Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ontological modelling of Natural Categories-based Agents : an Ant Colony

Nowadays, the study of multiagent systems is a significant and promising research area, since they are considered useful for simulating the behaviour of real systems. On the other hand, ontologies are considered the best manner for representing reusable and shareable knowledge. In this work, we make use of ontologies for modelling the multiagent system. In particular, top-level ontological categories are used for modelling the concepts of the domain. The application domain is an ant colony, and some results of this research are shown in the paper.
When lifelong learning isn't enough : the importance of individual and organisational unlearning

As organisations increasingly strive to maximise the utility of their human capital, many encourage lifelong learning and some have adopted formal knowledge management strategies. There is an ever-growing body of research relating to organisational learning and knowledge management (Easterby-Smith, Burgoyne, & Araujo, 1999; Markoczy, 1994; Nonaka, 1994; Starbuck, 1996), particularly since the transition to the “knowledge era”. There has been more recent focus on the topic of unlearning both at an individual and organisational level. It is proposed in this paper that these four concepts are interrelated and a model for linking these is put forward.
Landmark LRU: an efficient scheme for the detection of elephant flows at internet routers

The detection of elephant flows at routers with partial flow state is vitally important for Internet operation and management. This letter proposes a landmark LRU (L-LRU) cache scheme for the detection of elephant flows. Simulations driven by Internet traces demonstrate that the L-LRU scheme reduces false negative ratio by 6 to 35 times over the original LRU scheme.
A Review of Various Routing Protocols for Wireless Sensor Network

An ad hoc network is a foundation less system . It is also called as a decentralized system in which accumulation of devices are provided with wireless communication interface. A wireless sensor network (WSN) is topographically circulated self-administering sensors. It is used to monitoring physical or ecological conditions. For example temperature, sound, weight and at the same time send the assembled data through the network to the destination. A remote sensor network (WSN) has incredible applications for example, target following and remote natural observing. This paper is about routing protocol covering their advantages and disadvantages furthermore including the correlation between these routing protocols on the basis of performance analysis.
Information Choice Technologies

Theories based on information costs or frictions have become increasing popular in macroeconomics and macro-finance. The literature has used various types of information choices, such as rational inattention, inattentiveness, information markets and costly precision. Using a unified framework, we compare these different information choice technologies and explain why some generate increasing returns and others, particularly those where agents choose how much public information to observe, generate multiple equilibria. The results can help applied theorists to choose the appropriate information choice technology for their application and to understand the consequences of that modeling choice.
ALGORITHMIC METHODOLOGIES FOR DISCOVERY OF NONSEQUENTIAL PROTEIN STRUCTURE SIMILARITIES

This chapter discusses several issues of structural alignment. It then focuses on methods implemented for sequence order-independent structural alignment at the global and local surface levels. The chapter illustrates the utility of these methods by showing how the sequence order-independent global structural alignment method detects circular permuted proteins. The chapter shows how the local surface sequence order-independent structural alignment method can be used to construct a basis set of signature pockets of binding surfaces for a specific biological function. The chapter also describes the details of the circular permutation found between a neucleoplasmin core and an auxin binding protein, as well as details of the more complex noncyclic permutation. The chapter further shows that the surface alignments can be used to automatically construct a basis set of signature pockets representing structurally preserved atoms across a family of proteins with similar biological functions.
Clinical epidemiology of Alzheimer’s disease: assessing sex and gender differences

With the aging of the population, the burden of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is rapidly expanding. More than 5 million people in the US alone are affected with AD and this number is expected to triple by 2050. While men may have a higher risk of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), an intermediate stage between normal aging and dementia, women are disproportionally affected with AD. One explanation is that men may die of competing causes of death earlier in life, so that only the most resilient men may survive to older ages. However, many other factors should also be considered to explain the sex differences. In this review, we discuss the differences observed in men versus women in the incidence and prevalence of MCI and AD, in the structure and function of the brain, and in the sex-specific and gender-specific risk and protective factors for AD. In medical research, sex refers to biological differences such as chromosomal differences (eg, XX versus XY chromosomes), gonadal differences, or hormonal differences. In contrast, gender refers to psychosocial and cultural differences between men and women (eg, access to education and occupation). Both factors play an important role in the development and progression of diseases, including AD. Understanding both sex- and gender-specific risk and protective factors for AD is critical for developing individualized interventions for the prevention and treatment of AD.
Sosyal Bilgiler Öğretim Programında İlişkilendirmeler

