Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dual color fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) assays for detecting Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Mycobacterium avium complexes and related pathogens in cultures

Two rapid dual color fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) assays were evaluated for detecting M. tuberculosis and related pathogens in cultures. The MN Genus-MTBC FISH assay uses an orange fluorescent probe specific for the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) and a green fluorescent probe specific for the Mycobacterium and Nocardia genera (MN Genus) to detect and distinguish MTBC from other Mycobacteria and Nocardia. A complementary MTBC-MAC FISH assay uses green and orange fluorescent probes specific for the MTBC and M. avium complex (MAC) respectively to identify and differentiate the two species complexes. The assays are performed on acid-fast staining bacteria from liquid or solid cultures in less than two hours. Forty-three of 44 reference mycobacterial isolates were correctly identified by the MN Genus-specific probe as Mycobacterium species, with six of these correctly identified as MTBC with the MTBC-specific probe and 14 correctly as MAC by the MAC-specific probe. Of the 25 reference isolates of clinically relevant pathogens of other genera tested, only four isolates representing two species of Corynebacterium gave a positive signal with the MN Genus probe. None of these 25 isolates were detected by the MTBC and MAC specific probes. A total of 248 cultures of clinical mycobacterial isolates originating in India, Peru and the USA were also tested by FISH assays. DNA sequence of a part of the 23S ribosomal RNA gene amplified by PCR was obtained from 243 of the 248 clinical isolates. All 243 were confirmed by DNA sequencing as Mycobacterium species, with 157 and 50 of these identified as belonging to the MTBC and the MAC, respectively. The accuracy of the MN Genus-, MTBC-and MAC -specific probes in identifying these 243 cultures in relation to their DNA sequence-based identification was 100%. All ten isolates of Nocardia, (three reference strains and seven clinical isolates) tested were detected by the MN Genus-specific probe but not the MTBC- or MAC-specific probes. The limit of detection for M. tuberculosis was determined to be 5.1x104 cfu per ml and for M. avium 1.5x104 cfu per ml in liquid cultures with the respective MTBC- and MAC-specific probes in both the MN Genus-MTBC and MTBC-MAC FISH assays. The only specialized equipment needed for the FISH assays is a standard light microscope fitted with a LED light source and appropriate filters. The two FISH assays meet an important diagnostic need in peripheral laboratories of resource-limited tuberculosis-endemic countries.
A Service Discovery Framework for Ubiquitous Computing

This paper presents a novel service discovery framework for ubiquitous computing called Ubiquitous Computing Service Discovery Framework (UCSDF). UCSDF offers a more flexible and scalable architecture which can combine the local services with remote services. That characteristic makes UCSDF different from many other service discovery frameworks and more adaptive to ubiquitous computing environments.
Processive Movement by a Kinesin Heterodimer with an Inactivating Mutation in One Head

A single molecule of the motor enzyme kinesin-1 keeps a tight grip on its microtubule track, making tens or hundreds of discrete, unidirectional 8 nm steps before dissociating. This high duty ratio processive movement is thought to require a mechanism in which alternating stepping of the two head domains of the kinesin dimer is driven by alternating, overlapped cycles of ATP hydrolysis by the two heads. The R210K point mutation in Drosophila kinesin heavy chain was reported to disrupt the ability of the enzyme active site to catalyze ATP P−O bond cleavage. We expressed R210K homodimers as well as isolated R210K heads and confirmed that both are essentially inactive. We then coexpressed tagged R210K subunits with untagged wild-type subunits and affinity purified R210K/wild-type heterodimers together with the inactive R210K homodimers. In contrast to the R210K head or homodimer, the heterodimer was a highly active (>50% of wild-type) microtubule-stimulated ATPase, and the heterodimer displayed high duty ratio processive movement in single-molecule motility experiments. Thus, dimerization of a subunit containing the inactivating mutation with a functional subunit can complement the mutation; this must occur either by lowering or by bypassing kinetic barriers in the ATPase or mechanical cycles of the mutant head. The observations provide support for kinesin-1 gating mechanisms in which one head stimulates the rate of essential processes in the other.
Dialog Annotation for Stochastic Generation

