Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Use of pooled formalin-preserved fecal specimens to detect Giardia lamblia

Three formalin-preserved fecal specimens from the same child attending a child-care center were pooled and compared with the three separate individual specimens by a single microscopic examination of concentration sediment for Giardia lamblia. The sensitivity of the pooled system was 100% when two or more individual specimens were positive and 88% when only one individual specimen was positive. The organism density in a single specimen was not a factor of whether the pool of specimens was positive or negative. Nearly half of the pools that contained positive specimens had only one of three specimens with positive results, reinforcing the need for multiple stool examinations when diagnosing G. lamblia infections.
10 The Physiology of Effortless Attention: Correlates of State Flow and Flow Proneness

has been proposed for this type of attentive state to distinguish it from more well-studied states of high attention during mental effort (see, e.g., Bruya, Introduction, this volume). The main purpose of this chapter is to investigate whether high attention during flow is not only phenom-enologically but also physiologically different from effortful attention. As a back-ground, we first relate the concepts
On the proportion of edges that belong to shortest paths in random graphs

We consider the problem of determining the proportion of edges that are discovered in a random graph when one constructs all shortest paths from a given source node to all other nodes. This problem is equivalent to the one of determining the proportion of edges connecting nodes that are at identical distance from the source node. In order to perform our analysis, we introduce a new way of characteriz- ing the distribution of distances between nodes. Our method outperforms previous similar analysis and leads to estimates that coincide remarkably well with numerical simulations.
Air pollution and nonmalignant respiratory mortality in 16 cohorts within the ESCAPE project.

RATIONALE Prospective cohort studies have shown that chronic exposure to particulate matter and traffic-related air pollution is associated with reduced survival. However, the effects on nonmalignant respiratory mortality are less studied, and the data reported are less consistent. OBJECTIVES We have investigated the relationship of long-term exposure to air pollution and nonmalignant respiratory mortality in 16 cohorts with individual level data within the multicenter European Study of Cohorts for Air Pollution Effects (ESCAPE). METHODS Data from 16 ongoing cohort studies from Europe were used. The total number of subjects was 307,553. There were 1,559 respiratory deaths during follow-up. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS Air pollution exposure was estimated by land use regression models at the baseline residential addresses of study participants and traffic-proximity variables were derived from geographical databases following a standardized procedure within the ESCAPE study. Cohort-specific hazard ratios obtained by Cox proportional hazard models from standardized individual cohort analyses were combined using metaanalyses. We found no significant associations between air pollution exposure and nonmalignant respiratory mortality. Most hazard ratios were slightly below unity, with the exception of the traffic-proximity indicators. CONCLUSIONS In this study of 16 cohorts, there was no association between air pollution exposure and nonmalignant respiratory mortality.
Professional Development of Teachers for Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning: A Knowledge-Building Approach

Background This study was situated in Singapore, which aims to achieve engaged learning in P–12 schools with the use of educational technology. One of the foci of study among Singaporean educational researchers on a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment that emphasizes collaboration among learners for the co-construction of knowledge. Although there is some evidence that CSCL enhances students’ learning, an identified gap in the field of CSCL is documented accounts of how knowledge building happens. Knowledge of how to facilitate sustained and in-depth knowledge-building discourse among teachers has also been identified as a gap in understanding in teacher education. Purpose This case study aims to gain insights into how negotiation and co-construction of knowledge occurs among eachers during their participation in a knowledge-building community. Participants It involves 7 Singaporean teachers who enrolled in an 18-month Advanced Diploma program. Intervention Three consecutive modules were conducted to develop the participants’ competencies in and dispositions toward facilitating student-centered learning in a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment. The modules engaged the teachers as coc-onstructors of knowledge in a knowledge-building community. Research Design This is a case study in which the first author, as a participant observer, acted as the facilitator for the modules. Data Analysis The main source of data was the teachers’ notes in Knowledge Forum, a CSCL environment. The teachers’ patterns of online interactions were analyzed through social network analysis and the interaction analysis model (IAM). Findings Our findings indicate that the teachers formed a socially cohesive community and participated rather actively, writing an average of 3.7 notes and 425 words per week. Further analysis of the notes using IAM shows a healthy distribution of notes at various phases of knowledge construction. Conclusion We conclude that the teacher knowledge-building community was successful in engaging the teachers in collaborative knowledge building, leading to a deep understanding among them about learning in a CSCL environment. We suggest the following factors as contributors to this advancement: (1) having a group of committed teachers as participants, (2) engaging the teachers to work on authentic problems faced in schools, (3) empowering the teachers with the agency to solve problems and reflect on their learning, (4) allocating adequate time for teachers to link theories to practice and to reflect on their implementation, and (5) having a facilitator who is experienced in facilitating this form of learning and in using a pedagogical model that is built on appropriate learning theories.
Agrin regulates growth cone turning of Xenopus spinal motoneurons

