Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Soft biometrics for subject identification using clothing attributes

Recently, soft biometrics has emerged as a novel attribute-based person description for identification. It is likely that soft biometrics can be deployed where other biometrics cannot, and have stronger invariance properties than vision-based biometrics, such as invariance to illumination and contrast. Previously, a variety of bodily soft biometrics has been used for identifying people. Describing a person by their clothing properties is a natural task performed by people. As yet, clothing descriptions have attracted little attention for identification purposes. There has been some usage of clothing attributes to augment biometric description, but a detailed description has yet to be used. We show here how clothing traits can be exploited for identification purposes. We explore the validity and usability of a set of proposed semantic attributes. Human identification is performed, evaluated and compared using different proposed forms of soft clothing traits in addition and in isolation.
noncoding transcriptome C . elegans A differential sequencing-based analysis of the Material Supplemental

Noncoding RNAs are increasingly being recognized as important players in eukaryote biology. However, despite major efforts in mapping the Caenorhabditis elegans transcriptome over the last couple of years, nonpolyadenylated and intermediate-size noncoding RNAs (is-ncRNAs) are still incompletely explored. We have combined an enzymatic approach with full-length RNASeq of is-ncRNAs in C. elegans. A total of 473 novel is-ncRNAs has been identified, of which a substantial fraction was associated with transcription factor binding sites and developmentally regulated expression patterns. Analysis of sequence and secondary structure permitted classification of more than 200 is-ncRNAs into several known RNA classes, while another 33 isncRNAs were identified as belonging to two previously uncharacterized groups of is-ncRNAs. Three of the unclassified isncRNAs contain the 59 Alu domain common to SRP RNAs and specifically bound with the SRP9/14 heterodimer in vitro. One of these (inc394) showed 65% sequence identity with the human, neuron-specific BC200 RNA. Structure-based clustering analysis and in vitro binding experiments supported the notion that the nematode stem-bulge RNAs (sbRNAs) are homologs (or functional analogs) of the Y RNAs. Moreover, analysis of the differential libraries showed that some mature snoRNAs undergo secondary 59 cap modification after processing of the primary transcript, thus suggesting the existence of a wider range of functional RNAs arising from processed and modified fragments of primary transcripts.
Microglial acid-sensing T Cell Death Associated Gene-8 (TDAG8) receptor in CO2-evoked behavior and physiology: relevance to panic

Panic disorder is a debilitating anxiety disorder characterized by recurrent panic attacks which are episodes of excessive fear, cardiovascular and respiratory symptoms. Panic phenomena have primarily been investigated in clinical studies. Development of pertinent rodent models is necessary to understand underlying etiology. Currently, brain mechanisms underlying panic attacks are poorly understood. Elevated acidosis is hypothesized to be a factor in induction of panic due to the fact that clinical challenges, such as CO2 inhalation, lead to acid-base dysbalance and trigger panic attacks. However, it is not well understood how disturbances in pH induced by panicogens may translate to panic and fear responses. The T-cell death associated gene-8 (TDAG8) receptor is an acid sensing Gprotein-coupled receptor located on immune cells in the CNS and periphery. The TDAG8 receptor was cloned from rodent brain but the regional and cellular localization was not characterized. Functional contribution of TDAG8 in the brain, particularly its relevance to fear and panic associated responses has not been studied. The overall objective of this work was to investigate the contribution and potential mechanism of the TDAG8 receptor in CO2-evoked panic-associated behavioral and physiological responses. The first study aimed to characterize the cellular and regional expression of TDAG8 in murine CNS and to explore the regulation of TDAG8 after acidotic conditions. The results show that TDAG8 expression was localized to microglial cells in the sensory circumventricular organs (CVOs), which consist of the subfornical organ (SFO), organ vasculosum of the lamina terminalis (OVLT), and area postrema (AP). Only the SFO demonstrated significant TDAG8 up-regulation in response to acidosis. Next the
A high‐performance sorting algorithm for multicore single‐instruction multiple‐data processors

