Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Functional neuroimaging at different disease stages reveals distinct phases of neuroplastic changes in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Some previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have revealed increased activation in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patients but longitudinal data on such activation changes are lacking. To assess the time course of changes in fMRI patterns and their potential contribution to the understanding of ALS pathophysiology, we, therefore, investigated a total of 22 patients with ALS and matched control participants while they performed a blocked motor task. Patients were assigned to three groups according to whether they had no (MRC grade 5), mild (MRC 4), or marked (MRC 3) weakness of the examined right hand. Significant activations were seen in primary motor and premotor cortex, somatosensory cortex, supplementary motor area and subcortical areas in all groups. The size of the activated area in the contralateral sensorimotor cortex was increased to a similar degree in all three ALS groups compared to control participants irrespective of weakness on clinical examination. Whereas movement related signal change and beta weights extracted from the activated cluster were unchanged relative to controls in ALS patients with no weakness, a marked decrease of these parameters was seen in patients with weakness. Two distinct stages of neuroplastic changes could be identified in ALS (first: increase of the activated area in contralateral sensorimotor cortex; second: reduction of signal change and beta weights with increasing weakness). We interpret the increase of the activated area as a result of decreased intracortical inhibition and the reduction of movement related signal change and beta weights as a consequence of loss of upper motor neurons. Hum Brain Mapp, 2011. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Visualization of cardiac bioelectricity-a case study

A project in the field of computational electrocardiography which requires visualization of complex, three-dimensional geometry and electric potential and current fields is described. Starting from magnetic resonance images (MRIs) from a healthy subject, a multisurfaced model of the human thorax was constructed and used as the basis for computational studies relating potential distributions measured from the surface of the heart to potentials and currents throughout the volume of the thorax (a form of the forward problem in electrocardiography). Both interactive and batch-mode graphics programs were developed to view, manipulate, and interactively edit the model geometry. Results are presented. <<ETX>>
Improving cloud infrastructure utilization through overbooking

Despite the potential given by the combination of multi-tenancy and virtualization, resource utilization in today's data centers is still low. We identify three key characteristics of cloud services and infrastructure as-a-service management practices: burstiness in service workloads, fluctuations in virtual machine resource usage over time, and virtual machines being limited to pre-defined sizes only. Based on these characteristics, we propose scheduling and admission control algorithms that incorporate resource overbooking to improve utilization. A combination of modeling, monitoring, and prediction techniques is used to avoid overpassing the total infrastructure capacity. A performance evaluation using a mixture of workload traces demonstrates the potential for significant improvements in resource utilization while still avoiding overpassing the total capacity.
Relationship between pre-sarcopenia, sarcopenia and bone mineral density in elderly men.

OBJECTIVE Analyze the influence of sarcopenia in bone health of elderly men. SUBJECTS AND METHODS This cross-sectional study evaluated 198 men aged over 60 years. Body composition was measured by dual energy X-ray absorptiometry. The BMD was measured at the femoral neck, total hip, lumbar spine and 33% radius. The diagnosis of abnormal BMD was defined for men who presented densitometric diagnosis of osteopenia or osteoporosis defined by T-score of femoral neck, total hip and lumbar spine. The pre-sarcopenia and sarcopenia were defined according to the European Working Group on Sarcopenia in Older People. RESULTS The group diagnosed with normal BMD, compared to the group of abnormal BMD, have significantly higher body weight, body mass index, grip strength, lean mass, fat mass, and relative appendicular skeletal muscle mass (RASM). However, after multiple linear regression analysis, we found that only the RASM, lean mass, and handgrip strength in the dominant hand influenced the variability of the BMD after adjustment for age and weight. Regression analyzes showed a positive association between greater appendicular lean mass and a smaller number of elderly patients with abnormal BMD diagnostic. The regression analyzes showed that elderly men diagnosed with pre-sarcopenia and sarcopenia had more abnormal BMD than non-sarcopenic elderly men. CONCLUSION We concluded that pre-sarcopenia and sarcopenia were associated with abnormal BMD. The lean mass, compared to fat mass, has a greater positive influence on the BMD of elderly men. This result suggests the importance of the increase in lean mass for the bone health of elderly men.
VERBAL HUMOR IN THE RIO ANIMATED FILM AND ITS TRANSLATION IN THE INDONESIAN SUBTITLING

