Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy based MEMS sensors for phthalates detection in water and juices

Phthalate esters are ubiquitous environmental and food pollutants well known as endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs). These developmental and reproductive toxicants pose a grave risk to the human health due to their unlimited use in consumer plastic industry. Detection of phthalates is strictly laboratory based time consuming and expensive process and requires expertise of highly qualified and skilled professionals. We present a real time, non-invasive, label free rapid detection technique to quantify phthalates' presence in deionized water and fruit juices. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) technique applied to a novel planar inter-digital (ID) capacitive sensor plays a vital role to explore the presence of phthalate esters in bulk fluid media. The ID sensor with multiple sensing gold electrodes was fabricated on silicon substrate using micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) device fabrication technology. A thin film of parylene C polymer was coated as a passivation layer to enhance the capacitive sensing capabilities of the sensor and to reduce the magnitude of Faradic current flowing through the sensor. Various concentrations, 0.002ppm through to 2ppm of di (2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP) in deionized water, were exposed to the sensing system by dip testing method. Impedance spectra obtained was analysed to determine sample conductance which led to consequent evaluation of its dielectric properties. Electro-chemical impedance spectrum analyser algorithm was employed to model the experimentally obtained impedance spectra. Curve fitting technique was applied to deduce constant phase element (CPE) equivalent circuit based on Randle's equivalent circuit model. The sensing system was tested to detect different concentrations of DEHP in orange juice as a real world application. The result analysis indicated that our rapid testing technique is able to detect the presence of DEHP in all test samples distinctively.
Topic-based Multi-document Summarization using Differential Evolution forCombinatorial Optimization of Sentences

This paper describes a method of multidocument summarization with evolutionary computation. In automatic document summarization, the method to make a summary by finding the best combination of important sentences in target documents is popular approach. To find the best combination of sentences, explicit solution techniques such as integer linear programming, branch and bound method, and so on are usually adopted. However, there is a problem with them in terms of calculation efficiency. So, we apply evolutionary computation, especially differential evolution which is regarded as a method having a good feature in terms of calculation cost to obtain a reasonable quasi-optimum solution in real time, to the problem of combinatorial optimization of important sentences. Moreover, we consider latent topics in deciding the importance of a sentence, and define three fitness functions to compare the results. As a result, we have confirmed that our proposed methods reduced the calculation time necessary to make a summary considerably, although precision is more worse than the method with an explicit solution technique.
NeuroXidence : A Non-parametric Test on Excess or Deficiency of Joint-spike Events

Acknowledgements: The authors wish to thank to Sonja Grün and Emery Brown for the fruitful discussions on this project. Also, Gordon Pipa would like to thank to his wife Gabriela Pipa and his family for the great support. ABSTRACT We present a non-parametric and computationally-efficient method named NeuroXidence that detects coordinated firing of two or more neurons and tests whether the observed level of coordinated firing is significantly different from that expected by chance. The method considers the full auto-structure of the data, including the changes in the rate responses and the history dependencies in the spiking activity. Also, the method accounts for trial-by-trial variability in the dataset, such as the variability of the rate responses and their latencies. NeuroXidence can be applied to short data windows lasting only tens of milliseconds, which enables the tracking of transient neuronal states correlated to information processing. We demonstrate, on both toy-data and single-unit activity recorded in cat cortex, that NeuroXidence discriminates reliably between significant and spurious events that occur by chance.
Advancing quantitative methods in criminology and criminal justice

Introduction Travis C. Pratt 1. Using the group-based trajectory model to study crime over the life course Daniel S. Nagin and Alex R. Piquero 2. When space matters: Spatial dependence, diagnostics, and regression models Robert J. Fornango 3. Basic principles and practices of structural equation models in criminal justice and criminology research Jacinta M. Gau 4. Meta-analysis in criminal justice and criminology: What it is, when it's useful, and what to watch out for Travis C. Pratt 5. An overview of social network analysis Jean Marie McGloin and David S. Kirk 6. A user-friendly introduction to panel data modelling John L. Worrall 7. Censored regression in response to the distributional realities of crime and justice measures Christopher J. Sullivan and Tara Livelsberger
Online Parallelization in Conformant Planning

Presently, the main idea of most state-of-the-art conformant planners is to transform a conformant planning problem into a search problem in the space of brief states. However, directly searching a parallel plan solution in the space of brief states has an Achilles' heel: the space of brief states whose elements are sets of possible world states, is always too large. It's alomst impossible for the planner to branch on all possible subsets of parallel actions because the branching factor will exponentially increasing. In this paper, we design a system called CFFP on the basis of an efficient conformant planner CFF (conformant fast-forward). CFFP generates parallel plans by using recursion online parallelization of partial plans. Although this method can't generate optimal parallel plan, empirical results show that it can generate good plan close to the optimal parallel planning by small cost compared to CFF.
Inferring the direction of causation in cross‐sectional twin data: Theoretical and empirical considerations