Many sorting algorithms have been studied in the past, but there are only a few algorithms that can effectively exploit both single‐instruction multiple‐data (SIMD) instructions and thread‐level parallelism. In this paper, we propose a new high‐performance sorting algorithm, called aligned‐access sort (AA‐sort), that exploits both the SIMD instructions and thread‐level parallelism available on today's multicore processors. Our algorithm consists of two phases, an in‐core sorting phase and an out‐of‐core merging phase. The in‐core sorting phase uses our new sorting algorithm that extends combsort to exploit SIMD instructions. The out‐of‐core algorithm is based on mergesort with our novel vectorized merging algorithm. Both phases can take advantage of SIMD instructions. The key to high performance is eliminating unaligned memory accesses that would reduce the effectiveness of SIMD instructions in both phases. We implemented and evaluated the AA‐sort on PowerPC 970MP and Cell Broadband Engine platforms. In summary, a sequential version of the AA‐sort using SIMD instructions outperformed IBM's optimized sequential sorting library by 1.8 times and bitonic mergesort using SIMD instructions by 3.3 times on PowerPC 970MP when sorting 32 million random 32‐bit integers. Also, a parallel version of AA‐sort demonstrated better scalability with increasing numbers of cores than a parallel version of bitonic mergesort on both platforms. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Effect of Pronoun Resolution on Document Similarity

This paper presents a novel effect of Pronoun Resolution on measurement of document similarity. In this paper we have studied the effect of pronoun resolution within the framework of the Vector Space Model and Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis. For this purpose we have developed a Benchmark Corpus consisting of documents whose similarity scores have been given by human beings. We measured the inter-document similarity on these documents using VSM and PLSA. We then performed pronoun resolution on these documents and again calculated the similarity using both methods. Next, the correlation coefficient of the scores was taken with those of the human generated scores. The correlation coefficients clearly demonstrated substantial and consistent improvements of the similarity score after pronoun resolution.
Acanthamoeba binds to extracellular matrix proteins in vitro.

PURPOSE To identify host-tissue amoeba interactions that may be important in the pathogenesis of Acanthamoeba keratitis, the ability of the opportunistic pathogen Acanthamoeba polyphaga to bind various components of the extracellular matrix (collagen type IV, laminin, or fibronectin) was examined in vitro. METHODS A polyphaga, isolated from a case of human amoebic keratitis, was used in the studies. In the experiments, 96-well plates were coated with 0-, 5-, 10-, 20-, or 50-micrograms/ml solutions of the basal lamina proteins laminin or collagen type IV, the extracellular matrix protein fibronectin, or casein (control). Amoeba were metabolically labeled with 35[S]-methionine, and 1x 10(4) labeled amoeba in phosphate buffered saline (PBS) were seeded per well and allowed to bind for 20 min. After washing with PBS, bound amoeba were solubilized with 1% sodium dodecyl sulphate (SDS) and scintillation counting was used to determine the number of bound amoeba. RESULTS Counts from casein and protein-free controls were not significantly different from each other (P > 0.05). There was a significant increase in the binding of 35[S]-labeled A. polyphaga to collagen IV, laminin, and fibronectin over controls (P < 0.0001) and the binding was concentration-dependent. The rank order of binding was collagen > or = laminin >> fibronectin. Alpha-methyl-mannopyranoside, but not fucose, inhibited binding of labeled A. polyphaga to collagen IV, laminin, and fibronectin in a concentration-dependent manner. CONCLUSION In summary, the binding assays show that Acanthamoeba bind preferentially to collagen, laminin, and fibronectin, in that order, and that the adherence process is inhibited by mannose.
Managing Impacts of Security Protocol Changes in Service-Oriented Applications

