Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Contrast-Enhanced Magnetic Resonance Microangiography Reveals Remodeling of the Cerebral Microvasculature in Transgenic ArcAβ Mice

Amyloid-β (Aβ) deposition in the cerebral vasculature is accompanied by remodeling which has a profound influence on vascular integrity and function. In the current study we have quantitatively assessed the age-dependent changes of the cortical vasculature in the arcAβ model of cerebral amyloidosis. To estimate the density of the cortical microvasculature in vivo, we used contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance microangiography (CE-μMRA). Three-dimensional gradient echo datasets with 60 μm isotropic resolution were acquired in 4- and 24-month-old arcAβ mice and compared with wild-type (wt) control mice of the same age before and after administration of superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles. After segmentation of the cortical vasculature from difference images, an automated algorithm was applied for assessing the number and size distribution of intracortical vessels. With CE-μMRA, cerebral arteries and veins with a diameter of less than the nominal pixel resolution (60 μm) can be visualized. A significant age-dependent reduction in the number of functional intracortical microvessels (radii of 20–80 μm) has been observed in 24-month-old arcAβ mice compared with age-matched wt mice, whereas there was no difference between transgenic and wt mice of 4 months of age. Immunohistochemistry demonstrated strong fibrinogen and Aβ deposition in small- and medium-sized vessels, but not in large cerebral arteries, of 24-month-old arcAβ mice. The reduced density of transcortical vessels may thus be attributed to impaired perfusion and vascular occlusion caused by deposition of Aβ and fibrin. The study demonstrated that remodeling of the cerebrovasculature can be monitored noninvasively with CE-μMRA in mice.
Multiple Shape-Memory Behavior of Polyethylene/Polycyclooctene Blends Cross-Linked by Electron Irradiation

Comparative investigation of the thermo-induced unconstrained shape-memory (SM) recovery of a multi-phase semi-crystalline covalent network was performed using cross-linked polyolefin based blends of linear high density polyethylene (HDPE) and/or short-chain branched ethylene octen copolymers (EOC) as well as polycyclooctene (polyoctenamer, TOR). Different phase morphologies of the blends were generated by variation of blend composition and different pathways for sample preparation: Melt mixing of blends, compression molding of films, slowly cooling or quenching of films and subsequent cross-linking by electron irradiation at room temperature. Partly well developed triple- and quadruple SM behavior after one-step programming process was demonstrated for binary and ternary HDPE/EOC/TOR blends, which exhibit a morphology with segregated phases, where the matrix has the lower melting and correspondingly switching temperature (Tm and Tsw) in comparison to the disperse phases. These blends show pronounced steps of SM strain recovery and storage modulus as well as distinct DSC melting peaks. The peaks of SM recovery rate are located in the Tm range of the blend phases. The quenching procedure resulted in a better phase separation at nano-level and correspondingly in a more pronounced triple-shape behavior of the blends. All HDPE/EOC/TOR blends showed high values of strain fixing and strain recovery ratios of 95 to 99 %.
Data reduction on MFCC features based on kernel PCA for speaker verification system

Introduction: Mel Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients (MFCC) is one of the most widely used feature extraction techniques for speech recognition and produce MFCC features as input for the classification phase. In this study the reduction of feature dimension on MFCC features is studied due to large data size affects computational time which leads to slower verification speed. So, implementation of data reduction techniques so as to retain the most important feature parameters is evaluated in this study. In this study, an investigation of data reduction based on principal component analysis is proposed. Two approaches of Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA) techniques i.e. Gaussian and Polynomial KPCA and PCA are evaluated and compared. The features based on MFCC and the reduced dimensions based on KPCA and PCA are then classified using two types of Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers i . e. linear and polynomial SVM. A set of clean data samples with three different dimensions of principle components i.e. 80, 117 and 180 are used for system evaluation. For performance evaluation, Equal Error Rates (EER) and verification time (VT) are employed in this study. The best system performance is observed for MFCC-KPCA Gaussian feature extraction technique with 117 features dimensions using linear SVM as classifier. This study proves that the use of data reduction technique can speed up verification time tremendously and improve system performances as well.
Hierarchical Hough forests for view-independent action recognition

