Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Localization Method Using 3-axis Magnetoresistive Sensors for Tracking of Capsule Endoscope

In this paper, we propose a non-invasive tracking method, which has the potential to be used for localization of the capsule endoscope. The tracking system consists of a magnetic marker, a sensor array, amplifiers, data acquisition devices and a signal processing unit. The marker is modeled as a magnetic dipole to simplify the theoretical expression of the magnetic field distribution. By minimizing the squared error of the field values between the calculation and measurements using Levenberg-Marquardt optimization method, the 5 localization parameters of the dipole can be determined. Real time experiments were carried out to test the feasibility of the method. It is demonstrated that, the accuracy of the localization is related to the number of sensors. For the sensor array including 16 3-axis magnetoresistive sensors, the average position error is 3.3 mm and the average orientation error is about 3deg, when the magnetic marker is 100 mm above the sensor array plane
Semantic integration of file-based data for grid services

Data services for the grid have focussed so far primarily on virtualising access to distributed databases, and encapsulating file location. However, orchestration of services requires richer information semantics than these mechanisms provide. Service inputs and outputs must be semantically matched, or characterised in order that sensible transformations may be performed. In many domains important information structures must be aggregated across multiple files, and numerous legacy file formats obscure the natural logical structure of information types. We present a solution for constructing semantic data services for an earth-sciences data grid (the UK NERC DataGrid). A semantically-rich data model is developed, drawing on components from external ontologies. A 'storage descriptor' provides the mechanism for mapping legacy file-based storage onto data model instances. Finally, data services may be built on top of the data model to expose a semantic view of the data irrespective of the underlying file storage details. Our approach is similar to wrapper/mediator architectures for integrating database management systems.
Heating Greatly Speeds Coomassie Blue Staining and Destaining

All loading buffers allowed the target amplification at 0.25 and 0.5 ×final concentration (Figure 2). However, at 0.5 × final concentration , there was a decrease in the amplification that was more pronounced than that observed with the 359 bp target depicted in Figure 1. After the 0.25 ×gel-loading buffers in the PCR mixture proved to be feasible even when the bacterial lysate was diluted 1000-fold, we simplified our protocol: we added the bacterial colony directly to the 10 µ L of the PCR mixture distributed in the 0.2 mL tubes, according to Lee and Cooper (3). The cycling parameters were the same as already described except for the inclusion of one step at 94 ° C for 3 min before carrying out the 30 cycles. This protocol was used to amplify targets with intermediate sizes and to use other primers, as seen in Figure 3, using 0.25 × buffer I (buffers II and III worked as well; results are not shown). Using Taq DNA polymerases from other brands or a PCR apparatus requiring mineral oil on the top of the reaction mixture was also successful (results not shown). In conclusion, our results showed that the three gel-loading buffers can be added to the PCR mixture used to amplify target inserts from bacterial colonies, decreasing considerably the tedious handling of several small 0.2 mL tubes that are currently used in the most recent thermocyclers. We found that a 0.25 × concentration of any of the three gel-loading buffers does not decrease target amplification, although a negative effect was observed at a 0.5 × concentration. Finally, by decreasing the reaction volume to 10 µ L, the cost of the assay is considerably lower. Direct clone characterization from plaques and colonies by the polymerase chain reaction. Tissue specific activity and hormone control of the promoter of the gene coding for a maize hydroxyproline-rich glycoprotein. 1989. Rapid one-step characterization of re-combinant vectors by direct analysis of transformed Escherichia colicolonies. BioTech-niques 7 :689-690. SDS-PAGE is one of the most powerful and commonly used techniques in molecular biology. The most frequently used dye for visualizing proteins is Coomassie Brilliant Blue R-250 because of its relatively high sensitivity (3,6). However, its lengthy processing time is a major drawback of the standard Coomassie staining technique. Sambrook et al. (4) state that a staining time of at least 4 h is needed, with destaining overnight. This can be …
Mrs. Doubtfire Mentoring Program: Helping Children in Residential Care Transition to Bedtime