In recent years, some important developments regarding social studies education have taken place in Turkey. In particular, the social studies curriculum which took ef- fect in 2005 has brought a lot of innovations. One of these innovations is called affilia- tions. The aim of this study is to determine the place of affiliations in the social studies curriculum. In this study a qualitative research technique, namely, document analysis was employed to collect data. In the study, Primary School Social Studies Curricula (4 th -7 th Grades) were used as documents. Collected data were analyzed through content analysis. The results of the study showed that there are three types of affiliations and in total 141 affiliations were done in the curricula.
A Simple and Generic Belief Tracking Mechanism for the Dialog State Tracking Challenge: On the believability of observed information

This paper presents a generic dialogue state tracker that maintains beliefs over user goals based on a few simple domainindependent rules, using basic probability operations. The rules apply to observed system actions and partially observable user acts, without using any knowledge obtained from external resources (i.e. without requiring training data). The core insight is to maximise the amount of information directly gainable from an errorprone dialogue itself, so as to better lowerbound one’s expectations on the performance of more advanced statistical techniques for the task. The proposed method is evaluated in the Dialog State Tracking Challenge, where it achieves comparable performance in hypothesis accuracy to machine learning based systems. Consequently, with respect to different scenarios for the belief tracking problem, the potential superiority and weakness of machine learning approaches in general are investigated.
A cross-layer approach for designing directional routing protocol in MANETs

In this paper, we propose a directional routing protocol (DRP) for MANETs. DRP is an on-demand directional routing protocol which assumes a cross layer interaction between routing and MAC layer. The main features of DRP include an efficient route discovery mechanism, establishment and maintenance of directional routing and directional neighbor tables (DRT and DNT, respectively), and novel directional route recovery mechanisms. We have implemented DRP on top of an existing MAC protocol for directional antennas and have compared its performance with the popular dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol over both omni-directional and directional antenna models. Preliminary, simulation results are found to be very promising.
Canonical Correlation Analysis Applied to Remove Muscle Artifacts From the Electroencephalogram

The electroencephalogram (EEG) is often contaminated by muscle artifacts. In this paper, a new method for muscle artifact removal in EEG is presented, based on canonical correlation analysis (CCA) as a blind source separation (BSS) technique. This method is demonstrated on a synthetic data set. The method outperformed a low-pass filter with different cutoff frequencies and an independent component analysis (ICA)-based technique for muscle artifact removal. In addition, the method is applied on a real ictal EEG recording contaminated with muscle artifacts. The proposed method removed successfully the muscle artifact without altering the recorded underlying ictal activity
Insecticidal Activity of Ethyl Acetate Extracts from Culture Filtrates of Mangrove Fungal Endophytes

