Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On the feasibility of classification-based product package authentication

Depending on the product category the authenticity of a consumer good concerns economic, social and/or environmental issues. Counterfeited drugs are a threat to patient safety and cause significant economic losses. Different from physical-marking based approaches this work investigates authentication of drugs based on intrinsic texture features of the packaging material. Therefore, it is assumed that the packaging material of a certain drug shows constant but discriminative textural features which enable authentication, i.e. to prove if the packaging material is genuine or not. This objective requires considering a binary classification problem with an open set of negative classes, i.e. unknown and unseen counterfeits. In order to investigate the feasibility a novel drug packaging texture databases was acquired. The experimental evaluation of two basic requirements in texture classification serves as an evidence on the basic feasibility.
Employee negative emotions in supervisory relationships : an attachment theory perspective

Relationships with supervisors are a major source of negative emotions at work, but little is known about why this is so. The aim of the research was to use attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969, 1973; 1980) as a framework for investigating the nature and causes of employee negative emotional experiences, in the context of their supervisory relationships. The research was conducted in three stages. In Stage 1 two studies were conducted to develop a measure of employee perceptions of supervisor caregiving (SCS). Results indicated that the 20-item scale had good reliability and validity. Stage 2 required participants (N=183) to complete a questionnaire that was designed to examine the roles of supervisor caregiving and working models (specific and global) in determining cognitive and emotional responses to hypothetical supervisor behaviours. The results provided partial support for an Independent Effects Model. Supervisor caregiving predicted specific anxiety and avoidance. In tum, both dimensions of attachment predicted negative emotions, but this relationship was mediated by event interpretation only in the case of avoidance. Global models made a smaller but significant contribution to negative emotions overall. There was no support for an interaction effect between specific and global models in determining event interpretation. In stage 3 a sub-sample of questionnaire respondents (N=24) were interviewed about 'real-life' caregiving and negative emotional experiences in their supervisory relationships. Secure individuals experienced supervisors as consistently warm, available, and responsive. They reported few negative events or emotions. Individuals with insecure specific working models experienced rejecting or inconsistent supervisor caregiving. They were sensitised to trust and closeness issues in their relationships, and reported negative events and emotions underpinned by these themes. Overall, results broadly supported attachment theory predictions. It is concluded that an attachment theory perspective provides new insight into the nature and causes of employee negative emotions in supervisory relationships.
Arrhythmias in Patients with Mitral Valve Prolapse

Resting ECGs, exercise treadmill tests and 24-hour ambulatory ECGs were recorded and analyzed in 24 unselected patients with mitral valve prolapse. Arrhythmias were frequent. There were three distinct groups of patients, defined on the basis of total number of premature ventricular contractions (PVCs) during the 24 hours: there were no PVCs in 25%, infrequent PVCs in 25%, and frequent PVCs in 50%. Complex ventricular arrhythmias, including ventricular tachycardia in five patients, were found almost exclusively in the group with frequent PVCs. Fifteen of the 24 patients demonstrated atrial premature contractions (APCs) during the 24 hours. Complex atrial arrhythmias were found among patients with infrequent, as well as those with frequent, APCs. Supraventricular tachycardia was detected in seven of these patients. The incidence of PVCs decreased during sleep in 58% of the patients, increased in 17%, and showed no change in 25%. The incidence of APCs decreased during sleep in 67% of the patients and showed no change during sleep in 33%. A poor correlation was found between symptoms recorded in patient diaries and changes noted on 24-hour ECG recordings. The peak PVCs/15 min and peak APCs/15 min during a 24-hour period of monitoring was found to be an excellent guide to the total number of PVCs and APCs occurring during that period. This permits an accurate prediction of the total number of PVCs in 24 hours after performing an exact PVC count on only 15 minutes of ECG data. Finally, the 24-hour ambulatory ECG was more sensitive than the treadmill test and both were superior to the 12-lead ECG for detecting arrhythmias in these patients.
DIFFRACTION SHADING MODELS FOR IRIDESCENT SURFACES

