Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Possible Patient Early Diagnosis by Ultrasonic Noninvasive Estimation of Thermal Gradients into Tissues Based on Spectral Changes Modeling

To achieve a precise noninvasive temperature estimation, inside patient tissues, would open promising research fields, because its clinic results would provide early-diagnosis tools. In fact, detecting changes of thermal origin in ultrasonic echo spectra could be useful as an early complementary indicator of infections, inflammations, or cancer. But the effective clinic applications to diagnosis of thermometry ultrasonic techniques, proposed previously, require additional research. Before their implementations with ultrasonic probes and real-time electronic and processing systems, rigorous analyses must be still made over transient echotraces acquired from well-controlled biological and computational phantoms, to improve resolutions and evaluate clinic limitations. It must be based on computing improved signal-processing algorithms emulating tissues responses. Some related parameters in echo-traces reflected by semiregular scattering tissues must be carefully quantified to get a precise processing protocols definition. In this paper, approaches for non-invasive spectral ultrasonic detection are analyzed. Extensions of author's innovations for ultrasonic thermometry are shown and applied to computationally modeled echotraces from scattered biological phantoms, attaining high resolution (better than 0.1°C). Computer methods are provided for viability evaluation of thermal estimation from echoes with distinct noise levels, difficult to be interpreted, and its effectiveness is evaluated as possible diagnosis tool in scattered tissues like liver.
Using Automatic Frequency Shifting Techniques for LLC-SRC Output Voltage Regulation

In this paper, an automatic frequency shifting technique is developed for achieving output voltage regulation of LLC series resonant converter (LLC-SRC). Furthermore, the operating modes and dc characteristics are discussed for designing the steady state operating point. Finally, an LLC-SRC, rated about 90 W with operating frequency range from 92 KHz to 102 KHz is provided to verify the control strategy. As theoretical analysis, the proposed system gives a satisfactory result within the overall load range. This technique is very promising in resonant converter applications
Acetylcholine causes rapid nicotinic excitation in the medial habenular nucleus of guinea pig, in vitro

The actions of ACh in the medial habenular nucleus (MHb) were investigated using extra- and intracellular recording techniques in guinea pig thalamic slice maintained in vitro. Applications of ACh to MHb neurons resulted in rapid excitation followed by inhibition. Neither of these responses was abolished by blockade of synaptic transmission, indicating that they are consequences of ACh action directly on MHb cells. Local applications of the nicotinic agonists nicotine and cytisine caused long-lasting excitation, while applications of another nicotinic agonist, 1,1-dimethyl-4- phenylpiperazinium caused both the excitatory and inhibitory responses. Applications of the muscarinic agonists DL-muscarine and acetyl-beta- methylcholine did not consistently cause either the excitatory or inhibitory response. Adding the nicotinic antagonist hexamethonium to the bathing medium blocked both the excitatory and inhibitory ACh responses, while addition of the muscarinic antagonists atropine or scopolamine had no effect. These results indicate that the effects of ACh on MHb neurons are mediated by nicotinic receptors. Intracellular recordings revealed that ACh or nicotine cause an increase in membrane conductance associated with depolarizations that had an average reversal potential of -16 to -11 mV. These results indicate that the ACh-induced excitation is due to an increase in membrane cation conductance. The inhibitory response that follows ACh-induced depolarization and repetitive firing was associated with a hyperpolarization and an increase in membrane conductance. Similar postexcitatory inhibition could also be elicited by direct depolarization or by applications of glutamate, indicating that the hyperpolarizing response to ACh may be an endogenous postexcitatory potential that is not directly coupled to activation of nicotinic receptors. These results suggest that cholinergic transmission in the MHb may be largely of the nicotinic type. This nucleus may be of one of the major regions of the nervous system through which nicotine mediates its central effects.
Detecting price and search discrimination on the internet