Abstract In the search for novel potent fungi-derived bioactive compounds for bioinsecticide applications, crude ethyl acetate culture filtrate extracts from 110 mangrove fungal endophytes were screened for their toxicity. Toxicity tests of all extracts against brine shrimp (Artemia salina) larvae were performed. The extracts with the highest toxicity were further examined for insecticidal activity against Spodoptera litura larvae and acetylcholinesterase (AChE) inhibition activity. The results showed that the extracts of five isolates exhibited the highest toxicity to brine shrimp at 50% lethal concentration (LC50) values of 7.45 to 10.24 ppm. These five fungal isolates that obtained from Rhizophora mucronata were identified based on sequence data analysis of the internal transcribed spacer region of rDNA as Aspergillus oryzae (strain BPPTCC 6036), Emericella nidulans (strains BPPTCC 6035 and BPPTCC 6038), A. tamarii (strain BPPTCC 6037), and A. versicolor (strain BPPTCC 6039). The mean percentage of S. litura larval mortality following topical application of the five extracts ranged from 16.7% to 43.3%. In the AChE inhibition assay, the inhibition rates of the five extracts ranged from 40.7% to 48.9%, while eserine (positive control) had an inhibition rate of 96.8%, at a concentration of 100 ppm. The extracts used were crude extracts, so their potential as sources of AChE inhibition compounds makes them likely candidates as neurotoxins. The high-performance liquid chromatography profiles of the five extracts differed, indicating variations in their chemical constituents. This study highlights the potential of culture filtrate ethyl acetate extracts of mangrove fungal endophytes as a source of new potential bioactive compounds for bioinsecticide applications.
Registering retinal images using automatically selected control point pairs

Describes a method of registering retinal images automatically. Control points are automatically identified in each image from blood vessel segments extracted from both images. The location of the optic nerve is used check the spatial similarity of control point pairs. The control point pairs are ranked with a similarity assessment that calculates a correlation of image intensity around each control point. Using a model of an idealized registration, the authors calculate the expected scaling factor between the images. Control point pairs that differ from this expected scaling factor are eliminated, with a bias against pairs with a low similarity assessment. Accurate registration is reported in 22 out of 23 image pairs. The registration error is related to the errors from the methods used to extract the vascular tree and to identify the location of the optic nerve. <<ETX>>
Hypoxic priming of mESCs accelerates vascular-lineage differentiation through HIF1-mediated inverse regulation of Oct4 and VEGF

Hypoxic microenvironment plays an important role in determining stem cell fates. However, it is controversial to which direction between self‐renewal and differentiation the hypoxia drives the stem cells. Here, we investigated whether a short exposure to hypoxia (termed ‘hypoxic‐priming’) efficiently directed and promoted mouse embryonic stem cells (mESCs) to differentiate into vascular‐lineage. During spontaneous differentiation of embryoid bodies (EBs), hypoxic region was observed inside EB spheroids even under normoxic conditions. Indeed, hypoxia‐primed EBs more efficiently differentiated into cells of vascular‐lineage, than normoxic EBs did. We found that hypoxia suppressed Oct4 expression via direct binding of HIF‐1 to reverse hypoxia‐responsive elements (rHREs) in the Oct4 promoter. Furthermore, vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) was highly upregulated in hypoxia‐primed EBs, which differentiated towards endothelial cells in the absence of exogenous VEGF. Interestingly, this differentiation was abolished by the HIF‐1 or VEGF blocking. In vivo transplantation of hypoxia‐primed EBs into mice ischemic limb elicited enhanced vessel differentiation. Collectively, our findings identify that hypoxia enhanced ESC differentiation by HIF‐1‐mediated inverse regulation of Oct4 and VEGF, which is a novel pathway to promote vascular‐lineage differentiation.
Effortless attention : a new perspective in the cognitive science of attention and action

Effortful attention control / Brandon J. Schmeichel and Roy F. Baumeister -- The benefits and perils of attentional control / Marci S. DeCaro and Sian L. Beilock -- Effortless motor learning? : an external focus of attention enhances movement effectiveness and efficiency / Gabriele Wulf and Rebecca Lewthwaite -- The impact of anticipated cognitive demand on attention and behavioral choice / Joseph T. McGuire and Matthew M. Botvinick -- Grounding attention in action control: the intentional control of selection / Bernhard Hommel -- Implicit versus deliberate control and its implications for awareness / Chris Blais -- Effortless attention, hypofrontality, and perfectionism / Arne Dietrich and Oliver Stoll -- Effortless attention in everyday life: a systematic phenomenology / Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Robert D. Wall -- Developing an experimental induction of flow: effortless action in the lab / Arlen C. Moller, Brain P. Meier, and Robert D. Wall -- The physiology of efforless attention: correlates of state flow and flow proneness / Fredrik Ullen . [et al.] -- Apertures, draw, and syntax: remodeling attention / Brian Bruya -- Toward an empirically responsible ethics: cognitive science, virtue ethics, and effortless attention in early Chinese thought / Edward Slingerland -- Flow experience explained on the grounds of an activity approach to attention / Yuri Dormashev -- Two to tango: automatic social coordination and the role of felt effort / Joshua M. Ackerman and John A. Bargh -- The thalamic gateway: how the meditative training of attention evolves toward selfless transformations of consciousness / James H. Austin -- Training effortless attention / Michael I. Posner . [et al.]
Long-term follow-up of deep brain stimulation of peduncolopontine nucleus in progressive supranuclear palsy: Report of three cases

