Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reproductive ageing and ovarian function: is the early follicular phase FSH rise necessary to maintain adequate secretory function in older ovulatory women?

BACKGROUND Serum FSH elevations and decreases in inhibin B have been consistently demonstrated in the early follicular phase of cycles in women of advanced reproductive age. However, secretory products of the dominant follicle (estradiol and inhibin A) in the serum of older ovulatory women are maintained at levels similar to those of their younger counterparts. The goal of this investigation was to determine if ovarian secretory capacity is dependent on relative FSH levels and if basal measures of ovarian reserve reflect ovarian secretory capacity. METHODS We administered equivalent low, but effective doses of recombinant FSH for 5 days to a group of older subjects (40-45 years, n=9) and younger controls (20-25 years, n=10) after pituitary suppression with a GnRH agonist. Outcome measures included follicular development as determined by serial transvaginal ultrasound examinations and serum levels of estradiol, inhibin A and inhibin B. RESULTS Serum levels of estradiol and inhibin A were not statistically different between the two groups, while the number of large follicles formed was greater in the younger subjects. Basal parameters of ovarian reserve were not significantly correlated with ovarian secretory capacity, but did correlate with the number of follicles recruited in response to low-dose FSH. CONCLUSIONS By providing equivalent serum levels of FSH in older and younger reproductive aged women, this study demonstrates that the secretory capacity of recruited follicles is maintained in older reproductive aged women.
Polyhedral silver nanocrystals with distinct scattering signatures.

Silver nanoparticles are ideal building blocks for opticalmaterials that seek to manipulate, transport, or amplify light becausethey support surface plasmons with frequencies in the visible and near-IRregime. We demonstrate that polyhedral silvernanocrystals displaycomplex and distinct scattering signatures dictated by shape and size.The ability to engineer specific plasmon modes should have profoundconsequences for surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, sub-wavelengthoptics, and plasmonic transport.
TCP Congestion Window Validation

TCP's congestion window controls the number of packets a TCP flow may have in the network at any time. However, long periods when the sender is idle or application-limited can lead to the invalidation of the congestion window, in that the congestion window no longer reflects current information about the state of the network. This document describes a simple modification to TCP's congestion control algorithms to decay the congestion window cwnd after the transition from a sufficiently-long application-limited period, while using the slow-start threshold ssthresh to save information about the previous value of the congestion window.
A Novel Approach to Manage A Hybrid Storage System

This paper considers the problem of how to improve the performance of hybrid storage system employing solid state disks and hard disk drives. We utilize both initial block allocation as well as migration to reach “Wardrop equilibrium”, in which the response times of different devices equalize. We show that such a policy allows adaptive load balancing across devices of different performance. We also show that such a policy exploits parallelism in the storage system effectively to improve throughput and latency simultaneously. We implemented a prototype in Linux and evaluated it in multiple workloads and multiple configurations. The results show that the proposed approach improved both the latency of requests and the throughput significantly, and it adapted to different configurations of the system under different workloads.
SOM based activity learning for visual surveillance system

This paper proposes a new object activity learning algorithm based on self-organizing map (SOM) to detect anomaly events and predict activities in intelligent visual surveillance system. Two SOM networks are used to construct the distribution patterns of sub-trajectories and trajectories respectively. Sub-trajectories are first sampled to reveal the local activities. Before constructing the distribution patterns, trajectories are represented based on the distribution patterns of sub-trajectories. Finally, the distribution patterns of trajectories are merged to form clusters using agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm. By using the patterns of sub-trajectories, the learning process is accelerated and the representation of trajectory is simplified. The patterns of sub-trajectories and trajectories learned are then used to detect local and global anomaly events. A fuzzy set theory based predicting method is also proposed to predict the activity of object. Experimental results on real scene demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
Binocular transfer methods for point-feature tracking of image sequences

Image transfer is a method for projecting a 3D scene from two or more reference images. Typically, the correspondences of target points to be transferred and the reference points must be known over the reference images. We present two new transfer methods that eliminate the target point correspondence requirement. We show that five reference points matched across two reference images are sufficient to linearly resolve transfer under affine projection using two views instead of three views as needed by other techniques. Furthermore, given the correspondences of any four of the five reference points in any other view, we can transfer a target point to a third view from any one of the two original reference views. To improve the robustness of the affine projection method, we incorporate an orthographic camera model. A factorization method is applied to the reference points matched over two reference views. Experiments with real image sequences demonstrate the application of both methods for motion tracking.
An IAC Approach for Detecting Profile Cloning in Online Social Networks