Verbal humor is often viewed as the most difficult text to translate When translators translate the humor, they have to make the source humor function as humor in the target culture. The aim of this research is to know how verbal humor dialogue is translated in the audiovisual product, especially in subtitling. In analyzing the humor and the translated text, this research focuses on the categorization of verbal humor, the application of subtitling strategies, and the assessment of the acceptability level of the translated text. This research employs a descriptive qualitative research. The data of this research are collected manually from the VCD of Rio animated film. The main instrument of this research is the researcher herself and the second instrument is the data sheets. The data are categorized based on some theories. The first is verbal humor theory proposed by Spanakaki (2007) and the second is subtitling strategies theory proposed by Gottlieb (2001). To achieve data trustworthiness, the data sheets are repeatedly checked by the researcher and some peers and the results are discussed with the consultants and the respondents. The results of this research show that there are three kinds of verbal humor found in Rio. Those are Wordplay, Allusion, and Verbal Irony, and Allusion appears most often to amuse the audience. There are eight subtitling strategies the translator applied in translating the verbal humor dialogues. They are expansion, paraphrase, transfer, imitation, transcription, condensation, and decimation. In determining the acceptability level, the questionnaire was used to gain information from the three respondents about translation quality assessment in term of acceptability. From 48 data, there are 27 data in this research belong to acceptable level. This finding indicates that the translation of verbal humor dialogues in Rio is considered acceptable.
Statistical and Biological Validation Methods in Cluster Analysis of Gene Expression

Data clustering methods have become standard techniques in the analysis of gene expression data. They are used in a variety of tasks ranging from simple data pre- treatment for posterior analysis to the identification of important information, such as gene function and/or the participation of a group of genes in a given biological process. Data clustering methods also offer advantages to the biologist from the economic point of view and given the time that would be necessary to obtain this type of information without the aid of intelligent computational methods. This work aims at guiding the choices in order to get the best possible solution from data clustering. To do so, algorithms from different approaches were used, i.e. k-means and SOM algorithms belong to the unidimentional approach and SAMBA algorithm, a bidimentional approach. Methods of statistical and biological validation were employed in order to choose the best data clustering solution. Results presented here demonstrated that the statistic validation methods were hardly in agreement with the biology validation method. Furthermore, some advantages of the SOM algorithm over the k-means algorithm were observed. Use of the bidimentional algorithm SAMBA revealed dataset structure not identified by the unidimentional algorithms. It was possible to aggregate meaningfull biological information to genes of unknown function. All the content of this work, including all the data clustering and detailed analysis are available at the URL http://www.ppgia. pucpr.br/~nievola/clusteranalysis.
Increased Prefrontal and Parahippocampal Activation with Reduced Dorsolateral Prefrontal and Insular Cortex Activation to Food Images in Obesity: A Meta-Analysis of fMRI Studies

Background and Objectives Obesity is emerging as the most significant health concern of the twenty-first century. A wealth of neuroimaging data suggest that weight gain might be related to aberrant brain function, particularly in prefrontal cortical regions modulating mesolimbic addictive responses to food. Nevertheless, food addiction is currently a model hotly debated. Here, we conduct a meta-analysis of neuroimaging data, examining the most common functional differences between normal-weight and obese participants in response to food stimuli. Data Source We conducted a search using several journal databases and adhered to the ‘Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses’ (PRISMA) method. To this aim, 10 studies were found with a total of 126 obese participants, 129 healthy controls, equaling 184 foci (146 increased, 38 decreased activation) using the Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) technique. Out of the 10 studies, 7 investigated neural responses to food versus non-food images. Results In response to food images, obese in comparison to healthy weight subjects had increased activation in the left dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, right parahippocampal gyrus, right precentral gyrus and right anterior cingulate cortex, and reduced activation in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and left insular cortex. Conclusions Prefrontal cortex areas linked to cognitive evaluation processes, such as evaluation of rewarding stimuli, as well as explicit memory regions, appear most consistently activated in response to images of food in those who are obese. Conversely, a reduced activation in brain regions associated with cognitive control and interoceptive awareness of sensations in the body might indicate a weakened control system, combined with hypo-sensitivity to satiety and discomfort signals after eating in those who are prone to overeat.
Economic Denial of Sustainability (EDoS) in Cloud Services using HTTP and XML based DDoS Attacks

“Cloud Computing”, a new wave in the Internet revolution, transforms the kind of services provided over the Internet. The Cloud Services can be viewed from two perspectives, one as Cloud Service Provider and the other as Cloud Service Consumer. Assurance of security in the Cloud Service is a major challenge for the Providers, as it’s the biggest concern for the Consumers to opt for the service, which in turn decides the prospects of the business in Cloud Service. The Security can be administered in the Cloud at various levels and for several types of attacks. The threats and the attacks on the Cloud service can be common prevailing attacks in the internet or can be cloud specific. This paper deals about the threats and the counter measures of the prevailing DDoS attacks on the Cloud Environment as well as the Cloud Specific Vulnerabilities to these attacks. In specific, HTTP and XMLbased DDoS attacks on the cloud service are experimented under proposed security framework for EDoS Protection. A Cloud Service was hosted on Amazon EC2. The Service was targeted by HTTP, XML DDoS attacks from several nodes, which lead to the scaling of the service by consuming more Amazon EC2 resources, which in turn lead to Economic Denial of Sustainability to the Cloud Service under attack. Thus this paper explores the transformation of traditional Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack into cloud specific Economic Denial of Sustainability (EDoS) attack.
QSAR study of HCV NS5B polymerase inhibitors using the genetic algorithm-multiple linear regression (GA-MLR)

Quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) study has been employed for predicting the inhibitory activities of the Hepatitis C virus (HCV) NS5B polymerase inhibitors. A data set consisted of 72 compounds was selected, and then different types of molecular descriptors were calculated. The whole data set was split into a training set (80 % of the dataset) and a test set (20 % of the dataset) using principle component analysis. The stepwise (SW) and the genetic algorithm (GA) techniques were used as variable selection tools. Multiple linear regression method was then used to linearly correlate the selected descriptors with inhibitory activities. Several validation technique including leave-one-out and leave-group-out cross-validation, Y-randomization method were used to evaluate the internal capability of the derived models. The external prediction ability of the derived models was further analyzed using modified r2, concordance correlation coefficient values and Golbraikh and Tropsha acceptable model criteria's. Based on the derived results (GA-MLR), some new insights toward molecular structural requirements for obtaining better inhibitory activity were obtained.
History on Trial: Evaluating Learning Outcomes through Audit and Accreditation in a National Standards Environment

This paper uses a trial audit of history programs undertaken in 2011-2012 to explore issues surrounding the attainment of Threshold Learning Outcomes (TLOs) in an emerging Australian national standards environment for the discipline of history. The audit sought to ascertain whether an accreditation process managed by the discipline under the auspices of the Australian Historical Association (AHA) could be based on a limited-intervention, “light-touch” approach to assessing attainment of the TLOs. The results of the audit show that successful proof of TLO attainment would only be possible with more active intervention into existing history majors and courses. Assessments across all levels of history teaching would have to be designed, undertaken, and marked using a rubric matched to the TLOs. It proved unrealistic to expect students to demonstrate acquisition of the TLOs from existing teaching and assessment practices. The failure of the “light- touch” audit process indicates that demonstrating student attainment under a national standards regime would require fundamental redevelopment of the curriculum. With standards-based approaches to teaching and learning emerging as international phenomena, this case study resonates beyond Australia and the discipline under investigation.
Density based breast segmentation for mammograms using graph cut techniques

In this work we explore the application of graph cuts techniques to the problem of finding the boundary of different breast tissue regions in mammograms. The goal of the segmentation algorithm is to see if graph cuts algorithm could separate different densities for the different breast patterns. The graph cut is applied with multi-selection of seeds label to provide the hard constraint, whereas the seeds labels are selected based on user defined. Graph cuts have been explored on images of various imaging modalities but not on mammograms just yet. Therefore, this project is mainly focused on using graph cut algorithm to perform segmentation to increase visibility of different breast densities in mammography images. Segmentation of the mammogram into different mammographic densities is useful for risk assessment and quantitative evaluation of density changes. Our proposed methodology for the segmentation of mammograms on the basis of their region into different densities based categories has been tested on MIAS database.
Exploratory Factor Analysis: A Users’Guide

In 1978, Comrey wrote a guide to factor analysis in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. This paper provides an update of the information given by Comrey in relation to exploratory factor analysis (EFA) for work and organizational psychologists, and particularly those involved with test development, interpretation and validation. In doing so, it offers a user's guide to contemporary methods and available techniques and introduces heuristics for dealing with problems of skew and kurtosis, social desirability response set, and factor naming.
Modulation of the Effect of Prenatal PAH Exposure on PAH-DNA Adducts in Cord Blood by Plasma Antioxidants

The fetus is more susceptible than the adult to the effects of certain carcinogens, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH). Nutritional factors, including antioxidants, have been shown to have a protective effect on carcinogen-DNA adducts and cancer risk in adults. We investigated whether the effect of prenatal airborne PAH exposure, measured by personal air monitoring during pregnancy, on the level of PAH-DNA adducts in a baby's cord blood is modified by the concentration of micronutrients in maternal and cord blood. The micronutrients examined were: retinol (vitamin A), α-tocopherol and γ-tocopherol (vitamin E), and carotenoids. With the use of multiple linear regression, we found a significant interaction between prenatal PAH exposure and cord blood concentration of α-tocopherol and carotenoids in predicting the concentration of PAH adducts in cord blood. The association between PAH exposure and PAH adducts was much stronger among those with low α-tocopherol (β = 0.15; P = 0.001) and among those with low carotenoids (β = 0.16; P < 0.001) compared with babies with high levels of these micronutrients (among those with high α-tocopherol: β = 0.05; P = 0.165; among those with high carotenoids: β = 0.06; P = 0.111). These results suggest a protective effect of micronutrients on the DNA damage and potential cancer risk associated with prenatal PAH exposure. (Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2009;18(8):2262–8)
The home school knowledge exchange project: Linking home and school to improve children's literacy