We present a software tool and a framework for security protocol change management. While we focus on trust negotiation protocols in this paper, many of the ideas are generally applicable to other types of protocols. Trust negotiation is a flexible approach to access control that is well suited to dynamic environments typical of service-oriented applications. However, managing the evolution of trust negotiation protocols is a difficult problem that has not been sufficiently addressed, especially in situations where there are ongoing negotiations. By using our framework, the consequences of changing the protocol that applies to ongoing trust negotiations can be automatically determined. We have also implemented a database-backed GUI tool to manage the change process as an extension of an existing system, and we have performed experiments to test the efficiency of our management software. Our experimental results show that the techniques proposed can scale to applications with tens of thousands of simultaneous users even on commodity PCs.
Computing Queries from Derived Relations

Assume that a set of derived relations are available in stored form. Given a query (or subquery), can it be computed from the derived rela- tions and, if so, how? Variants of this problem arise in several areas of query processing. Relation fragments stored at a site in a distributed database system, data- base snapshots, and intermediate results obtained dur- ing the processing of a query are all examples of stored, derived relations. In this paper we give neces- sary and sufficient conditions for when a query is com- putable from a single derived relation. It is assumed that both the query and the derived relation are defined by PSJ-expressions, that is, relational algebra expressions involving only projections, selections, and joins, in any combination. The solution is constructive: not only does it tell whether the query is computable or not, but it also shows how to compute it.
Predicting Dynamic Difficulty

Motivated by applications in electronic games as well as teaching systems, we investigate the problem of dynamic difficulty adjustment. The task here is to repeatedly find a game difficulty setting that is neither 'too easy' and bores the player, nor 'too difficult' and overburdens the player. The contributions of this paper are (i) the formulation of difficulty adjustment as an online learning problem on partially ordered sets, (ii) an exponential update algorithm for dynamic difficulty adjustment, (iii) a bound on the number of wrong difficulty settings relative to the best static setting chosen in hindsight, and (iv) an empirical investigation of the algorithm when playing against adversaries.
A Grounded Theory of Veterans’ Experiences of Addiction-as-Occupation

This study examined how addiction emerges as an occupation in the lives of veterans. Its purpose was to facilitate better knowledge of how addiction is experienced as an occupation by this population, with the goal of destigmatizing addiction and paving the way for innovative ways to help people with addictions to build new occupational lives. Fifty-eight veterans diagnosed with a substance use disorder were recruited from a VA residential treatment center, of which 35 transcripts of the Indiana Psychiatric Illness Interview—a broad interview inquiring about participants’ life experiences—were randomly selected for grounded theory analysis following a 4-step coding procedure as outlined by Charmaz. Data revealed a five step occupational process: Being Initiated; Increasing Engagement; Establishing an Identity; Experiencing Discord and Defeat; and Finding Other Occupations. Addiction is discussed as a behavioral pattern, and the authors discuss how the use of new occupations may provide individuals with new patterns of organization, social interconnection, and identity development needed to sustain a move away from occupations of addiction.
Integrated DC/DC converter with digital controller

A DC/DC converter with integrated digital controller and switches is realized. This DC/DC converter only needs an external coil, diode and capacitor. The main advantages of this type of digital DC/DC converter are the fast response on load variation and the high efficiency over a wide power range. The DC/DC converter uses low resistance CMOS switches and operates in multi mode. The controller uses a small output voltage window as reference for control actions.
Brain Abnormalities Demonstrated by Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Adult IDDM Patients With and Without a History of Recurrent Severe Hypoglycemia