Individuals who successfully make their livelihood by talking with others, for example travel agents, can be presumed to have optimized their language for the task at hand in terms of conciseness and intelligibility. It makes sense to exploit this effort for the purpose of building better generation components for a spoken dialog system. The Stochastic Generation technique, introduced by Oh and Rudnicky (2002), is one such approach. In this approach, utterances in a corpus of domain expert utterances are classified as to speech act and individual concepts tagged. Statistical n-gram models are built for each speech-act class then used generatively to create novel utterances. These have been shown to be comparable in quality to human productions. The class and tag scheme is concrete and closely tied to the domain at hand; we believe this produces a distinct advantage in speed of implementation and quality of results. The current paper describes the classification and tagging procedures used for Stochastic Generation, and discusses the advantages and limitations of the techniques.
Clustering Large Attributed Graphs: An Efficient Incremental Approach

In recent years, many networks have become available for analysis, including social networks, sensor networks, biological networks, etc. Graph clustering has shown its effectiveness in analyzing and visualizing large networks. The goal of graph clustering is to partition vertices in a large graph into clusters based on various criteria such as vertex connectivity or neighborhood similarity. Many existing graph clustering methods mainly focus on the topological structures, but largely ignore the vertex properties which are often heterogeneous. Recently, a new graph clustering algorithm, SA-Cluster, has been proposed which combines structural and attribute similarities through a unified distance measure. SA-Cluster performs matrix multiplication to calculate the random walk distances between graph vertices. As the edge weights are iteratively adjusted to balance the importance between structural and attribute similarities, matrix multiplication is repeated in each iteration of the clustering process to recalculate the random walk distances which are affected by the edge weight update. In order to improve the efficiency and scalability of SA-Cluster, in this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm Inc-Cluster to incrementally update the random walk distances given the edge weight increments. Complexity analysis is provided to estimate how much runtime cost Inc-Cluster can save. Experimental results demonstrate that Inc-Cluster achieves significant speedup over SA-Cluster on large graphs, while achieving exactly the same clustering quality in terms of intra-cluster structural cohesiveness and attribute value homogeneity.
Crystallization of plagioclase in mare basalts

A detailed study has been made of the morphology, zoning and major- and minor-element chemistry of plagioclase in mare basalt 12021 and for comparison, in several other mare basalts. Two types of plagioclase can be distinguished based on growth rate as expressed by the formation of hollow as opposed to lath-shaped crystals. The liquidus plagioclase is the most sodic part of the hollow crystals and is more sodic than the lath-shaped crystals. Hollow grains show oscillatory zoning, whereas the lath-shaped grains show normal zoning. The ratios FeO/(FeO + MgO) and K2O/(K2O + Na2O) increased in both types of plagioclase as they grew, and these ratios can be used as a guide to the crystallization history of the plagioclase. The FeO/(FeO + MgO) ratios are similar to those of coprecipitating pyroxene. The data presented here suggest the onset of plagioclase nucleation is primarily controlled by magma composition, and the point at which the magma becomes supersaturated with plagioclase.
Evidence for active El Nino Southern Oscillation variability in the Late Miocene greenhouse climate

An evaporite varve thickness record from the Late Miocene Mediterranean reveals significant signals of interannual variability, the frequency and persistence of which are compared with climatic oscillations affecting the region today. Sustained variability in the 2–7 yr band resembles the modern spectrum of the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and contrasts with that of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), the cyclicity of which is less stationary in frequency and less sustained in duration. Fully coupled climate model simulations demonstrate not only that ENSO variability persisted during the Late Miocene, but also that its teleconnections may have extended further than today, as high-latitude climate modes weakened due to a reduced meridional temperature gradient. ENSO appears to have exerted a stronger influence on the evaporative balance of the Mediterranean in the Late Miocene than it does today. This evidence suggests that the Pacific prior to the Northern Hemisphere glaciation was characterized by ongoing interannual variability.
Constraints on Arabian Plate motion and extensional history of the Red Sea

Analysis of the geologic and geophysical data from the western and northern margin of the Arabian plate combined with data from the Red Sea/Gulf of Aden leads to an interpretation of Arabian plate motion that supports an episodic extensional history in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. Phase 1 extension began in medial to late Eocene and was caused by the NW propagation of the reoriented Central Indian Ridge spreading center. It stretched and thinned continental crust along numerous wrench and normal faults that reactivated preexisting structures. First-phase extension stopped when the Arabian plate terminally sutured to Eurasia in the medial Miocene and halted northward movement of Arabia relative to Africa. The combined African/Arabian plates moved north more slowly, constricting and thickening continental crust in the Bitlis/Zagros sutures while the Red Sea remained technically quiescent and accumulated salt. By the early Pliocene, continued northward movement was accommodated by lateral extrusion of large continental wedges north of the Bitlis/Zagros sutures. This allowed Arabia to move northward faster than Africa and reopen the Red Sea where phase 2 extension was expressed by seafloor spreading. Extension within the Red Sea/Gulf of Aden rift system has been controlled by the interactions and effects of two factors: (1) convergent processes between the north margin of the Arabian plate and the Eurasian plate to the north and (2) northwest propagation of extension associated with the medial Eocene reorganization of the Central Indian spreading center.
A New Polar Coding Scheme for the Interference Channel