Diffraction and interference are optical phenomena which split light into its component wavelengths, hence producing a full spectrum of iridescent colors. This paper develops comput er graphics models for iridescent colors produced by diffractive media. Diffraction gratings, certain animal skins and the crystal structure of some precious stones are known to produce diffraction. Several techniques can be employed to derive solutions to the diffraction problem including: (1)Electromagnetic boundary value methods (2)Applying the Huygens-Fresnel principle (3)Applying the Kirchoff-Fresnel theorem (4)Fourier optics. Previous work in developing diffraction models for computer graphics has used boundary value methods and Fourier optics but no models using HuygensFresnel principle have been published. This paper derives a set of diffraction solutions based on the Huygens -Fresnel principle, which are then used to extend well-known illumination models and are incorporated into a ray tracer.
Activated Integrin VLA-4 Localizes to the Lamellipodia and Mediates T Cell Migration on VCAM-11

Lymphocyte migration from blood into lymphoid tissues or to sites of inflammation occurs through interactions between cell surface integrins and their ligands expressed on the vascular endothelium and the extracellular matrix. VLA-4 (α4β1) is a key integrin in the effective trafficking of lymphocytes. Although it has been well established that integrins undergo functionally significant conformational changes to mediate cell adhesion, there is no mechanistic information that explains how these are dynamically and spatially regulated during lymphocyte polarization and migration. Using dynamic fluorescence resonance energy transfer analysis of a novel VLA-4 FRET sensor under total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy, we show that VLA-4 activation localizes to the lamellipodium in living cells. During T cell migration on VCAM-1, VLA-4 activation concurs with spatial redistribution of chemokine receptor and active Rap1 at the leading edge. Selective inhibition of the activated VLA-4 at the leading edge with a small molecule inhibitor is sufficient to block T cell migration. These data suggest that a subpopulation of activated VLA-4 is mainly localized to the leading edge of polarized human T cells and is critical for T cell migration on VCAM-1.
Towards Automated Record Linkage

The field of Record Linkage is concerned with identifying records from one or more datasets which refer to the same underlying entities. Where entity-unique identifiers are not available and errors occur, the process is non-trivial. Many techniques developed in this field require human intervention to set parameters, manually classify possibly matched records, or provide examples of matched and non-matched records. Whilst of great use and providing high quality results, the requirement of human input, besides being costly, means that if the parameters or examples are not produced or maintained properly, linkage quality will be compromised. The contributions of this paper are a critical discussion on the record linkage process, arguing for a more restrictive use of blocking in research, and evaluating and modifying the farthest-first clustering technique to produce results close to a supervised technique.
User-Centric QoS Provisioning for Heterogeneous D2D Multimedia Flows with Dense Spectral Reuse

With the increasing of heterogeneous short-range multimedia services in cellular networks, device-to- device (D2D) communication is viewed as a promising remedy to offload the above traffic volumes by taking full advantage of the favorable channel condition in proximity. Unfortunately, severe co-channel interference would be introduced among D2D links reusing the same resource. Besides, each D2D link is in need of a stringent quality-of-service (QoS) requirement, and the system capacity may not accommodate all of the above traffic volumes. Different to the majority of the existing works, we address the user-centric metrics and aim to maximize the number of admitted D2D links with satisfied QoS requirements within each scheduling period by QoS provisioning, including admission control (AC) and slot allocation (SA). Specifically, the above two components maintain a hierarchical structure: The AC concerns the spectral reuse at each slot and brings in the definition of maximal feasible pattern, i.e., the maximal number of D2D links reusing a same resource under a given bit- error rate constraint. The above problem can be transferred into a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) which is generally NP-hard. Instead of using branch-and-bound method, we view it from the perspective of graph theory and put forward an iterative interference graph based scheme to strike a balance between performance and complexity. Upon the above results, the SA can be relaxed into a convex- cardinality problem and is also equivalent to an MILP. To get a tractable solution, we approximate the cardinality with l1-norm heuristic, and apply the iterative weighted l1-norm heuristic to maintain polynomial-time complexity at minor performance loss. Thanks to the simulations, we illustrate the necessity to conduct user-centric optimizations and elucidate the efficacy of our QoS provisioning scheme.
Doubly Greedy Primal-Dual Coordinate Descent for Sparse Empirical Risk Minimization