OBJECTIVE Previous studies of a cohort of 100 patients with IDDM have shown that a history of recurrent severe hypoglycemia is associated with a modest impairment of cognitive function. The aim of the present study was to determine whether IDDM patients with and without a history of severe hypoglycemia have lesions in the brain that are identifiable by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) and to investigate the putative relationship of any structural brain abnormalities with cognitive function. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS MRI and MRS of the brain were performed in 22 patients from the original cohort. Eleven IDDM patients with no history of severe hypoglycemia (group A) were compared with 11 IDDM patients who had a history of five or more episodes of severe hypoglycemia (group B). RESULTS Nine patients (41%) had abnormal scans. Two types of abnormalities were observed: high-intensity rounded lesions, > 3 mm in diameters, distributed in the periventricular white matter (leukoaraiosis) in four patients; and cortical atrophy in five patients. Five patients in group B had cortical atrophy, whereas no patient in group A demonstrated this feature (P < 0.05). MRS of the frontal and parietal lobes showed no differences in the N-acetyl aspartate/creatine or N-acetyl aspartate/choline ratios between groups A and B. Patients with cortical atrophy showed a nonsignificant trend toward reduced performance on Rapid Visual Information Processing. CONCLUSIONS Brain abnormalities demonstrated by MRI are common in patients with IDDM of long duration and are suggestive of premature aging of the brain. IDDM per se may be an important pathogenic factor, but a significant association was observed between a history of recurrent severe hypoglycemia and cortical atrophy, which may be related to the modest impairment of cognitive function that has been reported previously.
Relation of multiple intelligence with participation of the students of elementary level

Conventionally, it is seen that in a class some students always participate more than the others. Some students face problems in class participation and discussions. Lack of participation can be a sign that the tasks are not allowing the students to using their intelligences. It affects their performance in the examination. The lack of implementation of proper intelligence considering the particular group of learners can be considered to be one of the most significant reasons behind their participation impairments. As, rarely, learners receive proper scope and opportunities of applying and developing their intelligences in the English language classroom (Hirsch, 1994, p. 11). The elementary level students are given textbooks, which gives opportunities to acquire linguistic intelligence through regular practice (Hirsch, 1994, p.12). However, other intelligences are left out since no examinations contain questions focusing on those (ibid). In order to widen their participation and gradually competence, identification and implementation of appropriate intelligences is significant. This thesis attempts to set the relation of intelligences with student participation. It mainly focused on the students of elementary level. The study could cover 90 students, who are from four different schools. At the beginning, the study presents a brief introduction to establish the aim, limitations and the research questions of the study, which are what is the most and least preferred intelligence of the students, do students involve in the tasks when it is based on their least preferred intelligence and is there any relationship between intelligence and participation. Studies and findings on the theory of multiple intelligences of Gardner (1983) are discussed to explain individual difference,
Semantically Rich Spaces for Document Clustering

Dimensionality reduction techniques address a relevant problem of vector space models that is the size of involved dictionaries. Certain geometrical transformations applied over the original feature space, like the latent semantic analysis (LSA), aim at preserving and discovering semantic relations between documents within small dimensional spaces. In this paper, a linear transformation method, named locality preserving projections (LPP), is evaluated with respect to a document clustering task and results are compared with LSA. LPP is here applied directly on the original space, through an efficient C-based implementation, and different parameterizations are investigated. Experimental results suggest that LPP is an effective technique able to account for the availability of a priori knowledge within an unsupervised learning framework.
Large scale visual odometry using stereo vision

This paper presents a system for egomotion estimation using a stereo head camera. The camera motion estimation is based on features tracked along a video sequence. The system also estimates the tridimensional geometry of the environment by fusing the visual information from multiple views. Furthermore, the paper presents comparisons between two different algorithms. The first one is by applying triangulation to 3D points. Motion estimation using 3D points suffers from the problem of nonisotropic noise due to the large uncertainty in depth estimation. To deal with this problem we present results with a second approach that works directly in the disparity space. Experimental results using a mobile platform are presented. The experiments cover long distances in urban-like environments with the presence of dynamic objects. The system presented is part of a bigger project involving autonomous navigation using vision only.
Evolution of the Metadata in the Ontology-based Knowledge Management Systems