ABSTRACT An exploratory qualitative study was conducted for the Mrs. Doubtfire mentoring program designed to connect volunteers with young children (6–11 years) in residential care to help with the bedtime transition and develop positive relationships with caring adults. Details of the program are provided. Positive effects on the agency, staff, volunteers, and children are discussed. Mrs. Doubtfire provides an innovative approach to meeting needs of children in residential care while also building strong community relationships and dedicated volunteers.
Clock buffer IC with dynamic impedance matching and skew compensation

This thesis describes a novel approach for distributing low skew clock signals across large digital systerns independent of environmental and process variations. The technique is integrated into a multi-output dock buffer circuit that can handle a scalable number of clock loads in a point-to-point configuration. The circuit contains an impedance-locked loop that continuously monitors the impedance of output clock traces and adjusts driver impedance for optimal matching. Reflections from dock destinations contain propagation deiay information that is used by delay-locked lwps to continuously adjust the departure time of outgoing clocks to ensure low relative skew at clock destinations. A theoretical evaluation of the deskewing technique is presented dong with results from a prototype clock buffer device. Testing indicates operational frequencies as high as 5OMHz with 40cm clock Iines, and skew on the order of 600-8ûûps as measured at the clock destinations.
Men’s Valuation of Temporal Proximity to Female Virginity: Evidence from Prostitutes

ABSTRACT We hypothesized that men value temporal proximity to female virginity and estimated the value of delaying a girl’s first sexual experience by analyzing 8,817 prostitutes in Indonesia. We regressed the log of the price of sex on age at first sex, current age, and their interaction term, along with covariates. An additional year’s postponement of first sex was associated with a 3.6% increase in the price of sex, when we controlled for only city-by-year fixed effects. Further controlling for the prostitute's age increased the value to 4.5%. More interestingly, a client depreciated this value over the prostitute’s age.
A Study of Web Maintenance in an Industrial Setting

In this paper, we explore facets of web maintenance effort for three commercial Web Information Systems. We decompose effort from over four hundred change requests collected post-implementation over a three month period into the three categories of adaptive, corrective and perfective maintenance change types. We explore two research questions. Firstly, the influence or otherwise of a 'ripple' change effect in each of those three categories, secondly, in which of the three architectural layers of the application the majority of maintenance activity was found (i.e., presentation, business logic or data). A ripple effect was found to occur most in the perfective maintenance category and of the three categories, the perfective category was again found to influence the business logic layer in contrast to the other two layers.
A Three-Dimensional Motion Anlaysis of Horse Rider in Wireless Sensor Network Environments

This paper constructed a database of the national representative level of a professional horse-rider by wearing a motion-capture suit attached with 16 inertial sensors under an inertial sensor-based wireless network environment, then made a visual comparative analysis through a few methods (graphical and statistical) on the values of all motion features (elbow angle, knee angle, knee-elbow distance, backbone angle and hip position) classified depending on horse types (using two horses named Warm-blood and Thoroughbred) and footpace types (at a trot and a canter) and obtained by various methods of calculating Euclidean distance, the second cosine, maximum and minimum values, and made a comparative analysis depending on motion features of a horse-rider by using MVN studio software. In the study, the experimental results confirmed the validity of the proposed method of obtaining the motion feature database of a horse-rider in the wireless sensor network environment and making an analytical system.
Managing code inspection information

Inspection data is difficult to gather and interpret. At AT&T Bell Laboratories, the authors have defined nine key metrics that software project managers can use to plan, monitor, and improve inspections. Graphs of these metrics expose problems early and can help managers evaluate the inspection process itself. The nine metrics are: total noncomment lines of source code inspected in thousands (KLOC); average lines of code inspected; average preparation rate; average inspection rate; average effort per KLOC; average effort per fault detected; average faults detected per KLOC; percentage of reinspections; defect-removal efficiency. <<ETX>>
Does a Positive Male Role Model Affect the Achievement of Adolescent African-American Males? A Case Study

