Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Predictors of brain morphology for the men of the NHLBI twin study.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Cross-sectional studies show that cerebrovascular risk factors are associated with increased brain atrophy, accumulation of abnormal cerebral white matter signals, and clinically silent stroke. We extend these findings by examining the relationship between midlife cerebrovascular risk factors and later-life differences in brain atrophy, amount of abnormal white matter, and stroke on MRI. METHODS Subjects were the 414 surviving members of the prospective National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Twin Study, who have been examined on 4 separate occasions, spanning the 25 years between 1969-1973 and 1995-1997. Quantitative measures of brain volume, volume of abnormal white matter signal (WMHI), and volume of stroke, when present, were obtained from those participating in the fourth examination. RESULTS The mean+/-SD age of the subjects was 47.2+/-3.0 years at initial examination and 72. 5+/-2.9 years at final examination. Average blood pressure (BP) levels were normal, although 32% of the subjects had received or were currently taking antihypertensive medications. As a group, 31% had symptomatic cardiovascular disease, 11% had symptomatic cerebrovascular disease, and 8% had symptomatic peripheral vascular disease. Both systolic and diastolic BP levels at initial examination were inversely related to brain volume and positively related to WMHI volume. Multiple regression analysis identified BP-related measures and vascular risk factors as significant predictors of brain and WMHI volumes. In addition, the magnitude of orthostatic BP change was significantly associated with WMHI volume. Subjects with extensive amounts of WMHI had significantly higher systolic BP at the final examination and a higher prevalence of symptomatic cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease, without significant differences in the prevalence of hypertension treatment. CONCLUSIONS Midlife BP measures are significantly associated with later-life brain and WMHI volumes and the prevalence of symptomatic vascular disease. Since WMHI share cerebrovascular risk factors and extensive WMHI are associated with symptomatic vascular disease, extensive WMHI may be a subclinical expression of cerebrovascular disease. Careful treatment of midlife BP elevations may diminish these later-life brain changes.
TINAMUTREMA CANOAE N. GEN. ET N. SP. (TREMATODA: DIGENEA: STRIGEIFORMES: BRACHYLAIMIDAE) IN CRYPTURELLUS CINNAMOMEUS (AVES, PASSERIFORMES, TINAMIDAE) FROM THE AREA DE CONSERVACIÓN GUANACASTE, COSTA RICA

We propose Tinamutrema as a new genus for Brachylaima centrodes (Braun, 1901) Dollfus, 1935 and for T. canoae, as a new species inhabiting tinamus in the Area de Conservación Guanacaste, Costa Rica. Specimens from Costa Rica resemble B. centrodes in having an elongate body, pretesticular genital pore and terminal genitalia, intercecal uterine loops occupying all available space between the anterior testis and the intestinal bifurcation, an oral sucker width:pharynx width ratio of approximately 1:0.55, an oral sucker:ventral sucker width ratio of approximately 1:1, and vitelline follicles extending into the forebody closer to the pharynx than to the anterior margin of the ventral sucker and by living in the cloaca. They differ from B. centrodes in having vitelline follicles that do not extend as far anteriorly as those in B. centrodes, which extend anteriorly to the level of the anteriormost extent of the cecal “shoulders,” dense tegumental spination as opposed to sparse or no spination, relatively smaller cirrus with fewer spines, longer and more sinous pars prostatica, and forebody averaging 36% of total body length (TBL) as opposed to 42% TBL. Both species differ from other members of the Brachylaimidae in possessing a spinose cirrus and a cirrus sac containing both the cirrus and the pars prostatica. Preliminary phylogenetic assessment suggests that these traits are plesiomorphic, and thus the species are basal to the rest of the Brachylaimidae, whose diagnosis we emend accordingly.
Maintaining Temporal Coherence in Video Retargeting Using Mosaic-Guided Scaling