Price discrimination, setting the price of a given product for each customer individually according to his valuation for it, can benefit from extensive information collected online on the customers and thus contribute to the profitability of e-commerce services. Another way to discriminate among customers with different willingness to pay is to steer them towards different sets of products when they search within a product category (i.e., search discrimination). Our main contribution in this paper is to empirically demonstrate the existence of signs of both price and search discrimination on the Internet, and to uncover the information vectors used to facilitate them. Supported by our findings, we outline the design of a large-scale, distributed watchdog system that allows users to detect discriminatory practices.
A framework for biological event extraction from text

In the biomedical domain, large experimental techniques such as DNA microarrays provide the scientist a huge textual data to search for the interactions between the components of biological systems (DNA, RNA, etc.), and how these interactions give rise to the function and behavior of that system. Recent researches focus on complex type of data which involves the change of the biological state, properties or a location of a biological entity, namely the biological event. In this paper, we develop a framework for biological event extraction from text.
Designing Reconfigurable Multi-Standard Analog Baseband Front-End for 4 G Mobile Terminals : System Level Design

This paper presents the system-level design of a wireless receiver’s analog baseband front-end, which satisfies the standards of 4G mobile communications. An analysis of different topologies for wireless receivers suited for multistandard purposes is performed. The Zero-IF architecture is chosen and design issues of analog baseband blocks are outlined, regarding a multi-standard solution. A detailed system-level analysis on the analog-to-digital converter block, based on a Sigma-Delta topology, is presented as an example of a reconfigurable analog block.
Daniel Jurafsky/James H. Martin, Speech and Language Processing

Carstensen, Broder (1981): Lexikalische Scheinentlehnungen des Deutschen aus dem Englischen. In: Kühlwein, Wolfgang, u. a. (Hgg.): Kontrastive Linguistik und Übersetzungswissenschaft. München: Fink, 175-182. Grzega, Joachim (1999): Some Observations on E-Mail-Style vs. Traditional Style. In: Papiere zur Linguistik 60, 3 1 6 . Grzega, Joachim (2001 a): Feministische Linguistik: Anmerkungen zur soziolinguistischen Variable „Geschlecht". In: Grzega, Joachim: Sprachwissenschaft ohne Fachchinesisch. 7 aktuelle Studien für alle Sprachinteressierten. Aachen: Shaker, 2 7 4 0 . Grzega, Joachim (2001 b): Deutschländisch und Österreichisches Deutsch. Mehr Unterschiede als nur in Wortschatz und Aussprache. In: Grzega, Joachim: Sprachwissenschaft ohne Fachchinesisch. 7 aktuelle Studien für alle Sprachinteressierten. Aachen: Shaker, 7 2 6 .
No Greater Provocation? Adultery and the Mitigation of Murder in English Law

Reformers in much of the common law world have recently turned their attentions to laws pertaining to murder and manslaughter; however, perceptions of the past maintain a hold. In England and Wales, the Coroners and Justice Act (2009) abandoned notions of provocation that developed in the seventeenth century, instead stipulating that “loss of control” would serve as the means of mitigating charges of murder to a lesser offence. If a person has reasonable grounds for losing control, of a sort that accords with contemporary norms and values, that loss of control can be adduced as a partial defense on a homicide charge. Concerns about blaming victims and gender bias have helped shape the shift away from provocation defenses. Whether a married woman's sexual infidelity might in some way serve as a partial defense that moderates her husband's killing of her from murder to something less serious has proven especially controversial. (The reverse, a wife killing an adulterous husband, receives far less attention, but then women kill their partners for any reason far less often.) Drafters of the 2009 act expressly abandoned the older notion that sexual infidelity constituted sufficient provocation to mitigate charges in a husband's killing of his wife. Angry, jealous men killing their spouses in revenge or a passionate rage might no longer cite infidelity as sufficient provocation to kill. Some people, including lawmakers and judges, expressed concerns about the change. One MP (and later attorney general) complained that “thousands of years of human experience and history should be jettisoned for a piece of political correctness. ” He need not have worried: recently, the decision in R. v. Clinton (2012) reintroduced the substance of the defense in a new guise, seeing a wife's adultery not as provocation, but as a trigger for a husband's understandable “loss of control. ” Among other factors, the Court of Appeal alluded to “experience over many generations” in treating a man's suspicion of his wife's sexual infidelity as reasonable grounds for mitigation.
An SDN-assisted system design for improving performance of SVC-DASH