A recent multivariate extension of the classical twin study in theory allows the inference of the direction of causation between correlated traits solely using cross‐sectional data. In this paper we briefly review this model and assess its usefulness by applying it to a number of pairs of biological and psychological variables between which the nature of the causative relationship is already known. We conclude that the method has a number of biases and limitations. If a causative relationship at the phenotypic level exists between two traits, the correct direction of causation is usually identifiable, providing the reliability and validity of the measures are known. Failure to correctly specify a measurement model can lead to incorrect tests of hypotheses. Difficulties can also occur when discriminating between a direct causative relationship and a correlation due to common genetic or environmental determinants, but these occur in predictable situations. If these considerations are taken into account in interpretation of results, the true nature of the association between traits can often be correctly identified, or at least included in a subgroup of best fitting models. © 1994 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Task-Dependency in Comprehension of Prose.

The effect of variations in the organization of information and contextual features upon comprehension of prose was tested in multiple tasks. The four tasks were (1) immediate, free recall and recognition of (2) a factual detail, (3) the main idea, and (4) an inference. A fractional design for 32 high school students was used to accommodate many aspects of organization and context, heretofore dispersed, in one experiment. The results suggest that performance on these four tasks may vary as a function of different dimensions of organization and context.
Dual-color superresolution microscopy reveals nanoscale organization of mechanosensory podosomes

Podosomes are multimolecular mechanosensory structures with a protrusive actin core and an adhesive ring of integrins and adaptor proteins. Dual-color direct stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy is used to reveal the nanoscale localization of the ring components αMβ2 integrin, talin, and vinculin with respect to the actin core.
Achieving Socially Optimal Outcomes in Multiagent Systems with Reinforcement Social Learning

In multiagent systems, social optimality is a desirable goal to achieve in terms of maximizing the global efficiency of the system. We study the problem of coordinating on socially optimal outcomes among a population of agents, in which each agent randomly interacts with another agent from the population each round. Previous work [Hales and Edmonds 2003; Matlock and Sen 2007, 2009] mainly resorts to modifying the interaction protocol from random interaction to tag-based interactions and only focus on the case of symmetric games. Besides, in previous work the agents’ decision making processes are usually based on evolutionary learning, which usually results in high communication cost and high deviation on the coordination rate. To solve these problems, we propose an alternative social learning framework with two major contributions as follows. First, we introduce the observation mechanism to reduce the amount of communication required among agents. Second, we propose that the agents’ learning strategies should be based on reinforcement learning technique instead of evolutionary learning. Each agent explicitly keeps the record of its current state in its learning strategy, and learn its optimal policy for each state independently. In this way, the learning performance is much more stable and also it is suitable for both symmetric and asymmetric games. The performance of this social learning framework is extensively evaluated under the testbed of two-player general-sum games comparing with previous work [Hao and Leung 2011; Matlock and Sen 2007]. The influences of different factors on the learning performance of the social learning framework are investigated as well.
Overrepresentation of Adopted Children Attending a Children's Mental Health Centre

A retrospective analysis was made of case records of children attending a Children's Mental Health Centre during the years 1959 to 1973. Annual comparisons were made between the numbers of adopted, children seen in the province of Ontario and within the clinic setting. The results indicated that over a fifteen year period the adopted children in the clinic were seen with twice the expected annual incidence predicted from the community rates. “So far as it is known, the proportion of successful and unsuccessful adoptions does not seem unsatisfactory. This result is in accordance with clinical experience which does not suggest that an undue proportion of adopted children are referred to child guidance clinics. ” Bowlby (1951)
Timed Uniform Atomic Broadcast in Presence of Crash and Timing Faults

SUMMARY ∆-Timed Atomic Broadcast is the broadcast ensuring that all correct processes deliver the same messages in the same order, and that delivery latency of any message broadcast by any correct process is some predetermined time ∆ or less. In this paper, we propose a ∆-timed atomic broadcast algorithm in a synchronous system where communication delay is bounded by a known constant d and processes suffer both crash faults and timing faults. The proposed algorithm can tolerate fc crash faults and ft timing faults as long as at least ft + 1 processes are correct, and its max
Psychosocial and emotional sequelae of individuals with traumatic brain injury: a literature review and recommendations.

