Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Disorganization of Cortical Microtubules Stimulates Tangential Expansion and Reduces the Uniformity of Cellulose Microfibril Alignment among Cells in the Root of Arabidopsis1

To test the role of cortical microtubules in aligning cellulose microfibrils and controlling anisotropic expansion, we exposed Arabidopsis thaliana roots to moderate levels of the microtubule inhibitor, oryzalin. After 2 d of treatment, roots grow at approximately steady state. At that time, the spatial profiles of relative expansion rate in length and diameter were quantified, and roots were cryofixed, freeze-substituted, embedded in plastic, and sectioned. The angular distribution of microtubules as a function of distance from the tip was quantified from antitubulin immunofluorescence images. In alternate sections, the overall amount of alignment among microfibrils and their mean orientation as a function of position was quantified with polarized-light microscopy. The spatial profiles of relative expansion show that the drug affects relative elongation and tangential expansion rates independently. The microtubule distributions averaged to transverse in the growth zone for all treatments, but on oryzalin the distributions became broad, indicating poorly organized arrays. At a subcellular scale, cellulose microfibrils in oryzalin-treated roots were as well aligned as in controls; however, the mean alignment direction, while consistently transverse in the controls, was increasingly variable with oryzalin concentration, meaning that microfibril orientation in one location tended to differ from that of a neighboring location. This conclusion was confirmed by direct observations of microfibrils with field-emission scanning electron microscopy. Taken together, these results suggest that cortical microtubules ensure microfibrils are aligned consistently across the organ, thereby endowing the organ with a uniform mechanical structure.
White Matter Alteration in Idiopathic Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus: Tract-Based Spatial Statistics Study

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: White matter alteration in iNPH has not been well-investigated. TBSS is a voxelwise statistical analysis developed for DTI data. We aimed to elucidate the cerebral white matter alteration in patients with iNPH by using DTI and to test the accuracy of TBSS analysis. MATERIALS AND METHODS: DTI data were obtained from 20 patients with iNPH and 20 age- and sex-matched controls. The FA values were evaluated by using TBSS, region-of-interest and tract-specific analysis of the CST. The accuracy of TBSS analysis was tested by using “back-projection” of TBSS results and by comparing the TBSS analysis results with those of region-of-interest and tract-specific analysis. RESULTS: Back-projection of the TBSS results showed accurate registration of the whole brain, with the exception of parts of the thalamus, fornix, and white matter around the posterior body of the lateral ventricle. The TBSS analysis results were consistent with those of the region-of-interest analysis and tract-specific analysis. In patients with iNPH compared with control subjects, the FA values were significantly decreased in parts of the corpus callosum, periventricular white matter, and juxtacortical white matter in the frontal and parietal lobes. In contrast, FA values were significantly increased in the internal capsule, extending to the white matter in the centrum semiovale. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that patients with iNPH have various patterns of white matter damage and that TBSS analysis is a promising tool for performing accurate voxelwise statistical analysis of the iNPH brain, with the exception of misregistered areas.
Exploring a Community's Response to Lesbian Domestic Violence Through the Voices of Providers

SUMMARY Lesbian domestic violence has been frequently denied among lesbian communities and society as a whole. As a result, women involved in same-sex abusive relationships remain isolated, fearful, and reluctant to identify and seek help for the abuse. This study investigated a lesbian community's response to domestic violence in same-sex relationships and the factors impacting the response. The participants included fifteen mental health professionals with expertise in the field of lesbian domestic violence. The phenomenon of “lessening the load” emerged as the central theme that categorized the lesbian community's response to domestic violence. Implications for further research and treatment are also discussed.
WebMARS : A Multimedia Search Engine for Full Document Retrieval and Cross Media Browsing

The Web provides a large repository of multimedia data, text, images, etc. Most current search engines focus on textual retrieval. In this paper, we focus on using an integrated textual and visual search engine for Web documents. We support query re nement which proves useful and enables cross{media browsing in addition to regular search.
Darfur Refugees in Cairo

