Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Stochastic signaling under second and fourth moment constraints

Stochastic signaling is investigated under second and fourth moment constraints for the detection of scalar-valued binary signals in additive noise channels. Sufficient conditions are derived to determine when the use of stochastic signals instead of deterministic ones can or cannot enhance the error performance of a given binary communications system. Also, a convex relaxation approach is employed to obtain approximate solutions of the optimal stochastic signaling problem. Finally, numerical examples are presented, and extensions of the results to M-ary communications systems and to other criteria than the average probability of error are discussed.
Egalitarian yet Unequal? Gender Stereotyping in Romantic Relationships

goals Career goals and family goals subscales Career goals 1. Having work/a career that is interesting and exciting to me is my most important life goal. 2. I expect my job/career to give me more real satisfaction than anything else I do. 3. It is important to me that I have a job/career in which I can achieve something of importance. Family goals 1. Although parenthood requires many sacrifices, the love and enjoyment of one's children is worth it all. 2. Having a successful marriage is the most important thing in life to me. 3. I expect the major satisfactions in my life to come from my marriage relationship. 4. If I chose not to have children, I would regret it. Note. Items were scored on a 7-point scale (1 = completely disagree, 7 = completely agree), with an N/A option.
Proteomic Analysis of Responsive Proteins Induced in Japanese Birch Plantlet Treated with Salicylic Acid

The present study was performed to unravel the mechanisms of systemic acquired resistance (SAR) establishment and resistance signaling pathways against the canker-rot fungus (Inonotus obliquus strain IO-U1) infection in Japanese birch plantlet No.8. Modulation of protein-profile induced by salicylic acid (SA)-administration was analyzed, and SA-responsive proteins were identified. In total, 5 specifically expressed, 3 significantly increased, and 3 significantly decreased protein spots were identified using liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry (LC/MS/MS) and the sequence tag method. These proteins were malate dehydrogenase, succinate dehydrogenase, phosphoglycerate kinase, diaminopimalate decarboxylase, arginase, chorismate mutase, cyclophilin, aminopeptidase, and unknown function proteins. These proteins are considered to be involved in SAR-establishment mechanisms in the Japanese birch plantlet No 8.
Application Requirements for Deaf Students to use in Inclusive Classrooms

The goal was to search for an alternative to mediate communication between people who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing (D/HH) and hearing individuals, in which the major motivation was to provide empowerment for D/HH students, using technology to provide them with more autonomy in inclusive classrooms. With that in mind, a systematic literature review was conducted to elucidate requirements for a mobile application that includes a Speech-To-Text (STT) system, as well as an opinion research accomplished with D/HH participants to know potential users' priorities among the elucidated requirements. As a result, the preference to communicate in Libras (Brazilian Sing Language) prevails, although users consider important to use a mobile application as the one proposed.
Assessing Impacts of Changes to Business Rules through Data Exploration

The benefits of impact analysis in the maintenance and evolution of software systems are well known, and many forms of impact analysis, over different software life cycle objects, have been proposed. However, one form of impact from software change has yet to be explored by the research community: these are the impacts of changes to software on data. In particular, when the business rules enforced by a system change, it may be necessary to perform some cleanup or transformations on persistent data, in order to bring it into line with the new system functionality. Alternatively, the proposed new rule may itself have to be modified, if the data impacts are too costly to address. In this paper, we show how such impacts can arise, and propose an approach to assisting in their identification through user-driven exploration of hypothetical change-impact scenarios.
Evolving personas for player decision modeling

This paper explores how evolved game playing agents can be used to represent a priori defined archetypical ways of playing a test-bed game, as procedural personas. The end goal of such procedural personas is substituting players when authoring game content manually, procedurally, or both (in a mixed-initiative setting). Building on previous work, we compare the performance of newly evolved agents to agents trained via Q-learning as well as a number of baseline agents. Comparisons are performed on the grounds of game playing ability, generalizability, and conformity among agents. Finally, all agents' decision making styles are matched to the decision making styles of human players in order to investigate whether the different methods can yield agents who mimic or differ from human decision making in similar ways. The experiments performed in this paper conclude that agents developed from a priori defined objectives can express human decision making styles and that they are more generalizable and versatile than Q-learning and hand-crafted agents.
Analyzing the Requirements for Knowledge Management using Intentional Analysis