Existing polar coding schemes for the two-user interference channel follow the original idea of Han and Kobayashi, in which component messages are encoded independently and then mapped by some deterministic functions (i.e., homogeneous superposition coding). In this paper, we propose a new polar coding scheme for the interference channel based on the heterogeneous superposition coding approach of Chong, Motani and Garg. We prove that fully-joint decoding (the receivers simultaneously decode both senders' common messages and the intended sender's private message) in the Han-Kobayashi strategy can be simplified to two types of partially-joint decoding, which are friendly to polar coding with practical decoding algorithms. The proposed coding scheme requires less auxiliary random variables and no deterministic functions, and can be efficiently constructed. Further, we extend this result to interference networks and show that the proposed partially-joint decoding scheme is a general method for designing heterogeneous superposition polar coding schemes in interference networks.
Mobility Management in Heterogeneous Wireless Access Network with IEEE 802.21 Services

Roaming across different access technologies permit people to access Internet via heterogeneous wireless networks such as WLAN, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and Beyond 3G networks. The convergence of heterogeneous wireless access networks with handoff support enable mobile nodes to freely move in and out of any available networks without breaking the connection to the Internet. In this paper, an Adaptive Cross Layer handoff Management for Future Generation Wireless Networks is presented and an efficient approach in optimizing the handoff decision procedure between WLAN and WiMAXnetworks utilizing IEEE 802.21 media independent handover functions (MIHFs) is proposed. This is expected to support seamless mobility while reducing handoff latency and call dropping probability for optimal user experience.
The Construction of Impossibility: A Logic-Based Analysis of Conjuring Tricks

Psychologists and cognitive scientists have long drawn insights and evidence from stage magic about human perceptual and attentional errors. We present a complementary analysis of conjuring tricks that seeks to understand the experience of impossibility that they produce. Our account is first motivated by insights about the constructional aspects of conjuring drawn from magicians' instructional texts. A view is then presented of the logical nature of impossibility as an unresolvable contradiction between a perception-supported belief about a situation and a memory-supported expectation. We argue that this condition of impossibility is constructed not simply through misperceptions and misattentions, but rather it is an outcome of a trick's whole structure of events. This structure is conceptualized as two parallel event sequences: an effect sequence that the spectator is intended to believe; and a method sequence that the magician understands as happening. We illustrate the value of this approach through an analysis of a simple close-up trick, Martin Gardner's Turnabout. A formalism called propositional dynamic logic is used to describe some of its logical aspects. This elucidates the nature and importance of the relationship between a trick's effect sequence and its method sequence, characterized by the careful arrangement of four evidence relationships: similarity, perceptual equivalence, structural equivalence, and congruence. The analysis further identifies two characteristics of magical apparatus that enable the construction of apparent impossibility: substitutable elements and stable occlusion.
Vehicle Embedded Data Stream Processing Platform for Android Devices

Automotive information services utilizing vehicle data are rapidly expanding. However, there is currently no data centric software architecture that takes into account the scale and complexity of data involving numerous sensors. To address this issue, the authors have developed an in-vehicle data-stream management system for automotive embedded systems (eDSMS) as data centric software architecture. Providing the data stream functionalities to drivers and passengers are highly beneficial. This paper describes a vehicle embedded data stream processing platform for Android devices. The platform enables flexible query processing with a dataflow query language and extensible operator functions in the query language on the platform. The platform employs architecture independent of data stream schema in in-vehicle eDSMS to facilitate smoother Android application program development. This paper presents specifications and design of the query language and APIs of the platform, evaluate it, and discuss the results.
Idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura: Current concepts in pathophysiology and management

Summary Idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP) is characterized by a low platelet count, which is the result of both increased platelet destruction and insufficient platelet production. Although the development of autoantibodies against platelet glycoproteins remains central in the pathophysiology of ITP, several abnormalities involving the cellular mechanisms of immune modulation have been identified. Conventional treatments for ITP aim at reducing platelet destruction, either by immunosuppression or splenectomy. Two new thrombopoietic agents, AMG 531 and eltrombopag, have been used in clinical trials to stimulate platelet production in ITP patients not responsive to standard treatments. These new molecules bear no structural resemblance to thrombopoietin, but still bind and activate the thrombopoietin receptor. This review will focus on the pathophysiology and treatment of ITP in adults, highlighting recent advances in both fields.
Texture Object Segmentation Based on Affine Invariant Texture Detection