Today, the most of the video streaming system provides quality adaptation and prefers to send their packets over HTTP. MPEG group has standardized Dynamic Adaptive HTTP Streaming (DASH) regarding this tendency on the adaptive HTTP streaming. Besides providing quality adaptation with a non-scalable codec, DASH standard also allows Scalable Video Coding (SVC) to adapt quality. Software Defined Networks (SDN) is a recently emerged networking paradigm. SDN enables to separate control and data plane of computer networks and hence provides flexibility to network operators to implement their own routing approaches. In this paper, we propose a system for increasing Quality of Experience (QoE) of SVC-DASH clients by utilizing SDN. Our experimental results show that the proposed system provides an increase in received video quality and decrease in outage duration and startup delay when compared to the performance of the client running over todays Internet implementing shortest path routing.
Causal Order Protocols for Group Communication

Group communication (or multicast) is a powerful abstraction that can be used whenever groups of distributed processes cooperate for the execution of a given task. Due to the uncertainties inherent to distributed systems (emerging from communication or process failures), multicast messages may arrive in an inconsistent order at different destination processes. Further complications will arise when groups overlap (i.e. a process is allowed to belong to distinct groups). In this paper, we address the problem of causal order violation in message delivery. We present three causal order protocols for overlapping groups with different trade-offs between message space overhead 2 and message delivery delays. The first protocol favours message space overhead (small one) with a longer message delivery delay. The second protocol favours message delivery delay but with a larger message space overhead. The third protocol is a compromise solution between message delivery delay and message space overhead, comparing favourably with respect to existing solutions. Key works: group communication, multicast protocols, causal order, logical clocks, distributed algorithms, distributed systems, network protocols.
The Use of Symmetry Chords for Expressing Grey Level Constraints

In many object recognition systems only geometric constraints on the boundaries of the objects are used. Many authors have shown the merit in determining the distinctiveness of boundary constraints, and using these to speed up and improve the robustness of object recognition algorithms. However, if the objects have variable shapes or the image is cluttered, then the use of boundary constraints alone can cause object recognition to be be both slow and lacking in robustness. We present a method for expressing grey level constraints using the grey levels along symmetry chords. We describe a method for forming groups of symmetry chords, and calculating their distinctiveness on the basis of the grey levels along the chords in training images. We show how distinct groups of symmetry chords can be used in object recognition by creating evidence images for specific groups of boundary points. Our initial results are promising.
Longitudinal changes of insulin sensitivity in essential hypertension: influence of blood pressure control and familial predisposition to hypertension.

The aim of this study was to evaluate the influence of blood pressure (BP) control and familial predisposition to hypertension on longitudinal changes in insulin sensitivity in essential hypertension. We evaluated 6 groups of subjects twice (basal: before any treatment; 2nd: after at least 18 months): 42 hypertensives (H) with a family history of hypertension (F+) and 30 H without a family history of hypertension (F-) successfully treated with angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors and/or calcium channel blockers (2nd: 24-h BP < or = 130/80 mm Hg); 22 untreated (UT) HF+ and 18 UTHF- (2nd: 24-h BP >140 and/or 90 mm Hg); 18 normotensives F+ and 15 normotensives F-. The parameters evaluated were as follows: glucose, insulin, and C-peptide (Cp) response to an oral glucose load. Glucose was normal in all of the subjects, similar among the 6 groups, and unchanged at the 2nd evaluation. At the basal evaluation insulin and Cp were higher and the metabolic clearance rate (MCR) of glucose was lower in the three F+ groups compared with the corresponding F- groups. In the 2nd evaluation insulin and Cp were reduced and the MCR of glucose increased in THF-, whereas all metabolic parameters were unchanged in THF+; in both UT hypertensive groups insulin and Cp increased and the MCR of glucose decreased, more so in F+ than in F-; in normotensive groups metabolic parameters did not change. A familial predisposition to hypertension influences insulin sensitivity changes during successful antihypertensive therapy, with an improvement in insulin sensitivity in F- and no changes in F+. A persistently high BP has a negative influence on insulin sensitivity in F+ and F-; this influence is greater when high BP is associated with a familial predisposition to hypertension.
Smoke-free homes: what are the barriers, motivators and enablers? A qualitative systematic review and thematic synthesis