Hundreds of thousands of Darfur people affected by the Sudanese genocide have fled to Cairo, Egypt, in search of assistance. Collaborating with Africa and Middle East Refugee Assistance (AMERA), the authors conducted a mental health care needs assessment among Darfur refugees in Cairo. Information was collected using individual and focus group interviews to identify gaps in mental health care and develop understandings of emotional and relationship problems. The refugee mental health care system has a piecemeal structure with gaps in outpatient services. There is moderate to severe emotional distress among many Darfur refugees, including symptoms of depression and trauma, and interpersonal conflict, both domestic violence and broader community conflict, elevated relative to pregenocide levels. Given the established relationships between symptoms of depression/traumatic stress and interpersonal violence, improving mental health is important for both preventing mental health decompensation and stemming future cycles of intra- and intergroup conflict.
The State of the Art of Social Structure of Accumulation Theory

This chapter provides an overview of the state of the art of the social structure of accumulation (SSA) literature produced since 1994. Any such project must start with David Gordon’s last contributions before his untimely death in 1996. In addition, there have been a a number of contributions from the academic discipline of sociology including the founding of a “spatialization” school extending the work of Gordon, Edwards, and Reich’s original Segmented Work, Divided Workers. There have been a number of works extending the geographic reach of the SSA framework to new areas, most prominently to developing countries. Several authors have applied the SSA framework to the history and analysis of specifi c institutions. Such an overview is supplied in the fi rst section below. Following that section we will assess the theoretical contributions made by these works in the last ten years or so. Finally we will discuss the debate over whether a new SSA was consolidated after the stagfl ation crisis of the 1970s and early 1980s. 1 If an SSA was consolidated, the current economic crisis results from the disintegration of that SSA. If an SSA was not consolidated, what we are witnessing today is the continuation of the unresolved collapse of the postwar SSA.
Like breadcrumbs in the forest: a tool for semantic exploratory search

The recent explosion of freely available RDF datasets on the Web calls for new tools and techniques for semantic-enabled exploratory browsing. We present ENT, an HTML5-based tool that guides the user through the navigation of RDF graphs avoiding the visualization of information resulting irrelevant for the exploratory task. Thanks to a hypertree-based visualization of the data-space, the user has a clear picture both of his/her navigation path and of the information he/she may discover.
Convergence of asynchronous matrix iterations subject to diagonal dominance

We consider point Gauss-Seidel and Jacobi matrix iterations subject to diagonal dominance. We give conditions on the relaxation parameter under which the iteration mapping has the maximum norm nonexpansive properties given in [TBT88]. It then follows from a result in [TBT88] that, under these conditions, the associated relaxation iterations converge under asynchronous implementation. Our conditions for convergence improve upon those given by James [Jam73] for the special cases of strict diagonal dominance and irreducible diagonal dominance and synchronous implementation. Acknowledgement: Thanks are due to Professor J.N. Tsitsiklis for bringing to my attention the reference [Jam73] which motivated this work.
UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) Herschel spectral surveys of star-forming regions : Overview of the 555-636 GHz range

High resolution line spectra of star-forming regions are mines of information: they provide unique clues to reconstruct the chemical, dynamical, and physical structure of the observed source. We present the first results from the Herschel key project “Chemical HErschel Surveys of Star forming regions”, CHESS. We report and discuss observations towards five CHESS targets, one outflow shock spot and four protostars with luminosities bewteen 20 and 2 × 105 L : L1157-B1, IRAS 16293-2422, OMC2-FIR4, AFGL 2591, and NGC 6334I. The observations were obtained with the heterodyne spectrometer HIFI on board Herschel, with a spectral resolution of 1 MHz. They cover the frequency range 555−636 GHz, a range largely unexplored before the launch of the Herschel satellite. A comparison of the five spectra highlights spectacular differences in the five sources, for example in the density of methanol lines, or the presence/absence of lines from S-bearing molecules or deuterated species. We discuss how these differences can be attributed to the different star-forming mass or evolutionary status.
Down to the bare metal: using processor features for binary analysis

A detailed understanding of the behavior of exploits and malicious software is necessary to obtain a comprehensive overview of vulnerabilities in operating systems or client applications, and to develop protection techniques and tools. To this end, a lot of research has been done in the last few years on binary analysis techniques to efficiently and precisely analyze code. Most of the common analysis frameworks are based on software emulators since such tools offer a fine-grained control over the execution of a given program. Naturally, this leads to an arms race where the attackers are constantly searching for new methods to detect such analysis frameworks in order to successfully evade analysis. In this paper, we focus on two aspects. As a first contribution, we introduce several novel mechanisms by which an attacker can delude an emulator. In contrast to existing detection approaches that perform a dedicated test on the environment and combine the test with an explicit conditional branch, our detection mechanisms introduce code sequences that have an implicitly different behavior on a native machine when compared to an emulator. Such differences in behavior are caused by the side-effects of the particular operations and imperfections in the emulation process that cannot be mitigated easily. Motivated by these findings, we introduce a novel approach to generate execution traces. We propose to utilize the processor itself to generate such traces. Mores precisely, we propose to use a hardware feature called branch tracing available on commodity x86 processors in which the log of all branches taken during code execution is generated directly by the processor. Effectively, the logging is thus performed at the lowest level possible. We evaluate the practical viability of this approach.
Segmented Gray-Code Kernels for Fast Pattern Matching