Background: Progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) is a neurodegenerative disease due to mitochondrial dysfunction. The PSP syndrome presents generally with gait disorder, Parkinsonism, ophthalmoparesis and cognitive alteration. Few reports exist on deep brain stimulation (DBS) in patients with atypical Parkinsonism. The aim of our study was to evaluate further the potential role of DBS in PSP. Case Description: We report three patients with PSP with long-term follow up undergoing DBS. Two patients had right peripedunculopontine nucleus (PPN) stimulation and one patient had simultaneous right PPN and bilateral globus pallidus internus DBS. DBS of the PPN alone or combined with globus pallidus internus (GPi) determined an improvement in gait and a reduction in falls sustained over time. Combined target stimulation (GPi-PPN) was correlated with better clinical outcome than single target (PPN) DBS for PSP. Conclusions: Although few data on DBS for PSP exist, reported clinical results are encouraging. DBS might be considered as an alternative therapeutic option for patients with PSP presenting with relevant gait imbalance and frequent falls, who fail to respond to pharmacological treatment. Larger cohorts with longer follow-ups are needed to evaluate more exhaustively the efficacy of DBS in PSP.
Maintenance Therapy with Unprocessed Bran in the Prevention of Acute Anal Fissure Recurrence

The effect of unprocessed bran in a dose of 5 g three times daily and a dose of 2.5 g three times daily for one year on the recurrence rate of anal fissures was studied in a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial in 90 patients with recently healed acute posterior anal fissures. Fifteen patients (16.6%) were withdrawn before the code was broken due to failure to follow the trial protocol for various reasons. Significantly fewer recurrences occurred in patients receiving bran 5 g throe times daily (recurrence rate 16%, 95% confidence limits, 4.54 to 36.08) when compared with patients receiving bran 2.5 g three times daily (60%; 38.67 to 78.87) (P<0.01) and with patients receiving placebo three times daily (68%; 46.50 to 85.05) (P<0.01). No significant difference in recurrences was found between patients on bran 2.5 g and those on placebo.
Patient Flow Prediction via Discriminative Learning of Mutually-Correcting Processes

Over the past decade, the rate of care unit (CU) use in the United States has been increasing. With an aging population and ever-growing demand for medical care, effective management of patients' transitions among different care facilities will prove indispensible for shortening the length of hospital stays, improving patient outcomes, allocating critical care resources, and reducing preventable re-admissions. In this paper, we focus on an important problem of predicting the so-called “patient flow” from longitudinal electronic health records (EHRs), which has not been explored via existing machine learning techniques. By treating a sequence of transition events as a point process, we develop a novel framework for modeling patient flow through various CUs and jointly predicting patients' destination CUs and duration days. Instead of learning a generative point process model via maximum likelihood estimation, we propose a novel discriminative learning algorithm aiming at improving the prediction of transition events in the case of sparse data. By parameterizing the proposed model as a mutually-correcting process, we formulate the estimation problem via generalized linear models, which lends itself to efficient learning based on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Furthermore, we achieve simultaneous feature selection and learning by adding a group-lasso regularizer to the ADMM algorithm. Additionally, for suppressing the negative influence of data imbalance on the learning of model, we synthesize auxiliary training data for the classes with extremely few samples, and improve the robustness of our learning method accordingly. Testing on real-world data, we show that our method obtains superior performance in terms of accuracy of predicting the destination CU transition and duration of each CU occupancy.
[Initial presentation and course of lupus membranous glomerulonephritis].