Objective To thematically synthesise primary qualitative studies of the barriers, motivators and enablers of smoke-free homes (SFHs). Design Systematic review and thematic synthesis. Data sources Searches of MEDLINE, EBM Reviews (Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews), PsycINFO, Global Health, CINAHL, Web of Science, Informit and EMBASE, combining terms for families, households and vulnerable populations; SFH and secondhand smoke; and qualitative research, were supplemented by searches of PhD theses, key authors, specialist journals and reference lists. Study selection We included 22 articles, reporting on 18 studies, involving 646 participants. Inclusion criteria: peer-reviewed; English language; published from 1990 onwards (to week 3 of April 2014); used qualitative data collection methods; explored participants’ perspectives of home smoking behaviours; and the barriers, motivators and enablers to initiating and/or maintaining a SFH. Data extraction 1 of 3 authors extracted data with checking by a second. Data synthesis A thematic synthesis was performed to develop 7 core analytic themes: (1) knowledge, awareness and risk perception; (2) agency and personal skills/attributes; (3) wider community norms and personal moral responsibilities; (4) social relationships and influence of others; (5) perceived benefits, preferences and priorities; (6) addiction and habit; (7) practicalities. Conclusions This synthesis highlights the complexity faced by many households in having a SFH, the practical, social, cultural and personal issues that need to be addressed and balanced by households, and that while some of these are common across study settings, specific social and cultural factors play a critical role in shaping household smoking behaviours. The findings can inform policy and practice and the development of interventions aimed at increasing SFHs. Trial registration number CRD42014014115.
Nonhealing Infection despite Th1 Polarization Produced by a Strain of Leishmania major in C57BL/6 Mice

Experimental Leishmania major infection in mice has been of immense interest because it was among the first models to demonstrate the importance of the Th1/Th2 balance to infection outcome in vivo. However, the Th2 polarization that promotes the development of nonhealing cutaneous lesions in BALB/c mice has failed to adequately explain the mechanisms underlying nonhealing forms of leishmaniasis in humans. We have studied a L. major strain from a patient with nonhealing lesions that also produces nonhealing lesions with ulcerations and high parasite burden in conventionally resistant C57BL/6 mice. Surprisingly, these mice develop a strong, polarized, and sustained Th1 response, as evidenced by high levels of IFN-γ produced by Leishmania-specific cells in the draining lymph node and in the ear lesion, and an absence of IL-4 or IL-13. The parasites fail to be effectively cleared despite high level induction of inducible NO synthase in the lesion, and despite their sensitivity to killing by IFN-γ-activated macrophages in vitro. Infection of IL-10−/− mice, blockade of the IL-10R, or depletion of CD25+ cells during the chronic phase promotes parasite killing, indicating that IL-10 and regulatory T cells play a role in rendering the Th1 responses ineffective at controlling infection in the skin. Mice with nonhealing primary lesions are nonetheless resistant to reinfection in the other ear. We suggest that nonhealing infections in animal models that are explained not by aberrant Th2 development, but by overactivation of homeostatic pathways designed to control inflammation, provide better models to understand nonhealing or reactivation forms of leishmaniasis in humans.
Machine Translation for Multilingual Troubleshooting in the IT Domain: A Comparison of Different Strategies