The psychosocial problems of decreased social contact, depression, and loneliness that occur for many with traumatic brain injury (TBI) create a major challenge for enhancing efforts at community re-entry. Despite dramatic physical progress within the first six months after injury, these psychosocial problems remain a persistent long-term problem for the majority of individuals with severe TBI. Researchers have consistently suggested that the psychosocial problems associated with TBI may actually be the major challenge facing rehabilitation. The majority of individuals who sustain TBI are young males between the ages of 19 and 25, who are in the early stages of establishing their independence in areas including friendships, leisure activities, intimate relationships, residence, and employment. The problem of social isolation and decreased leisure activities create a renewed dependence of the survivor on his/her family to meet these needs. In this article we review a large number of papers which examine the psychosocial and emotional sequelae for TBI patients. The results of those studies demonstrate four primary themes. The first theme depicts that individuals who experience severe TBI are at high risk for a significant decrease in their friendships and social support. The second theme relates to the lack of opportunity for establishing new social contacts and friends. The third theme relates to the decrease in leisure activities for individuals with severe TBI. Finally, anxiety and depression are found at high levels for prolonged periods of time following severe TBI. Several clinical recommendations are drawn from this literature review. They are: (1) Clinicians such as psychiatric social workers, psychologists, or psychiatrists may need to be called upon more quickly for intervention. The treating physiatrist cannot be expected to provide the insight and frequency of psychological services that may be necessary for many of these patients. (2) Since the literature seems to suggest that the presence of one psychosocial deficit, e.g., anxiety, will often be followed by other similar types of problems, e.g. depression, the treatment team needs to be sensitive to how rapidly these problems can cascade into a very dangerous situation. (3) Perhaps the most compelling recommendation we can make is for community rehabilitation specialists to focus significantly more energies and resources upon the psychological health of clients with TBI. Staff need to be trained to detect these signals that clients with TBI are often sending. It is apparent that psychosocial factors contribute to a rising obstacle level to community adjustment.
Measuring Alcohol-Related Harm: Test-Retest Reliability of a Popular Measure

This study assessed the test-retest reliability of a measure of alcohol-related harm commonly used in cross-sectional surveys. Sixty-four respondents of a 1995 telephone survey participated in a second interview 3 to 5 months after the survey. Drinking status and average volume of alcohol consumed proved to be highly reliable. For the lifetime harm scale, correlation was satisfactory, and reliability fell just short of satisfactory agreement (kappa = 0.716). For a score of alcohol-related harm in the past year, poor reliability was shown (kappa = 0.484). Future research must place greater emphasis on objective indicators and on validation of the measures used.
Multi-finger myoelectric signals for controlling a virtual robotic prosthetic hand

The paper investigates how multi-finger myoelectric signals could be used to control a virtual robotic prosthetic hand created by using robot operating system (ROS). Both off-line and online experiment phases are conducted by using ten electrodes and performing eight selected multi-finger motions on four healthy subjects. Classification accuracy and confusion matrix of eight time domain (TD)-features and two algorithms are compared during the off-line phase. Then the delay time and accuracy of online control of six selected TD-features and support vector machine (SVM) algorithm are presented with and without visual feedback from the virtual robotic prosthetic hand system. The experimental results show that different feature extraction principles have significant influence on online experiment performance when using SVM without visual feedback (SVMO), and the SVM with visual feedback (SVMW) has improved the online classification and recognition accuracy of eight multi-finger motions through all selected TD features.
Aspects of Pattern-matching in Data-Oriented Parsing

Data-Oriented Parsing (Dop) ranks among the best parsing schemes, pairing state-of-the art parsing accuracy to the psycholinguistic insight that larger chunks of syntactic structures are relevant grammatical and probabilistic units. Parsing with the DOP-model, however, seems to involve a lot of CPU cycles and a considerable amount of double work, brought on by the concept of multiple derivations, which is necessary for probabilistic processing, but which is not convincingly related to a proper linguistic backbone. It is however possible to reinterpret the DOP-model as a pattern-matching model, which tries to maximize the size of the substructures that construct the parse, rather than the probability of the parse. By emphasizing this memory-based aspect of the DOP-model, it is possible to do away with multiple derivations, opening up possibilities for efficient Viterbistyle optimizations, while still retaining acceptable parsing accuracy through enhanced context-sensitivity.
Expression patterns of cytokine, growth factor and cell cycle-related genes after partial hepatectomy in rats with thioacetamide-induced cirrhosis.