Appearance-based action recognition can be considered as a natural extension of appearance-based object detection from the spatial to the spatio-temporal domain. Although this step seems natural, most action recognition approaches are evaluated in isolation. Towards this end the contribution of this paper is twofold. First, a view-independent approach to action recognition is proposed and second the sensitivity w.r. t. a combination of person detection and action recognition is evaluated. Action recognition is performed in a hierarchical manner: First, the relative camera orientation in the scene is estimated and second, the action is determined using view-dependent Hough forests. The proposed approach is evaluated on the multi-view i3DPost dataset [1] and its performance is compared to single-step approaches using Hough forests. The results suggest that the recognition rate increases, when using the proposed hierarchical method compared to single-step approaches. Further, the performance rates of hierarchical Hough forests on ground truth data are compared to the results of hierarchical Hough forests in combination with a person detector.
Observations of structural order in ion-implanted amorphous silicon

Medium-range order in ion-implanted amorphous silicon has been observed using fluctuation electron microscopy. In fluctuation electron microscopy, variance of dark-field image intensity contains the information of high-order atomic correlations, primarily in medium-range order length scale (1–3 nm). Thermal annealing greatly reduces the order and leaves a random network. It appears that the free energy change previously observed on relaxation may therefore be associated with randomization of the network. In this paper, we discuss the origin of the medium-range order during implantation, which can be interpreted as a paracrystalline state, that is, a disordered network enclosing compacts of highly topologically ordered grains on the length scale of 1–3 nm with significant strain fields.
Dynamics of the fast solar tachocline I. Dipolar field

One possible scenario for the origin of the solar tachocline, known as the \fast tachocline", assumes that the turbulent diusivity exceeds > 10 9 cm 2 s 1 . In this case the dynamics will be governed by the dynamo- generated oscillatory magnetic eld on relatively short timescales. Here, for the rst time, we present detailed numerical models for the fast solar tachocline with all components of the magnetic eld calculated explicitly, assuming axial symmetry and a constant turbulent diusivity and viscosity . We nd that a suciently strong oscillatory poloidal eld with dipolar latitude dependence at the tachocline{convective zone boundary is able to conne the tachocline. Exploring the three-dimensional parameter space dened by the viscosity in the range log = 9{11, the magnetic Prandtl number in the range Prm =0 :1 10, and the meridional flow amplitude ( 3t o +3 cm s 1 ), we also nd that the conning eld strength Bconf, necessary to reproduce the observed thickness of the tachocline, increases with viscosity , with magnetic Prandtl number =, and with equatorward meridional flow speed. Nevertheless, the resulting Bconf values remain quite reasonable, in the range 10 3 10 4 G, for all parameter combinations considered here. The thickness of the tachocline shows a marked dependence on both time and latitude. The latitude dependence is similar to that inferred by helioseismology, while the time dependence is within the observational errors.
Look Ma, no wires

5 NETNEWS DECEMBER 2007 I t feels funny to be writing my first NetNews column for netWorker without any network wires in my office. Not a single one, only the smell of fresh paint. Two weeks ago, our offices were redecorated. In preparation for the upheaval, we pulled everything out of my office, including a fully-laden Gigabit Ethernet switch, phone wires, and miles of twisted Cat5 cable going into a couple of wall jacks. Now, there’s fresh carpet, fresh paint, and not a single phone wire or Ethernet cable. As part of this makeover, we’ve gone 100 percent wireless, other than electrical power. The only devices still connected physically to the business LAN are a 2Wire DSL modem with its SonicWall firewall appliance, Apple Airport Extreme access point, a file server, and a networked Brother HL-5170DN laser printer. Everything else is WiFi-B or WiFi-N. Even our phones are now cordless, with recharging base stations arrayed in a central location for the handsets. It’s a brave new world.
Greedy method for inferring tandem duplication history