Video retargeting from a full-resolution video to a lower resolution display will inevitably cause information loss. Content-aware video retargeting techniques have been studied to avoid critical visual information loss while resizing a video. Maintaining the spatio-temporal coherence of a retargeted video is very critical on visual quality. Camera motions and object motions, however, usually make it difficult to maintain temporal coherence using existing schemes. In this paper, we propose the use of a panoramic mosaic to guide the scaling of corresponding regions of video frames in a video shot to ensure good temporal coherence. In the proposed method, after aligning video frames in a shot to a panoramic mosaic constructed for the shot, a global scaling map for these frames is derived from the panoramic mosaic. Subsequently, the local scaling maps of individual frames are derived from the global map and is further refined according to spatial coherence constraints. Our experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively maintain temporal coherence so as to achieve good visual quality even a video contains camera motions and object motions.
CANGAROO-III SEARCH FOR TeV GAMMA RAYS FROM TWO CLUSTERS OF GALAXIES

Because accretion and merger shocks in clusters of galaxies may accelerate particles to high energies, clusters are candidate sites for the origin of ultra-high-energy (UHE) cosmic rays. A prediction was presented for gamma-ray emission from a cluster of galaxies at a detectable level with the current generation of imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes. The gamma-ray emission was produced via inverse Compton upscattering of cosmic microwave background photons by electron–positron pairs generated by collisions of UHE cosmic rays in the cluster. We observed two clusters of galaxies, Abell 3667 and Abell 4038, searching for very high energy gamma-ray emission with the CANGAROO-III atmospheric Cherenkov telescope system in 2006. The analysis showed no significant excess around these clusters, yielding upper limits on the gamma-ray emission. From a comparison of the upper limit for the northwest radio relic region of Abell 3667 with a model prediction, we derive a lower limit for the magnetic field of the region of ∼0.1 μG. This shows the potential of gamma-ray observations in studies of the cluster environment. We also discuss the flux upper limit from cluster center regions using a model of gamma-ray emission from neutral pions produced in hadronic collisions of cosmic-ray protons with the intracluster medium. The derived upper limit of the cosmic-ray energy density within this framework is an order of magnitude higher than that of our Galaxy.
Sequencegram: n-gram modeling of system calls for program based anomaly detection

Our contribution in this paper is two fold. First we provide preliminary investigation results establishing program based anomaly detection is effective if short system call sequences are modeled along with their occurrence frequency. Second as a consequence of this, built normal program model can tolerate some level of contamination in the training dataset. We describe an experimental system Sequencegram, designed to validate the contributions. Sequencegram model short sequences of system calls in the form of n-grams and store in a tree (for the space efficiency) called as n-gram-tree. A score known as anomaly score is associated with every short sequence (based on its occurrence frequency) which represents the probability of short sequence being anomalous. As it is generally assumed that, there is a skewed distribution of normal and abnormal sequences, more frequently occurring sequences are given lower anomaly score and vice versa. Individual n-gram anomaly score contribute to the anomaly score of a program trace.
Contact homology of left-handed stabilizations and plumbing of open books

We show that on any closed contact manifold of dimension greater than 1 a contact structure with vanishing contact homology can be constructed. The basic idea for the construction comes from Giroux. We use a special open book decomposition for spheres. The page is the cotangent bundle of a sphere and the monodromy is given by a left-handed Dehn twist. In the resulting contact manifold we exhibit a closed Reeb orbit that bounds a single finite energy plane. As a result, the unit element of the contact homology algebra is exact and so the contact homology vanishes. This result can be extended to other contact manifolds by using connected sums. The latter is related to the plumbing- or 2-Murasugi sum of the contact open books. We shall give a possible description of this construction and some conjectures about the plumbing operation.
Modeling Trajectory as Image: Convolutional Neural Networks for Multi-scale Taxi Trajectory Prediction