AIM To examine the differences in the responses of normal and cirrhotic livers to partial hepatectomy in relation to the factors influencing liver regeneration. METHODS Cirrhosis was induced in rats by administration of thioacetamide. Untreated rats were used as controls. The control rats as well as the cirrhotic rats were subjected to 70% partial hepatectomy. At different time points after hepatectomy, the livers were collected and the levels of cytokines, growth factors and cell cycle proteins were analyzed. RESULTS After hepatectomy, the cirrhotic remnant expressed significantly lower levels of cyclin D1, its kinase partner, cdk4, and cyclin E as compared to the controls up to 72 h post hepatectomy. Significantly lower levels of cyclin A and cdk2 were also observed while the cdk inhibitor, p27 was significantly higher. In addition, the cirrhotic group had lower IL-6 levels than the control group at all time points up to 72 h following resection. CONCLUSION The data from our study shows that impaired liver regeneration in cirrhotic remnants is associated with low expression of cyclins and cdks. This might be the consequence of the low IL-6 levels in cirrhotic liver remnant which would in turn influence the actions of transcription factors that regulate genes involved in cell proliferation and metabolic homeostasis during the regeneration process.
Characterization of Three Novel SINE Families with Unusual Features in Helicoverpa armigera

Although more than 120 families of short interspersed nuclear elements (SINEs) have been isolated from the eukaryotic genomes, little is known about SINEs in insects. Here, we characterize three novel SINEs from the cotton bollworm, Helicoverpa armigera. Two of them, HaSE1 and HaSE2, share similar 5′ -structure including a tRNA-related region immediately followed by conserved central domain. The 3′ -tail of HaSE1 is significantly similar to that of one LINE retrotransposon element, HaRTE1.1, in H. armigera genome. The 3′ -region of HaSE2 showed high identity with one mariner-like element in H. armigera. The third family, termed HaSE3, is a 5S rRNA-derived SINE and shares both body part and 3′-tail with HaSE1, thus may represent the first example of a chimera generated by recombination between 5S rRNA and tRNA-derived SINE in insect species. Further database searches revealed the presence of these SINEs in several other related insect species, but not in the silkworm, Bombyx mori, indicating a relatively narrow distribution of these SINEs in Lepidopterans. Apart from above, we found a copy of HaSE2 in the GenBank EST entry for the cotton aphid, Aphis gossypii, suggesting the occurrence of horizontal transfer.
Risk-Reward Trade-offs in Rank Fusion

Rank fusion is a powerful technique that merges multiple system runs to produce a single top-k list that often has much higher effectiveness than any single system can produce. Recently, there has been renewed interest in rank fusion in the IR community as these techniques can also be combined with query variations to produce highly effective runs. In this work, we comprehensively evaluate several state-of-the-art fusion algorithms in the context of risk. Like many re-ranking algorithms, there is a risk-reward trade-off in rank fusion, where improving the retrieval effectiveness for most queries often comes at the expense of others. Since system performance is usually compared using only aggregate scores for an evaluation metric, the risk is potentially obscured. In this work, we explore the use of the risk-based evaluation metrics over deep and shallow evaluation goals, and show that the risk-reward payoff in keyword queries can in fact be significantly improved when careful combinations of system and query variations are fused into a single run.
Protein 1 Interleukin-10 and Monocyte Chemoattractant during Experimental Fecal Peritonitis: Role of Therapeutic Effects of Nitric Oxide Inhibition

This study demonstrates that the therapeutic effect of a nitric oxide inhibitor in a murine model of fecal perito-nitis is mediated in part by increased levels of interleukin-10 (IL-10) and monocyte chemoattractant protein 1(MCP-1). Female CD1 mice were subjected to cecal ligation and puncture (CLP) with a 21-gauge needle and,immediately following surgery, were injected intraperitoneally with saline,
Emerging Approaches to Educational Research: Tracing the Socio-Material

1. Introduction: Why Socio-Materiality in Education? 2. Emergence and Perturbation: Understanding Complexity Science 3. Complexity Theory in Educational Research 4. Contradiction and Expansion: Understanding Cultural-Historical Activity Theory 5. Cultural-Historical Activity Theory in Educational Research 6. Translation and network effects: Understanding Actor-Network Theory 7. Actor-Network Theory in Educational Research 8. Spatiality and Temporality: Understanding Cultural Geography 9. Spatial Theory in Educational Research 10. Socio-Material Approaches: Contributions and Issues for Educational Research
Time series Clustering and Analysis of ECG heart-beats using Dynamic Time Warping

A novel Time series Clustering and Analysis Method for ECG (Electro Cardiogram) heart-beat Analysis is proposed using K-medoids Clustering with Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) distance. The main objective of this paper is to identify the abnormalities in ECG heart beats through Clustering and Validation by using QRS complexes of ECG heart-beats. The ECG data obtained from MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database, is used for experimentation. The 5 types of classes in ECG heart beats, used in this study are Normal (N), Left bundle branch blocks (LBBB), Right bundle branch blocks (RBBB), Premature ventricular contraction (PVC), Atrial premature contraction (APC).