The pivotal role of agrin in inducing postsynaptic specializations at neuromuscular junctions has been well characterized. Increasing evidence suggests that agrin is also involved in neuronal development. In this study, we found that agrin inhibited neurite extension and, more importantly, a gradient of agrin induced repulsive growth-cone turning in cultured Xenopus spinal neurons. Incubation with a neutralizing antibody to agrin or expression of the extracellular domain of muscle-specific kinase, a component of the agrin receptor complex, abolished these effects of agrin. Agrin-induced repulsive growth-cone turning requires the activity of PI3-kinase and Ca2+ signaling. In addition, the expression of dominant-negative Rac1 inhibited neurite extension and blocked agrin-mediated growth-cone turning. Taken together, our findings suggest that agrin regulates neurite extension and provide evidence for an unanticipated role of agrin in growth-cone steering in developing neurons.
An Overview of Mode of Action and Analytical Methods for Evaluation of Gas Phase Activities of Flame Retardants

The latest techniques used to prove, describe and analyze the gas phase activity of a fire retardant used in polymeric materials are briefly reviewed. Classical techniques, such as thermogravimetric analysis or microscale combustion calorimetry, as well as complex and advanced analytical techniques, such as modified microscale combustion calorimeter (MCC), molecular beam mass spectroscopy and vacuum ultra violet (VUV) photoionization spectroscopy coupled with time of flight MS (TOF-MS), are described in this review. The recent advances in analytical techniques help not only in determining the gas phase activity of the flame-retardants but also identify possible reactive species responsible for gas phase flame inhibition. The complete understanding of the decomposition pathways and the flame retardant activity of a flame retardant system is essential for the development of new eco-friendly-tailored flame retardant molecules with high flame retardant efficiency.
DNA as a universal substrate for chemical kinetics

Molecular programming aims to systematically engineer molecular and chemical systems of autonomous function and ever-increasing complexity. A key goal is to develop embedded control circuitry within a chemical system to direct molecular events. Here we show that systems of DNA molecules can be constructed that closely approximate the dynamic behavior of arbitrary systems of coupled chemical reactions. By using strand displacement reactions as a primitive, we construct reaction cascades with effectively unimolecular and bimolecular kinetics. Our construction allows individual reactions to be coupled in arbitrary ways such that reactants can participate in multiple reactions simultaneously, reproducing the desired dynamical properties. Thus arbitrary systems of chemical equations can be compiled into real chemical systems. We illustrate our method on the Lotka–Volterra oscillator, a limit-cycle oscillator, a chaotic system, and systems implementing feedback digital logic and algorithmic behavior.
Effects of ibuprofen on arylamine n ‐acetyltransferase activity in human colon tumor cells

The inhibition of arylamine N ‐acetyltransferase (NAT) activity by ibuprofen was determined in a human colon tumour (adenocarcinoma) cell line. Two assay systems were employed, one with cellular cytosols (9000 g supernatant) and the other with intact colon tumour cell suspensions. The NAT activity in a human colon tumour cell line was inhibited by ibuprofen in a dose‐dependent manner in both systems, i.e. the greater the concentration of ibuprofen in the reaction, the greater the inhibition of NAT activities in both systems. The data also indicated that ibuprofen decreases the apparent Km and Vmax of NAT enzyme from human colon tumour cells in both systems examined. This report is the first demonstration to show that ibuprofen affects human colon tumour cell NAT activity. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Output tracking for quadrotor-based aerial manipulators

For a class of aerial manipulators given by a quadrotor aerial vehicle endowed with a robotic arm, this work focuses on the design of a feedback control strategy to let the position and the orientation of the end-effector to track a desired trajectory. Different configurations of robotic arms are taken into account so as to link the number of actuated degrees of freedom to the achievable tracking performances. In particular, when a robotic arm characterized by the minimum number of actuated joints is considered, it is shown how the presence of an offset between the point in which the manipulator is attached and the center of gravity of the vehicle may introduce some unstable internal dynamics affecting the achievable asymptotic performances. Such a limitation can be removed by properly exploiting robotic manipulators characterized by a redundant number of actuated joints. The proposed feedback control strategy is then shown to be able to exploit the mechanical layout of the manipulator so as to achieve asymptotic or practical tracking of the desired references.
Sweeper: a lightweight end-to-end system for defending against fast worms