African-American males are at risk. A continuous cycle of low academic achievement, low academic attainment, and high incarceration rates threaten to end the lives of many of these young men one way or another. There are many challenges faced by African-American men that have caused economic opportunities to evade these young men. The concern is whether families, educators, and communities can help every African-American male achieve at a higher level in order to participate in better economic opportunities. This qualitative case study is designed to help families, educators, and community leaders understand and help African-American males achieve academically, close the achievement gap, and graduate from high school. This study will address many of the factors that contribute to the low academic achievement, low educational attainment, low graduation rate, high unemployment, and high incarceration rate of African-American men. This study is intended to give educators the knowledge that could help African-American boys increase their educational attainment that would lead to greater economic opportunities for these young men. There must be some changes made in how African-American male students are engaged, motivated, prepared, and supported as they move toward graduation. Leaving high school with a diploma is no guarantee of a successful and productive life; however, a high school graduate is more likely to avoid unemployment, poverty, and possible incarceration.
Policy-Induced Technology Adoption : Evidence from the U .

The theory of environmental regulation suggests that economic instruments, such as taxes and tradable permits, create more effective technology adoption incentives than conventional regulatory standards. We explore this issue for an important industry undergoing technological responses to a dramatic decrease in allowed pollution levels—the petroleum industry’s phasedown of lead in gasoline. Using a panel of refineries from 1971 to 1995, we provide some of the first direct evidence that alternative policies affect the pattern of adoption in expected ways. Importantly, we find that the tradable permit system used during the lead phasedown provided incentives for more efficient technology adoption decisions. Where environmentally appropriate, this suggests that flexible market-based regulation can achieve environmental goals while providing better incentives for technology diffusion.
A 1.6–880MHz synthesizable ADPLL in 0.13um CMOS

A synthesizable all digital phase-locked loop (ADPLL) with an improved DCO and a frequency-bouncing-reduced algorithm is presented. The ADPLL covers 1.6-880 MHz frequency range while maintaining high frequency resolution. The synthesizable ADPLL can be easily migrated to different processes and foundries; requires less design time and maintain effort; and directly benefit from CMOS technology scaling. The PLL is fabricated in a 0.13-mum 1P6M high-Vt CMOS process and occupies an active area of 220 x 220 um2. The PLL consumes a maximum power of 16 mW and has 114 ps peak-to-peak jitter at 880 MHz.
A Probabilistic Model of Information Retrieval : Development and Status

The paper combines a comprehensive account of the probabilistic model of retrieval with new systematic experiments on TREC Programme material. It presents the model from its foundations through its logical development to cover more aspects of retrieval data and a wider range of system functions. Each step in the argument is matched by comparative retrieval tests, to provide a single coherent account of a major line of research. The experiments demonstrate, for a large test collection, that the probabilistic model is e ective and robust, and that it responds appropriately, with major improvements in performance, to key features of retrieval situations.
Near optimal algorithms for scheduling independent chains in BSP

The aim of this work is to show that scheduling a set of independent chains on a parallel machine under the BSP model is a difficult optimization problem which can be easily approximated in practice. BSP is a machine independent computational model which is becoming more and more popular. Finding the optimal solution when the number of processors is fixed is shown to be hard. Efficient heuristics including communications are proposed and analyzed. We particularly focus on the influence of synchronization between consecutive supersteps. Simulations of a large number of instances have been carried out to complement the theoretical worst case analysis. They confirm the very good behaviour of the algorithm on average.
Do online social network friends still threaten my privacy?