The gray-code kernels (GCK) family, which has Walsh Hadamard transform on sliding windows as a member, is a family of kernels that can perform image analysis efficiently using a fast algorithm, such as the GCK algorithm. The GCK has been successfully used for pattern matching. In this paper, we propose that the G4-GCK algorithm is more efficient than the previous algorithm in computing GCK. The G4-GCK algorithm requires four additions per pixel for three basis vectors independent of transform size and dimension. Based on the G4-GCK algorithm, we then propose the segmented GCK. By segmenting input data into Ls parts, the SegGCK requires only four additions per pixel for 3Ls basis vectors. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly accelerate the full-search equivalent pattern matching process and outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
L2R: A Logical Method for Reference Reconciliation

The reference reconciliation problem consists in deciding whether different identifiers refer to the same data, i.e., correspond to the same world entity. The L2R system exploits the semantics of a rich data model, which extends RDFS by a fragment of OWL-DL and SWRL rules. In L2R, the semantics of the schema is translated into a set of logical rules of reconciliation, which are then used to infer correct decisions both of reconciliation and no reconciliation. In contrast with other approaches, the L2R method has a precision of 100% by construction. First experiments show promising results for recall, and most importantly significant increases when rules are added.
CONSTANT INPUT POWER CONTROL OF THREE-PHASE ISOLATED BUCK+BOOST RECTIFIER *

– A novel control method is proposed for single-stage three-phase isolated buck+boost rectifier. The control method is based on the conventional cascade two-loop control structure and is modified to achieve constant instantaneous input power. Input voltages, output voltage, and DC-link inductor current are measured to control the power switches to achieve output voltage regulation as well as input power factor correction. In the proposed method, input currents are controlled such that input power is constant, even for unbalanced mains. Thus, for the balanced mains converter it behaves like an ideal rectifier, and for unbalanced mains, low-frequency harmonics of the output voltage are suppressed. The performance of the proposed control structure is verified by the numerical simulation of a 6kW, 380V/48Vdc designed prototype.
A Distributed Power Control and Transmission Rate Allocation Algorithm over Multiple Channels

In this paper, we consider multiple channels and wireless nodes with multiple transceivers. Each node assigns one transmitter at each available channel. For each assigned transmitter the node decides the power level and data rate of transmission in a distributed fashion, such that certain Quality of Service (QoS) demands for the wireless node are satisfied. More specifically, we investigate the case in which the average SINR over all channels for each communication pair is kept above a certain threshold. A joint distributed power and rate control algorithm for each transmitter is proposed that dynamically adjusts the data rate to meet a target SINR at each channel, and to update the power levels allowing for variable desired SINRs. The algorithm is fully distributed and requires only local interference measurements. The performance of the proposed algorithm is shown through illustrative examples.
A limited-memory quasi-Newton algorithm for bound-constrained non-smooth optimization

We consider the problem of minimizing a continuous function that may be non-smooth and non-convex, subject to bound constraints. We propose an algorithm that uses the L-BFGS quasi-Newton approximation of the problem's curvature together with a variant of the weak Wolfe line search. The key ingredient of the method is an active-set selection strategy that defines the subspace in which search directions are computed. To overcome the inherent shortsightedness of the gradient for a non-smooth function, we propose two strategies. The first relies on an approximation of the ε-minimum norm subgradient, and the second uses an iterative corrective loop that augments the active set based on the resulting search directions. While theoretical convergence guarantees have been elusive even for the unconstrained case, we present numerical results on a set of standard test problems to illustrate the efficacy of our approach, using an open-source Python implementation of the proposed algorithm.
Episodic Monitoring of Time-Oriented Data for Heuristic Skeletal- Plan Refinement