MOTIVATION Genome analysis suggests that tandem duplication is an important mode of evolutionary novelty by permitting one copy of each gene to drift and potentially to acquire a new function. With more and more genomic sequences available, reconstructing duplication history has received extensive attention recently. RESULTS An efficient method is presented for inferring the duplication history of tandemly repeated sequences based on the model proposed by Fitch (1977). We validate the method by using simulation results and real data sets of mucin genes, ZNF genes, and olfactory receptors genes. The agreement with conclusions drawn by other biological researchers strongly indicates that our method is efficient and robust. AVAILABILITY The program is available by request.
Differential effects of extracellular vesicles secreted by mesenchymal stem cells from different sources on glioblastoma cells

Background: Malignant glial tumors, including glioblastoma multiforme, account for 15 – 20% of pediatric CNS malignancies. They are most resistant to therapy and are associated with a poor prognosis. Objective: Given the ability of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) to affect glioma growth, we investigated the effects of extracellular vesicles (EVs) derived from MSCs on U87MG glioblastoma cells line. Methods: EVs were isolated from culture media of MSCs from different sources, including bone marrow (BM), umbilical cord (UC) and adipose tissue (AT) and added to U87MG culture. The internalization and the effects of BM-, UC- and AT-MSC-EVs on proliferation and apoptosis of tumor cells were evaluated. Results: Both confocal microscopy and FACS analysis showed internalization of EVs into tumor cells. BM- and UC-MSC-EVs decreased cell proliferation, while an opposite effect was observed with AT-MSC-EVs. Moreover, both BM- and UC-MSC-EVs induced apoptosis of glioblastoma cells, while AT-MSC-EVs had no effect. Loading UC-MSC-EVs with Vincristine further increased cytotoxicity when compared both to the free drug and to untreated EVs. Conclusions: Different effects of MSC-EVs on cancer cells were observed depending on their tissue of origin. Moreover, MSC-EVs can deliver antiblastic drugs to glioblastoma cells.
Application of visible and near infrared spectroscopy in non-destructive evaluation of cement materials

In the twenty-first century, there has been rapid urbanization in economically emerging countries. Many scientific research studies have proposed methods to monitor the quality of materials used in engineering works. Quality inspections are most often made of structure-related materials such as concrete. All the concrete used in construction work is subjected to a test that breaks the samples to evaluate its final mechanical strength. In this sense, remote sensing can contribute to mapping and monitoring construction materials, allowing investigation and identification of various properties such as mechanical strength and water content in a non-destructive manner. The materials can be inspected directly on site, in a rapid, non-invasive, and inexpensive manner; this is crucial for the ongoing process of construction. The spectral behaviour of four different mechanical strengths of two cement materials based on Portland cement, cement paste, and mortar was observed using a FieldSpec® 3 spectroradiometer. The spectral curves generated by recording the reflected and absorbed electromagnetic radiation of the samples were interpreted based on the theory of vibrational and electronic spectroscopy. The objective of this work is to show a novel technique for assisting in the analysis of solid samples using visible and near infrared spectroscopy. Through this study, a spectral contrast between different samples of the paste and mortar was found. Besides, it was possible to detect the presence and the corresponding proportion of water in the samples. Wavelet analysis enabled records of statistical evidence of spectral contrast, and showed that the depth of water absorption features is inversely proportional to compressive strength in the cement materials under study. This work is innovative, because there are no studies in the literature on the application of this technique as an aid tool for differentiating compressive strengths of Portland-cement-based materials.
How much do smoking and alcohol consumption explain socioeconomic inequalities in head and neck cancer risk?