Novel approaches to knowledge management aim at exploiting knowledge properties such as its distributed and local nature, and to consider organizations as set of actors cooperating and competing to pursue private as well as common goals. Therefore, designing knowledge management solutions requires a deep analysis of the interests and intents of strategic organizational actors, and of the dependency relationships among them. This paper describes an approach based on intentional modelling techniques. Two examples from a hospital case study are used to illustrate.
Catadioptric single-shot rangefinder for textured map building in robot navigation

The paper focuses on combining the advantages of both omnidirectional vision and structured light in order to obtain panoramic depth information for generating a complete 3D visual model of the surroundings of a mobile robot. The model is completed by mapping the imaged texture onto the objects through the central view point. This process is called single-shot scene reconstruction because a visual model of the scene is obtained from a single omnidirectional image. Several such reconstructions are then registered to build a 3D map of the scene while the robot is moving. The authors call this process range scan registration modelling. A mobile platform provided with a catadioptric camera coupled with an omnidirectional structured light projector was used for this purpose. Sensor calibration, image processing and experimental results are included.
Rationally Designed Interfacial Peptides Are Efficient In Vitro Inhibitors of HIV-1 Capsid Assembly with Antiviral Activity

Virus capsid assembly constitutes an attractive target for the development of antiviral therapies; a few experimental inhibitors of this process for HIV-1 and other viruses have been identified by screening compounds or by selection from chemical libraries. As a different, novel approach we have undertaken the rational design of peptides that could act as competitive assembly inhibitors by mimicking capsid structural elements involved in intersubunit interfaces. Several discrete interfaces involved in formation of the mature HIV-1 capsid through polymerization of the capsid protein CA were targeted. We had previously designed a peptide, CAC1, that represents CA helix 9 (a major part of the dimerization interface) and binds the CA C-terminal domain in solution. Here we have mapped the binding site of CAC1, and shown that it substantially overlaps with the CA dimerization interface. We have also rationally modified CAC1 to increase its solubility and CA-binding affinity, and designed four additional peptides that represent CA helical segments involved in other CA interfaces. We found that peptides CAC1, its derivative CAC1M, and H8 (representing CA helix 8) were able to efficiently inhibit the in vitro assembly of the mature HIV-1 capsid. Cocktails of several peptides, including CAC1 or CAC1M plus H8 or CAI (a previously discovered inhibitor of CA polymerization), or CAC1M+H8+CAI, also abolished capsid assembly, even when every peptide was used at lower, sub-inhibitory doses. To provide a preliminary proof that these designed capsid assembly inhibitors could eventually serve as lead compounds for development of anti-HIV-1 agents, they were transported into cultured cells using a cell-penetrating peptide, and tested for antiviral activity. Peptide cocktails that drastically inhibited capsid assembly in vitro were also able to efficiently inhibit HIV-1 infection ex vivo. This study validates a novel, entirely rational approach for the design of capsid assembly interfacial inhibitors that show antiviral activity.
Layered Evaluation of Topic-Based Adaptation to Student Knowledge

A user modeling server is an important part of modern distributed ELearning architectures. The user modeling server CUMULATE has two main levels: the event storage and multiple inference agents. To evaluate adaptive systems functioning as components of the common distributed architecture and using CUMULATE as the central user modeling server we need to evaluate the adaptation provided by those agents. Unfortunately, there are no commonly accepted approaches to the evaluation of the universal user modeling server. This paper describes the results of layered evaluation of our recent topic-based adaptation engine based on the activity students performed using the system QuizGuide. User modeling and adaptation processes are evaluated separately. While previous evaluation experiments of QuizGuide based on the traditional “with-and-without” approach showed that students like the system and benefit from it, this paper provides evidence of unfitness of large topics as knowledge assessment units used for adaptation, which challenges the reasonableness of the entire adaptation performed by the system.
Treatment of First Recurrence of Clostridium difficile Infection: Fidaxomicin Versus Vancomycin

Recurrence of Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) occurs in approximately 25% of successfully treated patients. Two phase 3 randomized, double-blind trials were conducted at 154 sites in the United States, Canada, and Europe to compare fidaxomicin vs vancomycin in treating CDI. Patients with CDI received fidaxomicin 200 mg twice daily or vancomycin 125 mg 4 times daily for 10 days. The primary end point was clinical cure of CDI at end of treatment, and a secondary end point was recurrence during the 28 days following clinical cure. In all, 1164 subjects were enrolled, of which a subgroup of 128 in the per-protocol population had another recent episode of CDI prior to the CDI diagnosis at study enrollment. In the analysis of this subgroup, initial response to therapy was similar for both drugs (>90% cure). However, recurrence within 28 days occurred in 35.5% of patients treated with vancomycin and 19.7% of patients treated with fidaxomicin (−15.8% difference; 95% confidence interval, −30.4% to −0.3%; P = .045). Early recurrence (within 14 days) was reported in 27% of patients treated with vancomycin and 8% of patients treated with fidaxomicin (P = .003). In patients with a first recurrence of CDI, fidaxomicin was similar to vancomycin in achieving a clinical response at end of therapy but superior in preventing a second recurrence within 28 days. Clinical Trials Registration. NCT00314951 and NCT00468728.
Bat Search Algorithm Based Hybrid PSO Approaches to Optimize the Location of UPFC in Power System