An ontology-based knowledge management system uses an ontology to represent explicit specification of a business domain and to serve as a backbone for providing and searching for knowledge sources. But, dynamically changing business environment implies changes in the conceptualisation of a business domain that are reflected on the underlying domain ontologies. Consequently, these changes have effects on the performances and validity of the KM system. In this paper we present an approach for enabling consistency of the description of knowledge sources in an ontology-based KM system in the case of changes in the domain ontology. This approach is based on our research in the ontology evolution and ontology-based annotation of documents. The proposed method is implemented in our semantic annotation framework so that efficient acquiring and maintaining of ontology-based metadata is supported.
Evaluation of Features Extraction Algorithms for a Real-Time Isolated Word Recognition System

Paper presents an comparative evaluation of features extraction algorithm for a real-time isolated word recognition system based on FPGA. The Mel-frequency cepstral, linear frequency cepstral, linear predictive and their cepstral coefficients were implemented in hardware/software design. The proposed system was investigated in speaker dependent mode for 100 different Lithuanian words. The robustness of features extraction algorithms was tested recognizing the speech records at different signal to noise rates. The experiments on clean records show highest accuracy for Mel-frequency cepstral and linear frequency cepstral coefficients. For records with 15 dB signal to noise rate the linear predictive cepstral coefficients gives best result. The hard and soft part of the system is clocked on 50 MHz and 100 MHz accordingly. For the classification purpose the pipelined dynamic time warping core was implemented. The proposed word recognition system satisfy the real-time requirements and is suitable for applications in embedded systems.
Replication of Chimeric Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 (HIV-1) Containing HIV-2 Integrase (IN): Naturally Selected Mutations in IN Augment DNA Synthesis

ABSTRACT The human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) integrase (IN) protein augments the initiation of reverse transcription. Chimeric HIV-1 containing HIV-2 IN (SG3IN2) is severely impaired in virus infectivity and DNA synthesis. To analyze the nature of this defect, we infected T cells with the chimeric SG3IN2 virus and by continuous passage in cell culture selected for virus with improved replication properties. Viruses from two different time points were chosen for further analysis, an early culture-adapted virus (CF-65) that exhibited an intermediate level of infectivity, and a later-passaged virus (CF-131) that was significantly more infectious. Sequence analysis of multiple clones derived from the CF-65 virus culture demonstrated a diversity of mutations in the reverse transcriptase (RT) and a common V204I IN mutation. Analysis of clones derived from the CF-131 virus indicated the selection of two additional IN mutations, Q96H and K127E, and a fixed V179I RT mutation. By cloning RT and/or IN sequences back into the original SG3IN2 chimeric virus, we demonstrated that mutations in both RT and IN contributed to the improvement in viral fitness. The effect of the HIV-2IN(IN2) mutations on virus DNA synthesis was analyzed by packaging IN2 mutants into HIV-1 as Vpr-IN2 fusion proteins. This analysis revealed that the Q96H, K127E and V204I mutations increased the infectivity of the chimeric virus by augmenting the initiation of viral cDNA synthesis in infected cells. The Q96H and K127E mutations are present in adjacent helical structures on the surface of the IN protein and together account for most of the increase observed in DNA synthesis. Our findings provide evidence that the IN protein augments the initiation of reverse transcription through specific interactions with other viral components comprising the initiation complex. Moreover, they implicate specific regions on the surface of IN that may help to elucidate mechanisms by which the HIV-1 IN protein augments the initiation of HIV-1 reverse transcription in vivo.
Cultural expressions, meanings, beliefs, and practices of Mexican American women during the postpartum period: An ethnonursing study

iv Dedication . vi Acknowledgment . viii Chapter 1: Introduction . 1 Background of the Study . 1 Purpose and Specific Aims of the Study . 3 Domain of Inquiry . 3 Research Questions . 4 Theoretical Supports for the Study . 4 Significance for Nursing . 6 Definitions . 9 Assumptions . 10 Summary . 11 Chapter 2: Literature Review . 12 Worldview . 12 Ethnohistory . 13 The Land and Environment of Mexico . 13 The People and Society of Ancient Mexico . 14 The Ethnohistory of Mexican Americans . 15 Impact of Mexican/Mexican American Revolutions on Worldview . 15 Ethnonyms . 19