Precise destination prediction of taxi trajectories can benefit efficient scheduling of taxies and accurate advertisement. Traditional prediction algorithms treat trajectories as sequences of spatial points and process them in one single predefined spatial scale. In this paper, we show that taxi trajectories can exhibit different patterns in different spatial scales, and the combination of multi-scale patterns can improve the accuracy of prediction. Based on this, we propose T-CONV to achieve higher accuracy, which models trajectories as images and adopts multi-layer convolutional neural networks to combine multi-scale trajectory patterns. Furthermore, in order to solve the sparsity problem of trajectories, we integrate multiple local convolutional fields in T-CONV to capture important specific areas of trajectories. Comprehensive experiments based on real trajectory data show that T-CONV can achieve much better results than state-of-the-art methods.
Gene Howard Golub , 1932 – 2007

“I always thought Gene was immortal! ” Pete Stewart’s reaction [30] on hearing of Gene Golub’s illness reflects what many of us felt. In numerous ways, Gene seemed larger than life, and it is difficult to imagine the computational linear algebra community without him. Gene was born in Chicago, Illinois on Leap Day, 29 February 1932, and died at Stanford on 16 November 2007, shortly after being diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. He received his bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois and took a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at Cambridge. After short-term positions at Lawrence Radiation Laboratory and Space Technology Laboratories, he arrived at Stanford in 1962 and became a founding member of the Computer Science Department in 1965. He remained on the faculty at Stanford throughout the rest of his career, rising through the ranks while the department was under the direction of George Forsythe. When Forsythe died in 1972, Gene was left with 14 graduate students and an important legacy. Stanford, especially the Serra House building where the numerical group resided, was already a research center for computational linear algebra. Illustrious faculty, a great number of bright,
TailTheft: leveraging the wasted time for saving energy in cellular communications

A notion in cellular communications (e.g., GSM, 3G) is called Tail Time, namely the period of high power state after the completion of a transmission. This Tail Time can alleviate the overhead of switching from the low to the high power state, in case there is another transmission in the near future. However, it also results in large energy waste. In this paper, we propose TailTheft, a scheme that steals the wasted Tail Time for data prefetching and delayed transfer, thus significantly reducing energy consumption. In order to achieve this, TailTheft schedules a number of transmissions to the Tail Time of other transmissions. A Virtual Tail mechanism is employed to steal the Tail Time and a Dual Queue Scheduling algorithm is proposed for the scheduling of transmissions. We evaluate TailTheft through a trace-driven simulation using both per-application and real life traces. Experimental results show that TailTheft can reduce energy consumption by 20% to 34% in different cases.
Bi-Iterative Algorithm for Extracting Independent Components From Array Signals

It is well known that the complex-valued nonunitary joint diagonalization (NUJD) problem in blind source separation (BSS) can be linked to the trilinear models. In this paper, by exploring the special structure of the NUJD problem in BSS, we introduce a novel symmetric tri-quadratic cost function and then derive a simultaneous bi-iterative algorithm (s-BIA) for solving the NUJD problem. Finally, three experiments are conducted in order to show the comparatively good performance of the proposed BSS algorithm.
In Situ, Nonlinear Soil Response Applying an Active Source

[1] It is well known that soil sites have a profound effect on ground motion during large earthquakes. The complex structure of soil deposits and the highly nonlinear constitutive behavior of soils largely control nonlinear site response at soil sites. Measurements of nonlinear soil response under natural conditions are critical to advancing our understanding of soil behavior during earthquakes. Many factors limit the use of earthquake observations to estimate nonlinear site response such that quantitative characterization of nonlinear behavior relies almost exclusively on laboratory experiments and modeling of wave propagation. Here we introduce a new method for in situ characterization of the nonlinear behavior of a natural soil formation using measurements obtained immediately adjacent to a large vibrator source. To our knowledge, we are the first group to propose and test such an approach. Employing a large, surface vibrator as a source, we measure the nonlinear behavior of the soil by incrementally increasing the source amplitude over a range of frequencies and monitoring changes in the output spectra. We apply a homodyne algorithm for measuring spectral amplitudes, which provides robust signal-to-noise ratios at the frequencies of interest. Spectral ratios are computed between the receivers and the source as well as receiver pairs located in an array adjacent to the source, providing the means to separate source and near-source nonlinearity from pervasive nonlinearity in the soil column. We find clear evidence of nonlinearity in significant decreases in the frequency of peak spectral ratios, corresponding to material softening with amplitude, observed across the array as the source amplitude is increased. The observed peak shifts are consistent with laboratory measurements of soil nonlinearity. Our results provide constraints for future numerical modeling studies of strong ground motion during earthquakes.
An Improved Web Log Mining and Online Navigational Pattern Prediction