A user's online social network (OSN) friends commonly share information on their OSN profiles that might also characterize the user him-/herself. Therefore, OSN friends are potentially jeopardizing users' privacy. Previous studies demonstrated that third parties can potentially infer personally identifiable information (PII) based on information shared by users' OSN friends if sufficient information is accessible. However, when considering how privacy settings have been adjusted since then, it is unclear which attributes can still be predicted this way. In this paper, we present an empirical study on PII of Facebook users and their friends. We show that certain pieces of PII can easily be inferred. In contrast, other attributes are rarely made publicly available and/or correlate too little so that not enough information is revealed for intruding user privacy. For this study, we analyzed more than 1.2 million OSN profiles in a compliant manner to investigate the privacy risk due to attribute prediction by third parties. The data shown in this paper provides the basis for acting in a risk aware fashion in OSNs.
Inversion and Configuration of Faces

If the mouth and eyes of a face are inverted, the altered construction appears grotesque when upright, but not when upside-down. Three studies of this "Thatcher illusion" employed faces that were grotesque when upright because: (a) their eyes and mouths had been inverted ("Thatcherized" faces), (b) their eyes and mouths had been moved (spatially distorted faces), or (c) they had grotesque posed expressions. Inversion reduced the apparent grotesqueness of both Thatcherized and spatially distorted faces, but not grotesque-expression faces. Moreover, Thatcherized and distorted faces, although not grotesque-expression faces, were judged as more similar to normal, smiling faces when face-pairs were inverted than when they were upright. Similarity ratings to inverted face-pairs were correlated with latencies of response to these pairs in a task that encouraged attention to components (e.g., mouths, eyes) rather than wholistic properties. Similarity ratings to upright face-pairs showed no such correlation, and this and other findings suggested that although similarity ratings to upright faces are based on wholistic information, similarity ratings to inverted faces are based largely on components. The Thatcher illusion reflects a disruption of encoding of wholistic information when faces are inverted.
Circulating tumor DNA as an early marker of therapeutic response in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer.

BACKGROUND Early indicators of treatment response in metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC) could conceivably be used to optimize treatment. We explored early changes in circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) levels as a marker of therapeutic efficacy. PATIENTS AND METHODS This prospective study involved 53 mCRC patients receiving standard first-line chemotherapy. Both ctDNA and CEA were assessed in plasma collected before treatment, 3 days after treatment and before cycle 2. Computed tomography (CT) scans were carried out at baseline and 8-10 weeks and were centrally assessed using RECIST v1.1 criteria. Tumors were sequenced using a panel of 15 genes frequently mutated in mCRC to identify candidate mutations for ctDNA analysis. For each patient, one tumor mutation was selected to assess the presence and the level of ctDNA in plasma samples using a digital genomic assay termed Safe-SeqS. RESULTS Candidate mutations for ctDNA analysis were identified in 52 (98.1%) of the tumors. These patient-specific candidate tissue mutations were detectable in the cell-free DNA from the plasma of 48 of these 52 patients (concordance 92.3%). Significant reductions in ctDNA (median 5.7-fold; P < 0.001) levels were observed before cycle 2, which correlated with CT responses at 8-10 weeks (odds ratio = 5.25 with a 10-fold ctDNA reduction; P = 0.016). Major reductions (≥10-fold) versus lesser reductions in ctDNA precycle 2 were associated with a trend for increased progression-free survival (median 14.7 versus 8.1 months; HR = 1.87; P = 0.266). CONCLUSIONS ctDNA is detectable in a high proportion of treatment naïve mCRC patients. Early changes in ctDNA during first-line chemotherapy predict the later radiologic response.
, Giovanna Protein Kinase A Signals − and In Vivo by Amplifying cAMP Membrane-Bound Protein Kinase A Inhibits Smooth Muscle Cell Proliferation In Vitro