The vulnerabilities that plague computers cause endless grief to users. Slammer compromised millions of hosts in minutes; a hit-list worm would take under a second. Recently proposed techniques respond better than manual approaches, but require expensive instrumentation, which limits deployment. Although spreading "antibodies" (e.g. signatures) ameliorates this limitation, hosts depending on antibodies are defenseless until inoculation; to the fastest hit-list worms this delay is crucial. Additionally, most recently proposed techniques cannot provide recovery to provide continuous service after an attack. We propose a novel solution called Sweeper that provides both fast and accurate post-attack analysis and efficient recovery with low normal execution overhead. Sweeper in-novatively combines several techniques: (1) Sweeper uses lightweight monitoring techniques to detect a wide array of suspicious requests, providing a first level of defense. (2) By cleverly leveraging lightweight checkpointing, Sweeper postpones heavyweight monitoring until absolutely necessary --- after an attack is detected. Sweeper rolls back and re-executes multiple times to dynamically apply heavyweight analysis techniques via dynamic binary instrumentation. Since only the execution involved in the attack is analyzed, the analysis is efficient, yet thorough. (3) Based on the analysis results, Sweeper automatically generates low-overhead antibodies to prevent future attacks of the same vulnerability. (4) Finally, Sweeper again re-executes to perform fast recovery for continuous service. We implement Sweeper in a real system. Our experimental results with three real-world servers and four real security vulnerabilities show that Sweeper can detect an attack and generate antibodies in under 60 milliseconds. Our results also show that Sweeper imposes under 1% overhead during normal execution, clearly suitable for widespread production deployment (especially since Sweeper also allows partial deployment). Finally, we analytically show that, for a fast hit-list worm otherwise capable of infecting all vulnerable hosts in under a second, Sweeper contains the extent of infection to under 5%.
Correctness of monadic state: an imperative call-by-need calculus

The extension of Haskell with a built-in state monad combines mathematical elegance with operational efficiency: ¿Semantically, at the source language level, constructs that act on the state are viewed as functions that pass an explicit store data structure around. ¿Operationally, at the implementation level, constructs that act on the state are viewed as statements whose evaluation has the side-effect of updating the implicit global store in place.There are several unproven conjectures that the two views are consistent.Recently, we have noted that the consistency of the two views is far from obvious: all it takes for the implementation to become unsound is one judiciously-placed beta-step in the optimization phase of the compiler. This discovery motivates the current paper in which we formalize and show the correctness of the implementation of monadic state.For the proof, we first design a typed call-by-need language that models the intermediate language of the compiler, together with a type-preserving compilation map. Second, we show that the compilation is semantics-preserving by proving that the compilation of every source axiom yields an observational equivalence of the target language. Because of the wide semantic gap between the source and target languages, we perform this last step using an additional intermediate language.The imperative call-by-need ¿-Calculus is of independent interest for reasoning about system-level Haskell code providing services such as memo-functions, generation of new names, etc., and is the starting point for reasoning about the space usage of Haskell programs.
The effects of fast disparity adjustment in gaze-controlled stereoscopic applications

With the emergence of affordable 3D displays, stereoscopy is becoming a commodity. However, often users report discomfort even after brief exposures to stereo content. One of the main reasons is the conflict between vergence and accommodation that is caused by 3D displays. We investigate dynamic adjustment of stereo parameters in a scene using gaze data in order to reduce discomfort. In a user study, we measured stereo fusion times after abrupt manipulation of disparities using gaze data. We found that gaze-controlled manipulation of disparities can lower fusion times for large disparities. In addition we found that gaze-controlled disparity adjustment should be applied in a personalized manner and ideally performed only at the extremities or outside the comfort zone of subjects. These results provide important insight on the problems associated with fast disparity manipulation and are essential for developing appealing gaze-contingent and gaze-controlled applications.
A methodology for analysis and verification of power gated circuits with correlated results

With the rapid proliferation of handheld and other mobile devices, electronic circuits need to reduce both operational and off-state power consumption. This is necessary for both the chips and the end products to be competitive in their respective markets. In this paper, details of an innovative solution that combines full-chip level capacity with transistor level accuracy is presented which integrated circuit designers can use to analyze and optimize circuits that employ a commonly used standby leakage current reduction technique. An advanced capability of this tool like its ability to simulate multiple operating modes of such circuits is discussed. This analysis approach was demonstrated to have very good correlation to both silicon and spice based measurements.
Off-Line Writer Verification: A Comparison of a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) Based System

In this paper, we introduce and compare two off-line, text independent writer verification systems. At the core of the first system are Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based recognizers. The second system uses Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) to model a person's handwriting. Both systems are evaluated on two test sets consisting of unskillfully forged and skillfully forged text lines, respectively. In this comparison, different confidence measures are considered, based on the raw log-likelihood score, the cohort model approach, and the world model approach.
New DC-DC converter with reduced low-frequency current ripple for Fuel Cell in Single-Phase Distributed Generation