In this paper, we address the problem of machine translation (MT) of domain-speciﬁc texts for which large amounts of parallel data for training are not available. We focus on the IT domain and on English to Portuguese machine translation, and compare different strategies for improving system performance over two baselines, the ﬁrst using only large dataset of out-of-domain data, and the second using only a small dataset of in-domain data. Our results indicate that adding a domain-speciﬁc bilingual lexicon to the training dataset signiﬁcantly improves the performance of both a hybrid MT system and a PBSMT system, while adding out-of-domain sentence pairs to the training dataset only improves the performance of a hybrid MT system. Furthermore, we perform a human evaluation of the sentences generated by the hybrid MT system and the standard PBSMT system built using the same training datasets. The results indicate some signiﬁcant differences between those two MT approaches in this speciﬁc task.
Human Shape and Pose Tracking Using Keyframes

This paper considers human tracking in multi-view setups and investigates a robust strategy that learns online key poses to drive a shape tracking method. The interest arises in realistic dynamic scenes where occlusions or segmentation errors occur. The corrupted observations present missing data and outliers that deteriorate tracking results. We propose to use key poses of the tracked person as multiple reference models. In contrast to many existing approaches that rely on a single reference model, multiple templates represent a larger variability of human poses. They provide therefore better initial hypotheses when tracking with noisy data. Our approach identifies these reference models online as distinctive keyframes during tracking. The most suitable one is then chosen as the reference at each frame. In addition, taking advantage of the proximity between successive frames, an efficient outlier handling technique is proposed to prevent from associating the model to irrelevant outliers. The two strategies are successfully experimented with a surface deformation framework that recovers both the pose and the shape. Evaluations on existing datasets also demonstrate their benefits with respect to the state of the art.
Institutional Ethnography Research in Global South Settings

Within institutional ethnography (IE), texts—reproducible written and graphic materials—are understood to play a central role in coordinating social relationships. This is the case because of their ubiquity and because texts allow proceedings in one place to influence actions in another. This article considers the role of texts in settings that are less text-saturated than the Western societies whose organization Dorothy Smith first sought to understand through IE. Drawing from insights of a study examining the social organization of maternity care in rural northern Uganda, I discuss the differences in the role of texts in Global South research including the role of illiteracy, the need to read for absences or silences, and the prominent role of international texts. Identifying texts and observing their role in sequences of action are nevertheless essential for institutional ethnographers working to understand social organization in the Global South. This article seeks to contribute to IE methodology in Global South research settings.
Automatic metadata extraction and classification of spreadsheet documents based on layout similarity

Effective information search is becoming a key success for business. Metadata is an essential part of modern information system since it helps people to find relevant documents from disparate repositories. Automatic document metadata extraction has received attention in recent years as it is an important task in generating powerful search indices to support effective information search. The objective of this paper is to propose an innovative method that automatically performs metadata extraction and classification on the spreadsheets having layout similar to that of a given sample spreadsheet whose metadata is previously defined. Metadata classification is based on document types (e.g. purchase order, sales report etc) and data context (e.g. customer name, order date etc) so that users can define the meanings of the keywords in the search query. Therefore, search engine of this work returns the search results that match user search intention more than those of conventional keyword search engines.
Option Implied Risk-Neutral Distributions and Implied Binomial Trees: A Literature Review

In this selective literature review, we start by observing that in efficient markets, there is information incorporated in option prices that might help us to design option pricing models. To this end, we review the numerous methods of recovering risk-neutral probability distributions from option prices at one particular time to expiration and their applications. Next, we move beyond one time to expiration to the construction of implied binomial trees, which model the stochastic process of the underlying asset. Finally, we describe extensions of implied binomial trees, and other non-parametric methods.