We consider the popular problem of sparse empirical risk minimization with linear predictors and a large number of both features and observations. With a convex-concave saddle point objective reformulation, we propose a Doubly Greedy PrimalDual Coordinate Descent algorithm that is able to exploit sparsity in both primal and dual variables. It enjoys a low cost per iteration and our theoretical analysis shows that it converges linearly with a good iteration complexity, provided that the set of primal variables is sparse. We then extend this algorithm further to leverage active sets. The resulting new algorithm is even faster, and experiments on large-scale Multi-class data sets show that our algorithm achieves up to 30 times speedup on several state-of-the-art optimization methods.
8-PSK trellis codes for a Rayleigh channel

A suboptimal trellis coding approach based on the concept of combining a good convolutional code and bit interleavers is presented. The aim is to improve the reliability of digital radio communication over a fading channel. It is shown that over a Rayleigh channel and for a fixed code complexity the proposed system is superior to the baseline system. Its performance is analyzed using the generalized R/sub o/ and the upper bound on the bit error rate. The results suggest that on a Rayleigh channel, the standard trellis codes may not be the correct approach for improving the reliability of the communication channel. The discussion is restricted to a rate 2/3 coded system with 8-PSK modulation. >
Sexual dysfunction in middle-aged women: a multicenter Latin American study using the Female Sexual Function Index

Objective: The purpose of this study was to assess the prevalence of sexual dysfunction (SD) and associated risk factors among middle-aged Latin American women using one validated instrument. Methods: The Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI) was applied to 7,243 healthy women aged 40 to 59 years who were users of 19 healthcare systems from 11 Latin American countries. An itemized questionnaire containing personal and partner sociodemographic data was also filled out. Results: Mean ± SD age of surveyed women was 49.0 ± 5.7 years, with 11.6 years of schooling on average. There were 55.1% of women who were married, 46.8% who were postmenopausal, 14.1% who used hormonal therapy (HT), and 25.6% who were sexually inactive. Among those who were active (n = 5,391), the mean ± SD total FSFI score was 25.2 ± 5.9 and 56.8% of them presented SD (FSFI total score ≤26.55), with a prevalence varying from 21.0% to 98.5% depending on the center. Centers were grouped in terciles (according to mean ± SD prevalence). The tercile with higher SD prevalence (86.4%) compared with that with lower SD prevalence (32.2%) had significantly older women (49.5 ± 5.3 vs 48.0 ± 5.6 y) with a higher rate of vaginal dryness (60.4% vs 40.8%) and older partners (53.0 ± 6.9 vs 50.2 ± 7.5 y). Similarly, there was a significantly higher rate of married (68.5% vs 63.1%), postmenopausal (49.7% vs 39.3%), and HT-using women (23% vs 9.2%). There were no differences in regard to their health perception, history of oophorectomy, rape, and partner SD rate (27% vs 26.2%). The total FSFI score was significantly lower in the tercile with higher SD prevalence (22.0 ± 5.0 vs 27.5 ± 5.4). Logistic regression analysis was used to determine the odds ratios (95% CIs) for the main risk factors associated with SD among those who were sexually active: bad lubrication, 3.86 (3.37-4.43); use of alternative menopausal therapies, 2.13 (1.60-2.84); partner SD, 1.89 (1.63-2.20); older women (>48 y), 1.84 (1.61-2.09); bladder problems, 1.47 (1.28-1.69); HT use, 1.39 (1.15-1.68); negative perception of female health status, 1.31 (1.05-1.64); and being married, 1.22 (1.07-1.40). Protective factors were higher educational level (women), partner faithfulness, and access to private healthcare. Conclusions: The prevalence of SD in this middle-aged Latin American series was found to be high, varying widely in different populations. A decrease in vaginal lubrication was the most important associated risk factor. Differences in the prevalence of risk factors among the studied groups, several of which are modifiable, could explain the variation of SD prevalence observed in this study.
Effects of a Non Thermal Plasma Treatment Alone or in Combination with Gemcitabine in a MIA PaCa2-luc Orthotopic Pancreatic Carcinoma Model