FACTS devices plays a significant role to control the power flow of power transmission system. In this paper, a hybrid PSO algorithm is proposed to optimize the location of UPFC in power system. The proposed hybrid PSO algorithm has solved the formulated multiobjective optimization problem. This paper, five objective function to be considered in the form of minimization such as the fast voltage stability index (FVSI), fuel cost, power loss, voltage deviation and UPFC cost respectively. To improve the non satisfied solution of PSO algorithm, bat search optimization is used and the performance of PSO algorithm is enhanced. The proposed hybrid technique is implemented in MATLAB working platform which is tested with IEEE 14 bus bench mark system. Here, two load cases are considered to evaluate the proposed method and compared with traditional PSO algorithm. The comparative analysis are conformed the effectiveness hybrid PSO algorithm for solving multiobjective optimal power flow problem.
Convergence to the Reynolds approximation with a double effect of roughness

We prove that the lubrication approximation is perturbed by a non-regular roughness of the boundary. We show how the flow may be accelerated using adequate rugosity profiles on the bottom. We explicit the possible effects of some abrupt changes in the profile. The limit system is mathematically justified through a variant of the notion of two-scale convergence. Finally, we present some numerical results, illustrating the limit system in the three-dimensional case.
Molecular and Cellular Pathobiology IRP 2 Regulates Breast Tumor Growth

Experimental and epidemiologic evidence suggests that dysregulation of proteins involved in ironmetabolism plays a critical role in cancer. The mechanisms by which cancer cells alter homeostatic iron regulation are just beginning to be understood. Here, we demonstrate that iron regulatory protein 2 (IRP2) plays a key role in iron accumulation in breast cancer. Although both IRP1 and IRP2 are overexpressed in breast cancer, the overexpression of IRP2, but not IRP1, is associated with decreased ferritin H and increased transferrin receptor 1 (TfR1). Knockdown of IRP2 in triple-negative MDA-MB-231 human breast cancer cells increases ferritin H expression and decreases TfR1 expression, resulting in a decrease in the labile iron pool. Further, IRP2 knockdown reduces growth of MDA-MB-231 cells in the mouse mammary fat pad. Gene expression microarray profiles of patients with breast cancer demonstrate that increased IRP2 expression is associated with high-grade cancer. Increased IRP2 expression is observed in luminal A, luminal B, and basal breast cancer subtypes, but not in breast tumors of the ERBB2 molecular subtype. These results suggest that dysregulation of IRP2 is an early nodal point underlying altered iron metabolism in breast cancer and may contribute to poor outcome of some patients with breast cancer. Cancer Res; 74(2); 497–507. 2013 AACR.
Playing unpredictably: measuring the entropy of ball trajectories in international women’s basketball

Abstract It is generally accepted that playing unpredictable basketball is advantageous, however this strategic assumption has not been adequately tested. The aim of this study was to describe unpredictability of in-play ball movement trajectories during a selection of women’s international basketball games to determine the association, if any, between unpredictability and success in basketball. Ball movements were tracked for 60 international women’s basketball games over a two-year period. Ball movements were broken into five-second play segments and the spatial distribution of the ball was tracked across the court. Shannon’s entropy was then used to estimate the relative variability in ball movements. While no differences in entropy were observed between teams, the overall analysis revealed that entropy during large-deficit games (score differential of 10 points or more) was greater than that for small-deficit games and large-deficit wins showed greater entropy than large-deficit losses. Additionally, the entropy in the frontcourt (the scoring end for a given team) was significantly greater for wins compared to losses. This suggests that higher entropy may be associated with success in basketball, but more specifically, entropy in the frontcourt is potentially where it matters most.
Video booklet: a natural video searching and browsing interface

