by the action of the protease IcsP (SopA), whose activity we show to be near uniform on the bacterial surface. Further, we report polar delivery of IcsA in Escherichia coli and Yersinia pseudotuberculosis, suggesting that the mechanism for polar delivery of some outer membrane proteins is conserved across species and that the virulence function of IcsA capitalizes on a more global mechanism for subcellular organization.
Assessment and accountability: factors that influence the participation and performance of students with an emotional disturbance on a statewide accountability assessment in math

Assessment and Accountability: Factors That Influence the Participation and Performance of Students with an Emotional Disturbance on a Statewide Accountability Assessment in Math. (December 2008) Kimberly Temple Harvey, B.A., California State University at Long Beach; M.A., Houston Baptist University Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Kimberly J. Vannest Educational policy mandates student participation in statewide accountability assessments with the expectation that students achieve proficiency on content objectives. Demonstrating proficiency may be most difficult for students with an Emotional Disturbance (ED) who experience poor school outcomes. This study examined the participation and performance of students with ED on a regular statewide accountability assessment in math and examined the relationship between student and school level factors to student participation and performance. In the study, 34% of the students with ED participated and met proficiency standards on the regular statewide assessment in math. Student level factors examined were grade level, gender, ethnicity, and intelligence. School level factors were school-wide socioeconomic status and instructional setting for math; ethnicity, intelligence, and instructional setting associated with participation; grade level, ethnicity, and intelligence associated with performance. Level of intelligence was the only factor predictive of both participation and performance on the regular statewide accountability assessment in math.
The role of loudness in detection of surprising events in music recordings

The abrupt change of loudness is a salient event that is not always expected by a music listener. Therefore loudness is an important cue when seeking for events in a music stream that could violate human expectations. The concept of expectation and surprise in music has become recently the subject of extensive research, however mostly using symbolic data. The aim of this work is to investigate the circumstances when a change of sound intensity could be surprising for a listener. Then, using this knowledge, we aim to build a computational model that analyzes an audio stream and points to potential violations of human expectation. In order to check the quality of human prediction, an online (web-based) experiment, based on a gambling paradigm, has been performed. The subjects, after listening to an excerpt from real recordings of classical music, were asked to bet on how loud would be the next continuing seconds. The results of the survey have shown that the moments of sudden changes of intensity more likely caused mispredictions, however it is obvious that the loudness itself is not the only factor that determines human expectations.
Multipath key exchange on P2P networks

Distributed-hash-table (DHT) has been proposed to solve the problem of scaling for P2P networks. However, there are some problems of security in P2P networks. One of the problem is that key exchange is not performed preventing against endangering security. This reason may be the fact that P2P networks have no trusted server. Although certification and authentication are able to protect key exchange from spoofing and man-in-the-middle attacks, these cannot be applied because of that. Therefore, an attacker can easily compromise key exchange since P2P networks should accept any node whether it is malicious or not, and every node of P2P networks plays a role of router. Until today, for the above reasons, there is no way to exchange the secret key on P2P networks protecting against encountering security. In this paper, we propose a key exchange method on P2P networks protecting against spoofing and man-in-the-middle attacks. For the purpose of protecting key exchange from encountering security, we present the enhanced routings which are directional and probabilistic routings.
Manifold Learning for the Semi-Supervised Induction of FrameNet Predicates: An Empirical Investigation

This work focuses on the empirical investigation of distributional models for the automatic acquisition of frame inspired predicate words. While several semantic spaces, both word-based and syntax-based, are employed, the impact of geometric representation based on dimensionality reduction techniques is investigated. Data statistics are accordingly studied along two orthogonal perspectives: Latent Semantic Analysis exploits global properties while Locality Preserving Projection emphasizes the role of local regularities. This latter is employed by embedding prior FrameNet-derived knowledge in the corresponding non-euclidean transformation. The empirical investigation here reported sheds some light on the role played by these spaces as complex kernels for supervised (i.e. Support Vector Machine) algorithms: their use configures, as a novel way to semi-supervised lexical learning, a highly appealing research direction for knowledge rich scenarios like FrameNet-based semantic parsing.
International Student Teaching in Non-Western Cultures: Impact on First Year Teachers.

This research illuminated how five first-year teachers described the intercultural development that occurred while student teaching in a non-Western culture, and the value that those experiences abroad brought to their classrooms during their first year of teaching. The focus was to capture the essence of the experiences abroad as perceived and described by participants and how those experiences influenced both the tacit and explicit practices in their first year of teaching. This qualitative study focused on four research questions: (a) How do first year teachers describe the intercultural development that occurs while student teaching in a nonWestern culture? , (b) How does student teaching in a non-Western culture bring value to the first year teacher’s classroom? , (c) What role does student teaching in a non-Western culture have on the tacit and explicit practices used in a first year teacher’s classroom? and (d) How do personal influences in a non-Western culture impact student teaching and, ultimately, the first year teacher’s students? Analysis of the participants’ student teaching reflections and interview transcripts indicated: (a) they were welcomed into the non-Western cultures; (b) professional dedication was displayed by the teachers. Final reflections revealed the student teachers were influenced personally and professionally through: (a) professional relations and collaboration; (b) enthusiasm for teaching; (c) exposure to multiple nationalities and unique perspectives; (d) second language speakers and differentiated instruction; and (e) increased self-awareness.
A safe space for self-expansion: Attachment and motivation to engage and interact with the story world