Nowadays, Online Social Networks (OSNs) are popular websites on the internet, which millions of users register on and share their own personal information with others. Privacy threats and disclosing personal information are the most important concerns of OSNs’ users. Recently, a new attack which is named Identity Cloned Attack is detected on OSNs. In this attack the attacker tries to make a fake identity of a real user in order to access to private information of the users’ friends which they do not publish on the public profiles. In today OSNs, there are some verification services, but they are not active services and they are useful for users who are familiar with online identity issues. In this paper, Identity cloned attacks are explained in more details and a new and precise method to detect profile cloning in online social networks is proposed. In this method, first, the social network is shown in a form of graph, then, according to similarities among users, this graph is divided into smaller communities. Afterwards, all of the similar profiles to the real profile are gathered (from the same community), then strength of relationship (among all selected profiles and the real profile) is calculated, and those which have the less strength of relationship will be verified by mutual friend system. In this study, in order to evaluate the effectiveness of proposed method, all steps are applied on a dataset of Facebook, and finally this work is compared with two previous works by applying them on the dataset.
Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems ( MCIS ) Summer 9-4-2014 INSTITUTIONAL PRESSURES ON FINANCIAL SERVICES FIRMS : THE ROLE OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS IN REGULATORY COMPLIANCE

The financial crisis of 2008 led to new international regulatory controls for the governance, risk and compliance of financial services firms. Information systems play a critical role here as political, functional and social pressures may lead to the deinstitutionalization of existing structures, processes and practices. This research examines how an investment management system is introduced by a leading IT vendor across eight client sites in the post-crisis era. Using institutional theory, it examines changes in working practices occurring at the environmental and organizational levels and the ways in which technological interventions are used to apply disciplinary effects in order to prevent inappropriate behaviors. The results extend the constructs of deinstitutionalization and identify empirical predictors for the deinstitutionalization of compliance and trading practices within financial
Robust fault detection using set membership estimation and TS fuzzy neural network *

A robust fault detection method is proposed for nonlinear dynamical systems with unknown but bounded noises. The Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy neural network is used to build a model of the nonlinear dynamical system when the system is fault-free, taking into account that it is a universal approximator. The input space is partitioned by means of a fuzzy clustering algorithm based on the input and output data of the system. Supposing that the system noise and approximation error are unknown but bounded, the consequence parameters of the T-S fuzzy neural network are determined using a linear-in-parameter set membership estimation algorithm. An interval guaranteed to contain the actual output of the fault-free system is obtained by propagating the effect of model uncertainty to the model output. An occurrence of the fault is signaled when the measured output crosses the computed interval. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Rate-adaptive reconciliation and its estimator for quantum bit error rate

The purpose of reconciliation, one of classical aspects of quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol, is to mitigate errors after the distribution of quantum information over a quantum channel. In this paper, a rate-adaptive method is proposed by means of a channel coding scheme where specific low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are adapted in the Slepian-Wolf coding system. Puncturing and shortening techniques are adopted to optimize their coding rates with all possible cases of error in QKD. This successful method utilizes the knowledge of the quantum bit error rate (QBER) based on the maximum-likelihood estimator with respect to the syndrome information. Its benefit is that avoids wasting sample keys in the traditional channel estimation and thus increases the size of the final secret key. Evidently, simulation results confirm an improvement in the reconciliation efficiency with minimal interaction that suitable for high QKD throughput applications.
State of the Art in Methods and Representations for Fabrication‐Aware Design

Computational manufacturing technologies such as 3D printing hold the potential for creating objects with previously undreamed‐of combinations of functionality and physical properties. Human designers, however, typically cannot exploit the full geometric (and often material) complexity of which these devices are capable. This STAR examines recent systems developed by the computer graphics community in which designers specify higher‐level goals ranging from structural integrity and deformation to appearance and aesthetics, with the final detailed shape and manufacturing instructions emerging as the result of computation. It summarizes frameworks for interaction, simulation, and optimization, as well as documents the range of general objectives and domain‐specific goals that have been considered. An important unifying thread in this analysis is that different underlying geometric and physical representations are necessary for different tasks: we document over a dozen classes of representations that have been used for fabrication‐aware design in the literature. We analyze how these classes possess obvious advantages for some needs, but have also been used in creative manners to facilitate unexpected problem solutions.
Does Delegation Help to Prevent Spiteful Behavior?