ABSTRACT ONCOCIN is a medical expert system that extends the skeletal-planning technique to an application area where the history of past events and the duration of actions are important. The system's knowledge base is designed to reflect a hierarchical model of the domain, and its control and inference mechanisms encourage a mixed-initiative style of interaction between the computer and the user. 1. INTRODUCTION ONCOCIN is a therapy-advice system designed for use by physicians in the treatment of cancer patients. It has two objectives: (1) the extension of the skeletal-planning technique to an application area where the history of past events and the duration of actions are important, and (2) the development of an interactive decision-support system acceptable to computer-naive users in a busy environment. Satisfying the requirements of these two objectives has led us to make several modifications to the traditional expert-system technology. These modifications include the integration of a rule- and frame-based expert system with a temporal database, the use of augmented transition networks to represent procedural knowledge, and a control structure that allows a parallel run-time interface that encourages mixed-initiative interaction between the system and the user. The classical domain-independent planners that descended from STRIPS [8] usually have four components: a description of the state of the world, a goal to achieve, a set of actions that can change the state of the world, and knowledge about the domain or planning strategies. In programs such as NOAH [23], NONLIN [28], and SIPE [30], a plan is a set of ordered actions to be carried out by an agent, such as a robot arm. Each action has fixed preconditions and has known effects on the state of the world. The plan transforms an initial state into a goal state. The usual assumptions are that only the agent
On transforming a spatial graph into a plane graph

This article is a revised detailed version of the research announcement Ref. 9) introducing a complexity of a spatial graph, which is useful to transform a spatial graph (without degree one vertices) into a plane graph. We also introduce related topological invariants for every spatial graph, called the warping degree, and γ-warping degree and (γ, Γ )-warping degree. We also generalize the usual unknotting number of a knot to every spatial graph and introduce related topological invariants for every spatial graph, called the γ-unknotting number, Γ unknotting number and (γ, Γ )-unknotting number. These invariants are used to define “semitopological”invariants for a spatial graph with degree one vertices, meaningful even for a knotted arc.
ThumbTec: A New Handheld Input Device

This paper describes ThumbTEC, a novel general purpose input device for the thumb or finger that is useful in a wide variety of applications from music to text entry. The device is made up of three switches in a row and one miniature joystick on top of the middle switch. The combination of joystick direction and switch(es) controls what note or alphanumeric character is selected by the finger. Several applications are detailed.
Structure-oriented bilateral filtering

Bilateral filtering is widely used to enhance photographic images, but in most implementations is poorly suited to seismic images. A bilateral filter consists of two filter kernels. By replacing one of those kernels with a smoothing filter that conforms to image structures, we obtain a bilateral filter suitable for seismic image processing. Examples and comparison with conventional edge-preserving smoothing illustrate both advantages and disadvantages of structure-oriented bilateral filtering.
Psychotropic drugs and homicide: A prospective cohort study from Finland

After a high-profile homicide case, there is often discussion in the media on whether or not the killing was caused or facilitated by a psychotropic medication. Antidepressants have especially been blamed by non-scientific organizations for a large number of senseless acts of violence, e.g., 13 school shootings in the last decade in the U.S. and Finland (1). In September 2014, there were more than 139,000 hits from Google for the search terms “antidepressant, homicide”, and more than 1,050,000 hits for the terms “antidepressant, violence”. It is likely that such massive publicity in the lay media has already led a number of patients and physicians to abstain from antidepressant treatment, due to the perceived fear of pharmacologically induced violence.
iHR: an online recruiting system for Xiamen Talent Service Center

Online recruiting systems have gained immense attention in the wake of more and more job seekers searching jobs and enterprises finding candidates on the Internet. A critical problem in a recruiting system is how to maximally satisfy the desires of both job seekers and enterprises with reasonable recommendations or search results. In this paper, we investigate and compare various online recruiting systems from a product perspective. We then point out several key functions that help achieve a win-win situation between job seekers and enterprises for a successful recruiting system. Based on the observations and key functions, we design, implement and deploy a web-based application of recruiting system, named iHR, for Xiamen Talent Service Center. The system utilizes the latest advances in data mining and recommendation technologies to create a user-oriented service for a myriad of audience in job marketing community. Empirical evaluation and online user studies demonstrate the efficacy and effectiveness of our proposed system. Currently, iHR has been deployed at http://i.xmrc. com.cn/XMRCIntel.