The aim of this study is to improve web log mining and online navigation pattern prediction. Web mining is an active and wide area which incorporates several usages for the web site design, providing personalization server and other business making decisions etc. Efficient web log mining results and online navigational pattern prediction is a tough process due to vast development in web. It includes the process such as data cleaning, session identification and clustering of web logs generally. In this study initially the web log data is preprocessed and sessions are identified using refined time-out based heuristic for session identification. Then for pattern discovery a density based clustering algorithm is used. Finally for online navigation pattern prediction a new technique of SVM classification is used, which rectifies time complexity with increased prediction accuracy.
By Force of Nature : The Catastrophe Bond Market and Katrina

This paper proposes a dynamic equilibrium model that can account for several stylized facts of the catastrophe bond market in the presence of a small amount of systematic risk. The driving force behind the model is an external habit process, in that mega-catastrophes are economic shocks that could bring individuals close to their subsistence level. I find that cat bond spreads equal between two and three times expected losses after controlling for bond-specific characteristics, and that the term structure of cat bond spreads is upwardsloping. The market price of catastrophic risk is highly sensitive to changes in economic fundamentals. At the occurrence of Katrina, the most severe windstorm disaster in the U.S. in terms of economic impact, the model predicts a 15-20% increase in the cost of capital of reinsurance companies and plausible degrees of comovement among different perils. Arizona State University, W.P. Carey School of Business, Department of Finance, Tempe, AZ 85287-3906, email: stephan.dieckmann@asu.edu. I would like to thank Burton Hollifield, Morton Lane, Robert Marquez, Michael Melvin, Jeff Pontiff, and Ed Schlee for very useful discussions about this topic, as well as seminar participants at Arizona State University and Texas A&M University for suggestions. Research assistance by Qinqing Wu is greatly appreciated. All shortcomings are my own responsibility. By Force of Nature: The Catastrophe Bond Market and Katrina
Frightening Music Triggers Rapid Changes in Brain Monoamine Receptors: A Pilot PET Study

Frightening music can rapidly arouse emotions in listeners that mimic those from actual life-threatening experiences. However, studies of the underlying mechanism for perceiving danger created by music are limited. Methods: We investigated monoamine receptor changes induced by frightening music using 11C-N-methyl-spiperone (11C-NMSP) PET. Ten healthy male volunteers were included, and their psychophysiologic changes were evaluated. Results: Compared with the baseline condition, listening to frightening music caused a significant decrease in 11C-NMSP in the right and left caudate nuclei, right limbic region, and right paralimbic region; a particularly significant decrease in the right anterior cingulate cortex; but an increase in the right frontal occipital and left temporal lobes of the cerebral cortex. Conclusion: Transient fright triggers rapid changes in monoamine receptors, which decrease in the limbic and paralimbic regions but increase in the cerebral cortex.
Immunohistochemical Profile of Odontogenic Epithelium in Developing Dog Teeth (Canis familiaris)