The Government is urging teachers to engage more closely with families and is promoting the concept of the ‘extended’ school. This article reports on the literacy strand of the Home School Knowledge Exchange (HSKE) project, directed by Professor Martin Hughes at the University of Bristol. A selection of literacy activities developed during this project is discussed – activities that enabled teachers and parents to share their knowledge about children in order to enhance their learning. These included ‘school-to-home’ activities where the direction of knowledge was primarily from teachers to families and ‘home-to-school’ activities where families' knowledge of children impacted on school learning. Practical aspects of planning and conducting home–school knowledge exchange activities are discussed, and challenges are explored. The approaches presented in this article provide examples that could be considered and adapted by schools interested in extending their provision for families. This article draws on the recently published Improving Primary Literacy: Linking Home and School (Feiler et al., 2007).
Teaching Gerontology Using the Self-Discovery Tapestry

Abstract This article discusses the development of the Self-Discovery Tapestry and suggests a variety of strategies for using the Tapestry in undergraduate and graduate gerontology courses. Provided are a shared basis for class discussion of the life course and the similarities of experiences between older adults and younger students. The use of the Tapestry in gerontology courses invites creative ways to encourage students' self-awareness and curiosity about life-span development.
Potent Control of Acute Graft-Versus-Host Disease Lethality After Immunization With a Novel DNA Vaccine Targeted to B7-1/CD28 Costimulatory Signaling Pathway

A major challenge associated with allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation is effective prevention and/or attenuation of symptoms associated with acute graft-versus-host disease (aGVHD) that can result from a failure of either host and/or donor CD4+CD25+ regulatory T (Tr) and CD8+CD28− suppressor T (Ts) cells to dampen immunopathogenic responses mediated by alloreactive donor CD4+CD28+ Th1 (Th1) and CD8+CD28+ Tc1 (Tc1) cell-mediated inflammatory processes. Considering the crucial role of CD28/B7-1 costimulatory signal pathway in development, activation, differentiation, and function of these T subsets, we developed a targeted DNA vaccine encoding the Pseudomonas exotoxin-A and the B7-1 molecule that could act as both an antagonist to Th1-mediated and Tc1-mediated responses while concomitantly acting as an agonist stimulating Tr-mediated and Ts-mediated responses as a strategy for reducing aGVHD-associated lethality. A single intramuscular injection with this vaccine significantly increased Tr and Ts levels in a murine aGVHD model. In addition, immunized mice presented with significantly diminished Th1-cytokines interferon-&ggr; and interleukin-2 response and a moderately upregulated Th2-cytokine interleukin-10 and Th3-cytokine transforming growth factor-&bgr; response. More importantly, vaccination significantly reduced aGVHD, measured by significantly extended mean survival times, decreased mean weight loss, recovery of peripheral leukocyte numbers, disease presentation associated with mild-moderate histopathologic changes, a balanced Th1-Th2-Th3-cytokine responses and functional Tr-mediated and Ts-mediated regulatory/suppressor mechanisms at levels more potent than observed in animals treated with cyclosporine A+methotrexate. Our data first provide the proof-of-principal that B7-1-PE40KDEL targeted DNA vaccine represents a prophylactic approach for reducing alloreactive Th1-mediated and Tc-mediated aGVHD lethality by CD28/B7-1 axis.
Enhancing Secrecy With Multi-Antenna Transmission in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

We study physical-layer security in wireless ad hoc networks and investigate two types of multi-antenna transmission schemes for providing secrecy enhancements. To establish secure transmission against malicious eavesdroppers, we consider the generation of artificial noise with either sectoring or beamforming. For both approaches, we provide a statistical characterization and tradeoff analysis of the outage performance of the legitimate communication and the eavesdropping links. We then investigate the network-wide secrecy throughput performance of both schemes in terms of the secrecy transmission capacity, and study the optimal power allocation between the information signal and the artificial noise. Our analysis indicates that, under transmit power optimization, the beamforming scheme outperforms the sectoring scheme, except for the case where the number of transmit antennas are sufficiently large. Our study also reveals some interesting differences between the optimal power allocation for the sectoring and beamforming schemes.
LITERATURE REVIEW OF YOUTH DEVELOPMENT / ASSET TOOLS 3 Search for and Selection of Tools

Youth development programs provide many youth with positive experiences, settings, and people, as well as abundant opportunities for them to develop life skills to build fulfilling relationships throughout adolescence and beyond. Programs that foster these skills in youth are an important component of an adolescent’s landscape, and the appropriate use of assessment measures is a key variable in determining the success of a program’s goals for the youth it serves.