Background A higher burden of head and neck cancer has been reported to affect deprived populations. This study assessed the association between socioeconomic status and head and neck cancer, aiming to explore how this association is related to differences of tobacco and alcohol consumption across socioeconomic strata. Methods We conducted a case-control study in São Paulo, Brazil (1998–2006), including 1017 incident cases of oral, pharyngeal and laryngeal cancer, and 951 sex- and age-matched controls. Education and occupation were distal determinants in the hierarchical approach; cumulative exposure to tobacco and alcohol were proximal risk factors. Outcomes of the hierarchical model were compared with fully adjusted ORs. Results Individuals with lower education (OR 2.27; 95% CI 1.61 to 3.19) and those performing manual labour (OR 1.55; 95% CI 1.26 to 1.92) had a higher risk of disease. However, 54% of the association with lower education and 45% of the association with manual labour were explained by proximal lifestyle exposures, and socioeconomic status remained significantly associated with disease when adjusted for smoking and alcohol consumption. Conclusions Socioeconomic differences in head and neck cancer are partially attributable to the distribution of tobacco smoking and alcohol consumption across socioeconomic strata. Additional mediating factors may explain the remaining variation of socioeconomic status on head and neck cancer.
Large scale multi-label classification via metalabeler

The explosion of online content has made the management of such content non-trivial. Web-related tasks such as web page categorization, news filtering, query categorization, tag recommendation, etc. often involve the construction of multi-label categorization systems on a large scale. Existing multi-label classification methods either do not scale or have unsatisfactory performance. In this work, we propose MetaLabeler to automatically determine the relevant set of labels for each instance without intensive human involvement or expensive cross-validation. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmark data show that the MetaLabeler tends to outperform existing methods. Moreover, MetaLabeler scales to millions of multi-labeled instances and can be deployed easily. This enables us to apply the MetaLabeler to a large scale query categorization problem in Yahoo! , yielding a significant improvement in performance.
National Institute of Informatics, Japan at TRECVID 2009

This paper reports our experiments for TRECVID 2009 tasks: high level feature extraction, search and contentbased copy detection. For the high level feature extraction task, we used the baseline features such as color moments, edge orientation histogram, local binary patterns and local features trained with SVM classifiers and nearest neighbor classifiers. For the search task, we used . Concerning content based video copy detection (CBVCD), using local features leads to good robustness to most types of photometric or geometric transformations. However, to achieve both good precision and good recall when the transformations are strong, especially occlusions, feature configurations should be taken into account. This usually leads to complex matching operations that are incompatible with scalable copy detection. We suggest a computationally inexpensive solution for including a minimal amount of configuration information that significantly improves the balance between overall detection quality and scalability. I. HIGH LEVEL FEATURE EXTRACTION
A Discussion on Elliptic Curve Cryptography and Its Applications

Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is a kind of public key cryptosystem like RSA. But it differs from RSA in its quicker evolving capacity and by providing attractive and alternative way to researchers of cryptographic algorithm. The security level which is given by RSA can be provided even by smaller keys of ECC (for example, a 160 bit ECC has roughly the same security strength as 1024 bit RSA). In this paper, we will present some ECC algorithms and also gives mathematical explanations on the working of these algorithms.
Impact of Educational Level on Study Attrition and Evaluation of Web-Based Computer-Tailored Interventions: Results From Seven Randomized Controlled Trials