cAMP-dependent protein kinase is anchored to discrete cellular compartments by a family of proteins, the A-kinase anchor proteins (AKAPs). We have investigated in vivo and in vitro the biological effects of the expression of a prototypic member of the family, AKAP75, on smooth muscle cells. In vitro expression of AKAP75 in smooth muscle cells stimulated cAMP-induced transcription, increased the levels of the cyclin-dependent kinase-2 inhibitor p27, and reduced cell proliferation. In vivo expression of exogenous AKAP75 in common carotid arteries, subjected to balloon injury, significantly increased the levels of p27 kip1 and inhibited neointimal hyperplasia. Both the effects in smooth muscle cells in vitro and in carotid arteries in vivo were specifically dependent on the amplification of cAMP-dependent protein kinase (PKA) signals by membrane-bound PKA, as indicated by selective loss of the AKAP75 biological effects in mutants defective in the PKA anchor domain or by suppression of AKAP effects by the PKA-specific protein kinase inhibitor. These data indicate that AKAP proteins selectively amplify cAMP-PKA signaling in vitro and in vivo and suggest a possible target for the inhibition of the neointimal hyperplasia after vascular injury. (Circ Res. 2001;88:319-324.)
Frequency content of sea surface height variability from internal gravity waves to mesoscale eddies

High horizontal-resolution (1=12:5 and 1=25 ) 41-layer global simulations of the HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM), forced by both atmospheric fields and the astronomical tidal potential, are used to construct global maps of sea surface height (SSH) variability. The HYCOM output is separated into steric and nonsteric and into subtidal, diurnal, semidiurnal, and supertidal frequency bands. The model SSH output is compared to two data sets that offer some geographical coverage and that also cover a wide range of frequencies—a set of 351 tide gauges that measure full SSH and a set of 14 in situ vertical profilers from which steric SSH can be calculated. Three of the global maps are of interest in planning for the upcoming Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) two-dimensional swath altimeter mission: (1) maps of the total and (2) nonstationary internal tidal signal (the latter calculated after removing the stationary internal tidal signal via harmonic analysis), with an average variance of 1:05 and 0:43 cm2, respectively, for the semidiurnal band, and (3) a map of the steric supertidal contributions, which are dominated by the internal gravity wave continuum, with an average variance of 0:15 cm2. Stationary internal tides (which are predictable), nonstationary internal tides (which will be harder to predict), and nontidal internal gravity waves (which will be very difficult to predict) may all be important sources of high-frequency ‘‘noise’’ that could mask lower frequency phenomena in SSH measurements made by the SWOT mission.
Modelling and verifying web service orchestration by means of the concurrency workbench

Verification techniques like model checking, preorder checking and equivalence checking are shown to be relevant to web service orchestration. The Concurrency Workbench of the New Century (CWB) is a verification tool that supports these verification techniques. By means of the Process Algebra Compiler (PAC), the CWB is modified to support the BPE-calculus. The BPE-calculus is a small language, based on BPEL4WS, to express web service orchestration. Both the syntax and the semantics of the BPE-calculus are formally defined. These are subsequently used as input for the PAC. As output, the PAC produces modules that are incorporated into the CWB so that it supports the BPE-calculus and, hence, provides a verification tool for web service orchestration.
NUMERICAL SIMULATIONS OF A 2D QUASI GEOSTROPHIC EQUATION

This paper deals with the numerical simulations of the 2D generalized quasi geostrophic equation, where the velocity field is related to the solution µ by a rotation of Riesz transforms. Depending on the parameters of the problem, we present numerical evidences for long time behavior of the solution such as global existence effects or blow up in finite time.
Forest Age and Relative Abundance of Pileated Woodpeckers on Southeastern Vancouver Island1

A plastic intake manifold assembly for an internal combustion engine, and a method for its production. The assembly is in the form of a hollow plastic structure composed of two housing pieces in which a resonance chamber cross section is formed by means of an insert in the housing interior. Mating surfaces on the housing pieces are bonded together, for example by friction welding or ultrasonic welding. The invention has the advantage that by using inserts of differing size, resonance chambers of different sizes can be produced without altering or modifying the housing pieces.