The direct evolutionary approach according to Leininger (2003) states that players in a two player Tullock rent-seeking contest within a finite population behave as if they were relative payoff maximizers. Accordingly contest expenditures are higher than in Nash equilibrium. The indirect evolutionary approach also predicts more aggressive behavior by the players since negatively interdependent preferences are evolutionary stable. Both players are willing to harm themselves in material terms just to harm their opponent even more. I consider that every player in the contest has to contract a delegate either using a relative contract or a no-win-nopay contract. I show that delegation once introduced is able to overcompensate all negative effects of negatively interdependent objective functions. But as in the case without delegation a commitment on more aggressive behavior is a dominant strategy. Nevertheless delegation endows principals with a material payoff that is equal to the payoff an individualistic player facing another individualistic player would get.
Identifiability of a Markovian model of molecular evolution with gamma-distributed rates

Inference of evolutionary trees and rates from biological sequences is commonly performed using continuous-time Markov models of character change. The Markov process evolves along an unknown tree while observations arise only from the tips of the tree. Rate heterogeneity is present in most real data sets and is accounted for by the use of flexible mixture models where each site is allowed its own rate. Very little has been rigorously established concerning the identifiability of the models currently in common use in data analysis, although nonidentifiability was proven for a semiparametric model and an incorrect proof of identifiability was published for a general parametric model (GTR + Γ + I). Here we prove that one of the most widely used models (GTR + Γ) is identifiable for generic parameters, and for all parameter choices in the case of four-state (DNA) models. This is the first proof of identifiability of a phylogenetic model with a continuous distribution of rates.
The role of supplemental oxygen during submaximal exercise in patients with cystic fibrosis

Repeated bouts of submaximal exercise are an important part of most pulmonary rehabilitation programmes. Patients with moderate-to-severe cystic fibrosis (CF) often demonstrate oxygen desaturation during submaximal exercise, which may limit their ability to participate in these programmes. This study examines whether arterial desaturation contributes to submaximal exercise limitation by testing whether supplemental O2 improves submaximal exercise capacity. Eight patients with CF (mean forced expiratory volume in one second 41% predicted) each underwent two submaximal exercise tests on a bicycle ergometer at 80% of maximal workload. The two tests were identical except for the addition of supplemental O2 (inspiratory O2 fraction 39%) during one of the tests. Exercise duration was significantly longer in the supplemental O2 study versus control (673±63 s versus 835±99 s). Arterial O2 saturation was also higher in the supplemental O2 study than the control exercise test (96±0.3% versus 86±1.5%). There was no statistical difference at end exercise between O2 consumption, minute ventilation and heart rate. There was a significant relationship between improvement in exercise capacity and the amount of desaturation during the control exercise test. Results indicate that supplemental oxygen improves submaximal exercise capacity in patients with moderate-to-severe cystic fibrosis. Oxygen therapy may be an important intervention to improve participation and maximise the benefits of pulmonary exercise rehabilitation programmes.
Ad-Hoc On-Demand Communication System based on Mobile Agents

Recently, long-range wireless networks such as cellular networks, and short-range wireless communication devices such as IrDA, Wireless LAN(IEEE802.11), and Bluetooth become popular. In this paper, we introduce the concept of ad-hoc communication which is the short-range wireless communication between the information devices that happen to meet each other. We clarify the characteristics of ad-hoc communication and discuss the difficulties of on-demand communications. We propose a mobile agent system for supporting ad-hoc on-demand communication by the full use of both long and short-range network devices. We implement the mobile agent system named MAGNET and we also develop communication several prototype systems which implement ad-hoc on-demand communication. These systems exemplify the usefulness of the framework.
Comparing Economic and Social Interventions to Reduce Intimate Partner Violence: Evidence from Central and Southern Africa

The empowerment of women within households remains a major issue around the world including in Africa. We have conducted a study in Burundi coupling discussion sessions with microfinancing to determine if they enhance the role of women in decisions regarding household purchases and the reduction of domestic violence. We compare our findings to that from a published study in South Africa that combined discussion sessions on life skills and health on reduction in domestic violence and decisions on economic issues. Both studies used randomized controlled experiments. Both studies show a trend towards increases in household authority, with the Burundi study showing statistical significance. In South Africa there was a large, albeit short lived decrease in domestic violence. In Burundi there was small reduction but trends suggest a longer duration. The effects on overall empowerment are small. These studies suggest that a more sustained use of discussion sessions may result in longer and more sustained economic and social empowerment. Future research could focus on the longer term effects of the use of discussion sessions and investigate how the observed impacts can be sustained in magnitude and duration.
Constructing Reliable and Efficient Overlays for P2P Live Media Streaming