Background Web-based computer-tailored interventions have shown to be effective in improving health behavior; however, high dropout attrition is a major issue in these interventions. Objective The aim of this study is to assess whether people with a lower educational level drop out from studies more frequently compared to people with a higher educational level and to what extent this depends on evaluation of these interventions. Methods Data from 7 randomized controlled trials of Web-based computer-tailored interventions were used to investigate dropout rates among participants with different educational levels. To be able to compare higher and lower educated participants, intervention evaluation was assessed by pooling data from these studies. Logistic regression analysis was used to assess whether intervention evaluation predicted dropout at follow-up measurements. Results In 3 studies, we found a higher study dropout attrition rate among participants with a lower educational level, whereas in 2 studies we found that middle educated participants had a higher dropout attrition rate compared to highly educated participants. In 4 studies, no such significant difference was found. Three of 7 studies showed that participants with a lower or middle educational level evaluated the interventions significantly better than highly educated participants (“Alcohol-Everything within the Limit”: F 2,376=5.97, P=.003; “My Healthy Behavior”: F 2,359=5.52, P=.004; “Master Your Breath”: F 2,317=3.17, P=.04). One study found lower intervention evaluation by lower educated participants compared to participants with a middle educational level (“Weight in Balance”: F 2,37=3.17, P=.05). Low evaluation of the interventions was not a significant predictor of dropout at a later follow-up measurement in any of the studies. Conclusions Dropout attrition rates were higher among participants with a lower or middle educational level compared with highly educated participants. Although lower educated participants evaluated the interventions better in approximately half of the studies, evaluation did not predict dropout attrition. Further research is needed to find other explanations for high dropout rates among lower educated participants.
Child and Adolescent Emergency and Urgent Mental Health Delivery Through Telepsychiatry: 12-Month Prospective Study.

BACKGROUND The significant gap between children and adolescents presenting for emergency mental healthcare and the shortage of child and adolescent psychiatrists constitutes a major barrier to timely access for psychiatric assessment for rural and remote areas. Unlike remote areas, urban emergency departments have in-house psychiatric consultation. Telepsychiatry may be a solution to ensure the same service for remote areas. However, there is a paucity of studies on the use of telepsychiatry for child and adolescent emergency consults. Thus, the aim of our study was to (1) assess patient satisfaction with telepsychiatry and (2) compare clinical characteristics and outcome of telepsychiatry with face-to-face emergency child and adolescent assessments. METHODS This is a prospective study of telepsychiatry emergency assessments of children and adolescents referred by emergency physicians. The comparison group was age- and gender-matched patients seen for face-to-face urgent assessments. Data were gathered on demographic and clinical variables. Telepsychiatry satisfaction was assessed using a questionnaire. Descriptive statistics and chi-square tests were used to assess group differences for each variable. Logistic regression was used to assess impact of the variables on outcome after the consult. A p value <0.05 was used to determine statistical significance. RESULTS Sixty (n = 60) assessments were conducted through telepsychiatry in 12 months. Among the telepsychiatry group, Aboriginal patients were over-represented (50% vs. 6.7%, p < 0.001), a higher proportion received a diagnosis of adjustment disorder (22% vs. 8.3%, p = 0.004) or no diagnosis (27% vs. 6.7%, p = 0.004) compared with controls. There was no statistically significant difference between groups on other clinical variables. Patients reported a high degree of satisfaction with telepsychiatry. CONCLUSIONS Telepsychiatry is acceptable to patients and families for safe emergency assessment and follow-up, reducing unnecessary travel to urban centers. Longer time outcomes are needed to establish validity of telepsychiatry for emergency assessments.
Requirements Engineering Education in the 21st Century, An Experiential Learning Approach

RE use in industry is hampered by a poor understanding of RE practices and their benefits. Teaching RE at the university level is therefore an important endeavor. This education can ideally be provided at the university level as an integrated part of developing the requisite RE and software engineering technical skills, shortly before students become engineers and enter the workforce. However, much social wisdom is packed into RE methods. It is unrealistic to expect students with little organizational experience to understand this body of knowledge. The course described in this paper uses an active, affective, experiential pedagogy giving students the opportunity of experiencing a simulated work environment that demonstrates the social/design-problem complexities and richness of a development organization in the throws of creating a new product. Emotional and technical debriefing is conducted after each meaningful experience so that students and faculty, alike, can better understand the professional relevancies of what they have just experienced. This includes an examination of the many forces experienced in industrial settings but not normally discussed in academic settings. The course uses a low-tech social simulation rather than software simulation so that students learn through interaction with real people and therefore are confronted with the complexity of true social relationships.