Tumors of the jaw bones and oral soft tissue are relatively common lesions in dogs. The aim of this study was to find cell markers to differentiate odontogenic epithelium from nonodontogenic epithelium for future research on the pathogenesis and pathology of odontogenic neoplasms in dogs. Keratin 14 and 19 staining was observed in odontogenic and nonodontogenic epithelium, whereas amelogenin and p75 neurotrophin receptor immunoreactivity was observed in certain odontogenic epithelial cells at various stages of development but not in other epithelial cells. Calretinin staining was observed in the alveolar epithelial cells directly overlying the developing tooth germ in 28 of 39 sections (71.8%), as well as the dental laminae in 30 of 35 sections (85.7%) and Serres rests in 24 of 28 sections (85.7%). Focal positivity was detected in the respiratory mucosa, some hair follicles, and fusion epithelium of the palate, but no calretinin staining was observed in other oral epithelial cells; therefore, calretinin has potential to be utilized as a marker to differentiate odontogenic form nonodontogenic epithelium.
ISPRP: a message-efficient protocol for initializing structured P2P networks

Most research activities in the field of peer-to-peer (P2P) computing are concerned with routing in virtualized overlay networks. These overlays generally assume node connectivity to be provided by an underlying network-layer routing protocol. This duplication of functionality can give rise to severe inefficiencies. In contrast, we suggest a cross-layer approach where the P2P overlay network also provides the required network-layer routing functionality by itself. Especially in sensor networks, where special attention has to be paid to the nodes' limited capabilities, this can greatly help in reducing the message overhead. In this paper, we present a key building block for such a protocol, the iterative successor pointer rewiring protocol (ISPRP), which efficiently initializes a P2P routing network among a freshly deployed set of nodes having but link-layer connectivity. ISPRP works in a fully self-organizing way and issues only a small per-node amount of messages by keeping interactions between nodes as local as possible.
Articulatory reduction in emotional speech

The present study aims at examining vocal expression of emotion. Emotionally loaded speech material produced by actors was analyzed with reference to the accuracy of articulation as well as to the duration of syllables and segments. It was investigated whether the vocal expression of several emotions (anger, happiness, fear and sadness) differ from one another and from neutral speech with respect to the durational and qualitative reduction of articulation. The obtained results suggest that accuracy of articulation and durational aspects are useful parameters to characterize especially the emotions anger, fear and sadness.
Advanced Antenna Configurations for the Downlink of Multihop Based Cellular Networks

Relaying is expected to play an important role in the design of next generation cellular networks. Integrating multihop communications with the infrastructure-based design of cellular networks results in a new wireless architecture known as multihop based cellular network (MBCN). Studies performed so far on MBCNs mainly assume the use of omnidirectional antennas at relay stations. In this work, we investigate the use of advanced antenna configurations at fixed relay stations in CDMA-based MBCNs. The considered advanced antenna configurations include directional antennas and various adaptive antenna arrays. A new interference reduction factor is derived and studied in terms of overall system performance. Analytical results accompanied by Monte-Carlo simulation results demonstrate that with proper selection of advanced antennas at fixed relay stations, significant performance gains can be achieved.
A Neuron Membrane Mesh Representation for Visualization of Electrophysiological Simulations

We present a process to automatically generate three-dimensional mesh representations of the complex, arborized cell membrane surface of cortical neurons (the principal information processing cells of the brain) from nonuniform morphological measurements. Starting from manually sampled morphological points (3D points and diameters) from neurons in a brain slice preparation, we construct a polygonal mesh representation that realistically represents the continuous membrane surface, closely matching the original experimental data. A mapping between the original morphological points and the newly generated mesh enables simulations of electrophysiolgical activity to be visualized on this new membrane representation. We compare the new mesh representation with the state of the art and present a series of use cases and applications of this technique to visualize simulations of single neurons and networks of multiple neurons.
An Evaluation of the Impact of Emotional Intelligence on Team Effectiveness among It Professionals at Bytes Systems Integration : South Africa

Emotional intelligence and team effectiveness have attracted considerable interest from many researchers recently. Teams have become a preferred method to increase efficiency and to respond quickly to technological and market changes in organisations. A considerable amount of research has been conducted to understand how to create effective teams. Research data have shown that emotions are inseparable from the workplace as they affect how team members interpersonal relations among team members. Working in teams requires skills that help individuals to recognise and manage their emotions and those of others. Many studies assert that teams need more than just technical skills to be effective. Emotional intelligence is regarded as a critical skill required in teams.