For single-source, single-tree-based peer-to-peer live media streaming, it is generally believed that a short (and wide) data delivery tree provides the best comprehensive performance in terms of reliability and service delay. While a short tree directly benefits delay optimization, it is unclear whether such a structure maximizes reliability, which is sometimes more critical for a streaming Internet service. This paper compares several prevalent overlay construction algorithms in terms of (1) service reliability; (2) service delay and (3) protocol overhead. A new Heap Algorithm is proposed to enhance reliability by leveraging the peers’ time properties while maintaining a short tree, which in turn helps to reduce service delay. This new algorithm dynamically moves peers between different layers of the tree according to a simple metric called Service Capacity Contribution (SCC), and gradually adjusts the overlay toward a short tree with peers ordered in time. Extensive simulations show that this new algorithm achieves better comprehensive performance than existing algorithms.
Large-Scale Recombinant Expression and Purification of Human Tyrosinase Suitable for Structural Studies

Human tyrosinase (TYR) is a glycoprotein that initiates the first two reactions in the melanin biosynthesis pathway. Mutations in its encoding gene cause Oculocutaneous Albinism type I (OCA1), the most severe form of albinism, which is a group of autosomal recessive disorders characterized by reduced or absent production of melanin in skin, hair and eyes. Despite extensive structural and characterization studies of its homologues in lower eukaryotic organisms, the catalytic mechanism of human TYR and the molecular basis of OCA1 are largely unknown. In this work, we have carried out a large-scale recombinant expression of TYR that has enabled us to obtain high yields of pure and active protein, required for crystallization trials and screening of skin whitening agents, which is highly demanded in the cosmetic industry. Addition of an N-terminal honeybee melittin signal peptide for secretion of the produced protein into the (protein-free) medium, as well as a cleavable His-tag at the C-terminus, was crucial for increasing the yield of pure protein. We have successfully crystallized two TYR variants, in both glycosylated and deglycosylated forms, showing preliminary X-ray diffraction patterns at 3.5 Å resolution. Hence, we have established an expression and purification protocol suitable for the crystal structure determination of human TYR, which will give unique atomic insight into the nature and conformation of the residues that shape the substrate binding pocket that will ultimately lead to efficient compound design.
DNS Traffic Analysis: Issues of IPv6 and CDN

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a key naming system used in the Internet. Recently, the deployment of IPv6 and the DNS pre-fetch function in web browsers has significantly changed DNS usage. Furthermore, content delivery networks (CDNs) use complicated DNS configurations together with small TTL values to control their traffic. These three factors significantly increase DNS traffic. Thus, the importance of DNS traffic analysis has been increasing to properly maintain DNS operations. This paper presents an analysis of DNS full-resolver traffic at the University of Tsukuba in Japan. What we found are 1) The deployment of IPv6 has increased queries from clients as much as 41%, 2) The deployment of CDNs increases the use of small TTL values, the use of CNAME resource records and the use of out-of-bailiwick DNS server names. Since these increases are making the DNS cache hit rate low and the DNS response slow without recognition by Internet users, this paper seeks to warn application designers of potential system design risks in current Internet applications.
Technology-assisted dietary assessment

Dietary intake provides valuable insights for mounting intervention programs for prevention of disease. With growing concern for adolescent obesity, the need to accurately measure diet becomes imperative. Assessment among adolescents is problematic as this group has irregular eating patterns and have less enthusiasm for recording food intake. Preliminary studies among adolescents suggest that innovative use of technology may improve the accuracy of diet information from young people. In this paper, we propose a novel food record method using a mobile device that will provide an accurate account of daily food and nutrient intake among adolescents. Our approach includes the use of image analysis tools for identification and quantification of food consumption. Images obtained before and after food is consumed can be used to estimate the diet of an individual. In this paper we describe our initial results and indicate the potential of the proposed system.
A closure associative processor

The authors describe a bidirectional associative processor that stores a hierarchy of entities and characteristics as an adjacency matrix. The matrix is unipolar binary, which allows it to be easily stored in a spatial light modulator and makes it attractive for optical implementation. A large hierarchy can be separated into subhierarchies and stored in separate processors. The authors discuss how the processor can perform upward and downward closure, union, intersection, and complementation with the aid of simple electronics (a register, thresholders, exclusive-OR and inverter gates). By combining series of these operations, the processor can answer nontrivial queries. <<ETX>>