To solve the issue of segmenting rich texture images, a novel detection methods based on the affine invariable principle is proposed. Considering the similarity between the texture areas, we first take the affine transform to get numerous shapes, and utilize the KLT algorithm to verify the similarity. The transforms include rotation, proportional transformation and perspective deformation to cope with a variety of situations. Then we propose an improved LBP method combining canny edge detection to handle the boundary in the segmentation process. Moreover, human-computer interaction of this method which helps splitting the matched texture area from the original images is user-friendly.
Object-Based Change Detection Using Georeferenced Uav Images

Abstract. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have been widely used to capture and down-link real-time videos/images. However, their role as a low-cost airborne platform for capturing high-resolution, geo-referenced still imagery has not been fully utilized. The images obtained from UAV are advantageous over remote sensing images as they can be obtained at a low cost and potentially no risk to human life. However, these images are distorted due to the noise generated by the rotary wings which limits the usefulness of such images. One potential application of such images is to detect changes between the images of the same area which are collected over time. Change detection is of widespread interest due to a large number of applications, including surveillance and civil infrastructure. Although UAVs can provide images with high resolution in a portable and easy way, such images only cover small parts of the entire field of interest and are often with high deformation. Until now, there is not much application of change detection for UAV images. Also the traditional pixel-based change detection method does not give satisfactory results for such images. In this paper, we have proposed a novel object-based method for change detection using UAV images which can overcome the effect of deformation and can fully utilize the high resolution capability of UAV images. The developed method can be divided into five main blocks: pre-processing, image matching, image segmentation and feature extraction, change detection and accuracy evaluation. The pre-processing step is further divided into two sub-steps: the first sub-step is to geometrically correct the bi-temporal image based on the geo-reference information (GPS/INS) installed on the UAV system, and the second sub-step is the radiometric normalization using a histogram method. The image matching block uses the well-known scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) algorithm to match the same areas in the images and then resample them. The image segmentation and feature extraction block is used to separate the images to different meaningful regions by the mean shift method, extract the textural features and contextual features (polygon,etc.) , Based on the features extracted above as well as the SIFT features of the area, the optimization result is achieved by considering the neighbourhood information . The proposed method is being tested by using multi-temporal images acquired by UAV. The results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
A Gadamerian approach to interpreting pain: model-making metaphors through embodied cognitive theory

ABSTRACT This paper will discuss how the conceptualization of embodied, abstract notions such as pain, which is multi-modal, non-visual and subjective, has the potential to be communicated visually using model making, as it is traditionally understood in the fields of architecture and design. We propose a new methodological approach to research where Gadamer’s [2004. Truth and Method. Continuum International Publishing Group] understanding of intersubjective interpretation used in conjunction with Simulation theory [Gallese, V. , and A. Goldman. 1998. “Mirror Neurons and the Simulation Theory of Mind-Reading. ” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 2 (12): 493–501] in embodied cognitive science, provides a strong framework in which to formulate a palette of materials and forms to visualize subjective experience. This novel approach to design research is currently being undertaken within the field of Health Sciences to produce metaphorically provocative, descriptive models of the lived experience of people with Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) to help bridge the gap in understanding between the sufferer and the public. This paper seeks to engage briefly with two questions integral to the research being undertaken: how does one understand another’s pain, and how can one conceptualize and communicate abstract notions such as pain visually using material and form as language?
Integrated recursive least square lattice and neuro-fuzzy modules for mobile multi-sensor data fusion

The last two decades have witnessed an increasing trend in integrating different navigation systems to overcome the limitations of the stand-alone operation of such systems. For instance, GPS is usually combined with Inertial Navigation System (INS) in several navigation applications. Most of the INS/GPS integration techniques relied on Kalman filtering (KF). Recently, artificial intelligence based techniques were also introduced to replace KF. In order to avoid some of the limitations of the present techniques, this paper introduces multi-sensor systems integration using Recursive Least Square Lattice (RLSL) filter along with an artificial intelligence technique based on Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS). The proposed technique was examined with field test data conducted in a land vehicle using a tactical grade INS (Honeywell HG1700) integrated with Differential GPS measurements collected by a NovAtel OEM4 GPS receiver. The results indicate that the proposed RLSL/neuro-fuzzy system is robust in providing a reliable real-time INS/GPS integration module.