Pancreatic tumors are the gastrointestinal cancer with the worst prognosis in humans and with a survival rate of 5% at 5 years. Nowadays, no chemotherapy has demonstrated efficacy in terms of survival for this cancer. Previous study focused on the development of a new therapy by non thermal plasma showed significant effects on tumor growth for colorectal carcinoma and glioblastoma. To allow targeted treatment, a fibered plasma (Plasma Gun) was developed and its evaluation was performed on an orthotopic mouse model of human pancreatic carcinoma using a MIA PaCa2-luc bioluminescent cell line. The aim of this study was to characterize this pancreatic carcinoma model and to determine the effects of Plasma Gun alone or in combination with gemcitabine. During a 36 days period, quantitative BLI could be used to follow the tumor progression and we demonstrated that plasma gun induced an inhibition of MIA PaCa2-luc cells proliferation in vitro and in vivo and that this effect could be improved by association with gemcitabine possibly thanks to its radiosensitizing properties.
Evolutionary models of in-group favoritism

In-group favoritism is the tendency for individuals to cooperate with in-group members more strongly than with out-group members. Similar concepts have been described across different domains, including in-group bias, tag-based cooperation, parochial altruism, and ethnocentrism. Both humans and other animals show this behavior. Here, we review evolutionary mechanisms for explaining this phenomenon by covering recently developed mathematical models. In fact, in-group favoritism is not easily realized on its own in theory, although it can evolve under some conditions. We also discuss the implications of these modeling results in future empirical and theoretical research.
Feasibility conditions of interference alignment via two orthogonal subcarriers

Conditions are derived on the interference channel with single-antenna nodes to achieve maximal degrees-of-freedom with only two symbol extensions. The conditions for line-of-sight channels involve choosing only the spacing between two subcarriers of an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) scheme. For 3 user pairs an upper bound on the sum-rate of interference alignment is approached arbitrarily closely.
Protein tolerance to random amino acid change.

Mutagenesis of protein-encoding sequences occurs ubiquitously; it enables evolution, accumulates during aging, and is associated with disease. Many biotechnological methods exploit random mutations to evolve novel proteins. To quantitate protein tolerance to random change, it is vital to understand the probability that a random amino acid replacement will lead to a protein's functional inactivation. We define this probability as the "x factor. " Here, we develop a broadly applicable approach to calculate x factors and demonstrate this method using the human DNA repair enzyme 3-methyladenine DNA glycosylase (AAG). Three gene-wide mutagenesis libraries were created, each with 10(5) diversity and averaging 2.2, 4.6, and 6.2 random amino acid changes per mutant. After determining the percentage of functional mutants in each library using high-stringency selection (>19,000-fold), the x factor was found to be 34% +/- 6%. Remarkably, reanalysis of data from studies of diverse proteins reveals similar inactivation probabilities. To delineate the nature of tolerated amino acid substitutions, we sequenced 244 surviving AAG mutants. The 920 tolerated substitutions were characterized by substitutability index and mapped onto the AAG primary, secondary, and known tertiary structures. Evolutionarily conserved residues show low substitutability indices. In AAG, beta strands are on average less substitutable than alpha helices; and surface loops that are not involved in DNA binding are the most substitutable. Our results are relevant to such diverse topics as applied molecular evolution, the rate of introduction of deleterious alleles into genomes in evolutionary history, and organisms' tolerance of mutational burden.
Parallel Range Query Processing on R-Tree with Graphics Processing Unit