In this paper, we propose a novel system, named Video Booklet, which enables efficient and natural personal video browsing and searching. In the system, firstly representative thumbnails of a collection of video segments are selected through an elaborate booklet generation approach, and then reshaped by a set of pre-trained personalized shape templates (such as circle, heart, sector, stamp, etc), consequently printed out on a real booklet or album. When users plan to browse the content of their digital video library, they can firstly browse their booklets in a manner as browsing ordinary photo albums. When they want to watch a certain segment indicated by a thumbnail in the booklet, they are able to use their camera phones or similar devices to capture the corresponding thumbnail, and send the captured image to a computer via wireless network. Thereafter, the target thumbnail is accurately located by a proposed Self-Trained Active Shape Model algorithm, and then the distortion of the captured image is corrected. Finally the Video Booklet system will automatically find the most similar thumbnail to the corrected one in the video library and begin to play the corresponding segment for the users. Thereby, Video Booklet builds a seamless bridge between digital videos and analog albums.
Evidence for the Presence of an Electrogenic Proton Pump on the Trout Gill Epithelium

Ion transport inhibitors, amiloride, SITS, vanadate and acetazolamide, wereadded to the water to determine the effect of ion transfer mechanisms on the acidification of water passing over the gills. In neutral water, proton excretion causes a marked reduction in gill water pH. If water pH is 2.5 units lower than blood pH, however, then this proton excretion is inhibited and all water pH changes can be accounted for by CO 2 hydration and ammonia protonation. Proton excretion across the gills is insensitive to 0.1mmoll −1 amiloride and SITS but sensitive to vanadate, acetazolamide and water pH; thus, we conclude that proton excretion is mediated by an active proton pump on the apical membrane of the gill epithelium similar to that reported for the frog skin. Higher concentrations of amiloride (0.5 and 1mmoll −1 ) reduced both ammonia and acid excretion, presumably because of inhibition of Na + /K + -ATPase on the basolateral border ofthe gill epithelium.
Simulating Snow with the Material Point Method

This thesis discusses the research and development steps for the simulation of snow with the Material Point Method (MPM). In order to gain an understanding in the technique and mathematics the MPM was researched in detail. All ten steps of the MPM were implemented using C++. First the method was implemented without the collision and implicit update. Next the body-collision for the particles and grid nodes were applied and last the semi-implicit update step was applied. The goal of implementing and understanding all the steps of the MPM was obtained. Test were done with snowballs: letting them drop, throwing them against a wall and throwing a small snowball against a static bigger snowball. The two snowballs interacted and the big snowball was pushed back by the small snowball while the small snowball also created a hole in the big snowball. The collision worked correctly for the grid nodes and particles. Finding the balance between the number of particles, their weight and the size of the grid nodes was challenging and while this was improved the simulations improved too and became more realistic. The results were not completely satisfactory yet and when the snowball was dropped shear and velocity decrease was observed after a few frames. This problem could not be solved within the available time. Although the snow characteristics where not completely reached the Lagrangian particle and Euler grid implementation that is the basis of the MPM method was succesfull.
Thalamocortical contributions to olfactory non-matching to sample and discrimination in the rat

Twenty-eight male rats were pretrained on a go/no-go, continuous olfactory non-matching to sample (CONMTS) task, and randomly assigned to one of four treatment groups: radiofrequency lesions of either the medial wall or rhinal sulcal cortical projection sites of the mediodorsal thalamic nucleus (MDn); lesions of the lateral internal medullary lamina site (L-IML) of thalamus; or sham surgical control. All three lesioned groups exhibited a significant impairment on initial retraining of CONMTS. However, the two cortical groups rapidly improved, and did not differ from the control animals for the remainder of CONMTS training. Alternatively, the L-IML deficit persisted throughout retraining. The cortical and control subjects exhibited susceptibility to proactive interference effects created by reducing the number of odor stimuli, and a moderate decay in performance was observed with increased intertrial intervals. No differential effect of these manipulations was observed in the L-IML group, apparently due to a floor effect. Subsequent training on go/no-go odor discrimination tasks demonstrated that the CONMTS deficit, characterized by an increase in "false alarms", was not attributable to an inability to suppress responding to nonreinforced odors. All subjects, including the L-IML lesioned rats, learned the discrimination tasks at equivalent rates. The present findings demonstrate that singular destruction of specific MDn projection sites in prefrontal cortex does not disrupt performance of an olfactory working memory task. The L-IML lesions produced deficits on working, but not reference, memory components of the paradigm. This effect of L-IML lesions is consistent with previous studies utilizing spatial stimuli, demonstrating that the amnestic effects seen following thalamic destruction are multimodal.