INTRODUCTION Lupus membranous nephropathy (MN) is associated with a substantial risk of developing end-stage renal disease and may thus be fatal. There is currently no consensus about specific immunosuppressive treatment. We describe the presentation of lupus MN and its course according to type of immunosuppressive treatment. PATIENTS AND METHODS This retrospective study included all patients with lupus MN (only, not associated with any proliferative nephropathy) hospitalized in the nephrology unit of Ibn Sina University Hospital in Rabat from 1994 through 2005. RESULTS MN was found in 18 patients, 16.7% of our patients with lupus. The average age at first admission of these 18 was 29+/-2.1 years (17-52), with a sex ratio of 0.12. The mean follow-up period was 54+/-31 months (3-130). The initial clinical presentation of MN was marked by the presence of proteinuria, nephrotic in 11 cases. Mean serum creatinine was 18.6+/-3.9 mg/L. Leukocyturia was noted in 12 cases (67%) and microscopic hematuria in 8 cases (44%). Extrarenal signs were cutaneous (14 cases), articular (14 cases), hematologic (8 cases), cardiac (6 cases) and neurological (4 cases). Patients were treated by corticosteroids only (group 1=7 cases) or by corticosteroids combined with cyclophosphamide in cases of renal insufficiency or neurological signs (group 2=11 cases). Complete remission occurred in 11 cases, and partial remission in the others. Four relapses were observed, including three in group 2. Mean serum creatinine blood levels were comparable in the 2 groups. Four patients died of extrarenal causes. Only one patient, in group 2, progressed to end-stage renal disease. CONCLUSION The initial presentation of lupus MN is variable. Cyclophosphamide has favorable renal effects, but does not prevent lethal complications, especially neurological complications.
Czech Monolingual Information Retrieval Using Off-The-Shelf Components - the University of West Bohemia at CLEF 2007 Ad-Hoc track

The paper provides a brief description of the system assembled for the CLEF 2007 Ad-Hoc track by the University of West Bohemia. We have performed only monolingual experiments (Czech documents - Czech queries) using two incarnations of the tf.idf model | one with raw term frequency and the other with the BM25 term frequency weighting | as implemented in the Lemur toolkit. The eect of the blind relevance feedback was also explored. Czech morphological analyser and tagger were used for lemmatization and stop word removal. The results achieved seem to be quite reasonable, with MAP ranging from 0.11. to 0.30.
Melatonin rhythms in European sea bass plasma and eye: influence of seasonal photoperiod and water temperature

The transduction of seasonal information from the environment (i.e., photoperiod and water temperature) into melatonin rhythms was studied in sea bass. Plasma and ocular melatonin (N‐acetyl‐5‐methoxytryptamine) was determined in autumn, winter, spring and summer (experiment 1) under natural culture conditions, and in the summer and winter solstices under both natural and “6‐month out‐of‐phase” photoperiods (experiment 2). At each sampling, 48 sea bass were sacrificed at a rate of 6 fish every 3 hr and the level of melatonin was determined in plasma and eye cup samples by ELISA. In experiment 1, significant diel changes were observed in plasma melatonin, with nocturnal melatonin varying from 144 pg/mL (summer) to 23 pg/mL (autumn), while diurnal melatonin remained low, around 8 pg/mL throughout the year. In experiment 2, the photoperiod length was shown to control the duration of the nocturnal melatonin rise, while the water temperature determined the amplitude of the melatonin rhythm. Ocular melatonin peaked during daytime in autumn and winter, but no significant changes were detected in summer and spring. In conclusion, plasma melatonin rhythms in sea bass reflect the pineal capacity to integrate seasonal information and supply precise calendar information, which may synchronize different physiological processes such as annual reproduction and feeding rhythms.