Recently, various research efforts have been conducted to develop strategies for accelerating multi-dimensional query processing using the Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Well-known multidimensional access methods such as R-tree, B-tree and their variants, however, are hardly applicable to GPUs in practice, mainly due to the characteristics of a hierarchical structure. More specifically, the structure not only causes frequent transfers of small volume of data but also gives limited opportunities to exploit GPUs' advanced data parallelism. To address the problems, we propose an approach which uses GPUs as a buffer. Main idea is that object entries in recently visited leaf nodes are buffered in the global memory of the GPU and are processed by massive threads of GPUs in parallel. In this paper, we presented both a single buffer strategy and a multiple buffer strategy since a single buffer strategy has problems deteriorating query performance seriously. Through the extensive performance studies, we observed that the proposed approach achieved up to 5 times higher query performance than the original CPU-based R-trees.
A Person-by-Situation Approach to Emotion Regulation

Emotion regulation is central to psychological health. For instance, cognitive reappraisal (reframing an emotional situation) is generally an adaptive emotion-regulation strategy (i.e., it is associated with increased psychological health). However, a person-by-situation approach suggests that the adaptiveness of different emotion-regulation strategies depends on the context in which they are used. Specifically, reappraisal may be adaptive when stressors are uncontrollable (when the person can regulate only the self) but maladaptive when stressors can be controlled (when the person can change the situation). To test this prediction, we measured cognitive-reappraisal ability, the severity of recent life stressors, stressor controllability, and level of depression in 170 participants. For participants with uncontrollable stress, higher cognitive-reappraisal ability was associated with lower levels of depression. In contrast, for participants with controllable stress, higher cognitive-reappraisal ability was associated with greater levels of depression. These findings support a theoretical model in which particular emotion-regulation strategies are not adaptive or maladaptive per se; rather, their adaptiveness depends on the context.
An Innovative Cascade System for Simultaneous Separation of Multiple Cell Types

Isolation of different cell types from one sample by fluorescence activated cell sorting is standard but expensive and time consuming. Magnetic separation is more cost effective and faster by but requires substantial effort. An innovative pluriBead-cascade cell isolation system (pluriSelect GmbH, Leipzig, Germany) simultaneously separates two or more different cell types. It is based on antibody-mediated binding of cells to beads of different size and their isolation with sieves of different mesh-size. For the first time, we validated the pluriSelect system for simultaneous separation of CD4+- and CD8+-cells from human EDTA-blood samples. Results were compared with those obtained by magnetic activated cell sorting (MACS; two steps -first isolation of CD4+, then restaining of the residual cell suspension with anti-human CD8+ MACS antibody followed by the second isolation). pluriSelect separation was done in whole blood, MACS separation on density gradient isolated mononuclear cells. Isolated and residual cells were immunophenotyped by 7-color 9-marker panel (CD3; CD16/56; CD4; CD8; CD14; CD19; CD45; HLA-DR) using flow cytometry. Cell count, purity, yield and viability (7-AAD exclusion) were determined. There were no significant differences between both systems regarding purity (MACS (median[range]: 92.4% [91.5-94.9] vs. pluriSelect 95% [94.9-96.8])) of CD4+ cells, however CD8+ isolation showed lower purity by MACS (74.8% [67.6-77.9], pluriSelect 89.9% [89.0-95.7]). Yield was not significantly different for CD4 (MACS 58.5% [54.1-67.5], pluriSelect 67.9% [56.8-69.8]) and for CD8 (MACS 57.2% [41.3-72.0], pluriSelect 67.2% [60.0-78.5]). Viability was slightly higher with MACS for CD4+ (98.4% [97.8-99.0], pluriSelect 94.1% [92.1-95.2]) and for CD8+-cells (98.8% [98.3-99.1], pluriSelect 86.7% [84.2-89.9]). pluriSelect separation was substantially faster than MACS (1h vs. 2.5h) and no pre-enrichment steps were necessary. In conclusion, pluriSelect is a fast, simple and gentle system for efficient simultaneous separation of two and more cell subpopulation directly from whole blood and provides a simple alternative to magnetic separation.