Insecure attachment places enduring limitations on one’s ability to satisfy important intrinsic needs. An increasing body of literature suggests that such barriers may motivate engagement with stories such as absorption into fictional worlds, sharing experiences and forming relationships with characters, and even pursuing vicarious satisfaction of unmet needs. Moreover, this sort of engagement has been demonstrated to drive narrative influence, further suggesting that barriers to intimacy in relationships such as those characterized by insecure attachment may render one more susceptible to the influence of entertainment media. A cross-sectional survey (N = 1,039) revealed an interaction between the anxiety and avoidance dimensions of attachment wherein avoidance was negatively associated with parasocial relationships, boundary expansion, and transportability, as well as self-reported proclivities to reflect on and be impacted by story-based movies and television when anxiety was low but was associated with increased engagement when anxiety was high. The potential interplay between attachment and narrative influence is discussed with respect to targeting and tailoring media literacy and narrative-based interventions.
What lexical sets tell us about conceptual categories

It is common practice in computational linguistics to attempt to use selectional constraints and semantic type hierarchies as primary knowledge resources to perform word sense disambiguation (cf. Jurafsky and Martin 2000). The most widely adopted methodology is to start from a given ontology of types (e.g. Wordnet, cf. Miller and Fellbaum 2007) and try to use its implied conceptual categories to specify the combinatorial constraints on lexical items. Semantic Typing information about selectional preferences is then used to guide the induction of senses for both nouns and verbs in texts. Practical results have shown, however, that there are a number of problems with such an approach. For instance, as corpus-driven pattern analysis shows (cf. Hanks et al. 2007), the paradigmatic sets of words that populate specific argument slots within the same verb sense do not map neatly onto conceptual categories, as they often include words belonging to different types. Also, the internal composition of these sets changes from verb to verb, so that no stable generalization seems possible as to which lexemes belong to which semantic type (cf. Hanks and Jezek 2008). In this paper, we claim that these are not accidental facts related to the contingencies of a given ontology, but rather the result of an attempt to map distributional language behaviour onto semantic type systems that are not sufficiently grounded in real corpus data. We report the efforts done within the CPA project (cf. Hanks 2009) to build an ontology which satisfies such requirements and explore its advantages in terms of empirical validity over more speculative ontologies.
Research and Reports in Urology Dovepress Minimally Invasive Devices for Treating Lower Urinary Tract Symptoms in Benign Prostate Hyperplasia: Technology Update

Benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) represents a spectrum of related lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS). The cost of currently recommended medications and the discontinuation rate due to side effects are significant drawbacks limiting their long-term use in clinical practice. Interventional procedures, considered as the definitive treatment for BPH, carry a significant risk of treatment-related complications in frail patients. These issues have contributed to the emergence of new approaches as alternative options to standard therapies. This paper reviews the recent literature regarding the experimental treatments under investigation and presents the currently available experimental devices and techniques used under local anesthesia for the treatment of LUTS/BPH in the vast majority of cases. Devices for delivery of thermal treatment (microwaves, radiofrequency, high-intensity focused ultrasound, and the Rezum system), mechanical devices (prostatic stent and urethral lift), fractionation of prostatic tissue (histotripsy and aquablation), prostate artery embolization, and intraprostatic drugs are discussed. Evidence for the safety, tolerability, and efficacy of these " minimally invasive procedures " is analyzed.
The Staying-on Decision at Age 16 : Educational Experience in a Multicultural City Environment

The intention to continue on to post-compulsory education of students at the age of 16 is examined with particular focus on the contributory effects of peer groups and educational experience. Using random effects nominal logistic regression analysis and data from the Bradford Youth Cohort (1998 sweep), our results suggest that expected grades have a powerful influence on the decision to stay on. For boys, the impression of teachers, peer groups and undertaking work experience are all important in this decision making process; this is not the case for girls. These results could inform policy makers on which strategies to use to increase participation. * Corresponding author. Tel. : (+44/0) 117 344 2366. Fax: (+44/0) 117 344 2295. Email: Wayne.Thomas@uwe.ac. uk We would like to acknowledge Fiona Walton who organised and led the original study, Bradford Training Enterprise Council for funding and supporting the original study, all of the schools that participated and the young people who completed the questionnaires. Additional thanks to Rachel Chapman, Alex Upton and the Survey Research Centre at the Policy Research Institute, Leeds Metropolitan University. Any remaining errors are the authors’ responsibility.