This paper presents a new topology for current fed push-pull-based DC-DC converters employing a low-voltage Fuel Cell (FC) as energy source. This DC-DC converter can be used in Single-Phase Distributed Generation (DG) systems. The work aims presenting new solutions for two important issues regarding fuel cells in DG applications. The first issue is related to the low-frequency ripple in the FC output current when the FC supplies a single-phase power conditioner. It is strongly recommended to minimize the low-frequency FC current ripple in order to increase its lifecycle and performance. Therefore, a simple and effective control strategy has been applied to sharply attenuate such current ripple. The second issue concerns the operation of the current fed push-pull DC-DC converter. An auxiliary circuit is proposed to protect the power switches against the overvoltage due to the transformer's leakage inductance. The auxiliary circuit regenerates also the energy stored in a clamping capacitor, thus improving the overall converter efficiency. Moreover, the auxiliary circuit allows implementing the DC-DC converter soft-start. Simulation and experimental results are provided for a 5 kW converter prototype, demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed solutions.
Learning to Transform Natural to Formal Languages

This paper presents a method for inducing transformation rules that map natural-language sentences into a formal query or command language. The approach assumes a formal grammar for the target representation language and learns transformation rules that exploit the non-terminal symbols in this grammar. The learned transformation rules incrementally map a natural-language sentence or its syntactic parse tree into a parse-tree for the target formal language. Experimental results are presented for two corpora. one which maps English instructions into an existing formal coaching language for simulated RoboCup soccer agents, and another which maps English U.S.-geography questions into a database query language. We show that our method performs overall better and faster than previous approaches in both domains.
Training Feedforward Neural Networks by Pruning Algorithm Based on Grey Incidence Analysis

In this paper, a new pruning algorithm based on grey incidence analysis for feedforward neural networks is presented.The pruned network has the optimal topology with avoiding over training and obtaining good generalization.The removed connections and the incorporated connections are chosen according to the degree of grey incidence of each output sequence of the network units. The simulation results show the effectiveness over several test problems.
AIM/CD5L: a key protein in the control of immune homeostasis and inflammatory disease

CD5L, a soluble protein belonging to the SRCR superfamily, is expressed mostly by macrophages in lymphoid and inflamed tissues. The expression of this protein is transcriptionally controlled by LXRs, members of the nuclear receptor family that play major roles in lipid homeostasis. Research undertaken over the last decade has uncovered critical roles of CD5L as a PRR of bacterial and fungal components and in the control of key mechanisms in inflammatory responses, with involvement in processes, such as infection, atherosclerosis, and cancer. In this review, we summarize the current knowledge of CD5L, its roles at the intersection between lipid homeostasis and immune response, and its potential use as a diagnostic biomarker in a variety of diseases, such as TB and liver cirrhosis.
Trastornos emocionales en población urbana mexicana: resultados de un estudio nacional

En la actualidad no existen instrumentos en espanol para la medicion de la intensidad de los sintomas del trastorno obsesivo compulsivo. En la primera parte del estudio se reporta el proceso de la traduccion de la escala Yale Brown para el trastorno obsesivo compulsivo. En la segunda parte se presentan los resultados del estudio preliminar de confiabilidad en 11 pacientes con cinco evaluaciones cada uno. El instrumento demostro tener una adecuada consistencia interna demostrada por el Coeficiente a de Cronbach y por las altas correlaciones significativas entre los evaluadores.
A Multi-Path Architecture for Machine Translation of English Text into American Sign Language Animation

The translation of English text into American Sign Language (ASL) animation tests the limits of traditional MT architectural designs. A new semantic representation is proposed that uses virtual reality 3D scene modeling software to produce spatially complex ASL phenomena called "classifier predicates. " The model acts as an interlingua within a new multi-pathway MT architecture design that also incorporates transfer and direct approaches into a single system.
Statistical modeling of the geometric error in cardiac electrical imaging

Kalman filter approach provides a natural way to include the spatio-temporal prior information in cardiac electrical imaging. This study focuses on the performance of Kalman filter approach with geometric errors present in inverse Electrocardiography (ECG) problem. The geometric errors considered here are the wrong determination of the heart's size and location. In addition to Kalman filtering, we also compare the performances of Tikhonov regularization and Bayesian MAP estimation when geometric errors are present. After presenting the effects of geometric errors on the solutions, a possible model to reduce the effects of the geometric errors in the inverse ECG problem for Bayes-MAP and Kalman solution is studied. To this purpose, a method that is suggested to overcome modeling errors in inverse problem solutions by Heino et. al. is modified and its effectiveness for inverse ECG problem is shown. Here the main idea is to assume geometric errors as additive noise and adding them to the covariance matrices used in the algorithms [1]. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study in which it has been applied to the inverse problem of ECG.