Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Association of expiratory airway dysfunction with marked obesity in healthy adult dogs.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effects of obesity on pulmonary function in healthy adult dogs. ANIMALS 36 Retrievers without cardiopulmonary disease. PROCEDURES Dogs were assigned to 1 of 3 groups on the basis of body condition score (1 through 9): nonobese (score, 4.5 to 5.5), moderately obese (score, 6.0 to 6.5), and markedly obese (score, 7.0 to 9.0). Pulmonary function tests performed in conscious dogs included spirometry and measurement of inspiratory and expiratory airway resistance (R(aw)) and specific R(aw) (sR(aw)) during normal breathing and during hyperpnea via head-out whole-body plethysmography. Functional residual capacity (FRC; measured by use of helium dilution), diffusion capacity of lungs for carbon monoxide (DLCO), and arterial blood gas variables (PaO(2), PaCO(2), and alveolar-arterial gradient) were assessed. RESULTS During normal breathing, body condition score did not influence airway function, DLCO, or arterial blood gas variables. During hyperpnea, expiratory sR(aw) was significantly greater in markedly obese dogs than nonobese dogs and R(aw) was significantly greater in markedly obese dogs, compared with nonobese and moderately obese dogs. Although not significantly different, markedly obese dogs had a somewhat lower FRC, compared with other dogs. CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE In dogs, obesity appeared to cause airflow limitation during the expiratory phase of breathing, but this was only evident during hyperpnea. This suggests that flow limitation is dynamic and likely occurs in the distal (rather than proximal) portions of the airways. Further studies are warranted to localize the flow-limited segment and understand whether obesity is linked to exercise intolerance via airway dysfunction in dogs.
Crowdsourcing Based API Search via Leveraging Twitter Lists Information

With the rapid growth of open APIs on the Internet, searching appropriate APIs for a given query becomes a challenging problem. General API search systems, such as ProgrammableWeb, usually can not provide satisfactory results of API search due to the simple keywords matching between queries and API information offered by providers (e.g. name and description). In this paper, we propose a crowdsourcing based search approach named CrowdAPS to effectively find the appropriate APIs. Specifically, CrowdAPS leverages Twitter lists, which is a tool used by individual users to organize accounts that interest them on semantics. List meta-data, including list name and description, is generated from collective intelligence and can be used by Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) model to acquire semantic similarity between APIs and queries. Furthermore, CrowdAPS exploits list number to infer the popularity of APIs. The final search result relies on the integration of semantic similarity and popularity. Comprehensive experiment based on real-world datasets crawled from ProgrammableWeb and Twitter demonstrates the effectiveness of CrowdAPS.
The Significance of Race for Neighborhood Social Cohesion: Perceived Difficulty of Collective Action in Majority Black Neighborhoods

This article explores William Julius Wilson’s contentions about community cultural traits by examining racial differences in middle class neighborhoods’ levels of social cohesion. Specifically, we explore the perceived difficulty of these actions—as opposed to general pessimism about their outcomes—as a potential explanation for low levels of instrumental collective action in Black middle class neighborhoods. Our results indicate that, regardless of other neighborhood factors, majority Black neighborhoods have low levels of social cohesion. We also find that this racial disparity is statistically explained by shared perceptions about the amount of effort required to engage in group action in different neighborhoods. These findings emphasize that residence in a majority Black area—and the well-informed perceptions accompanying it—affect the lived experience of neighbors, even when they are middle class.
Towards natural bipedal walking: Virtual gravity compensation and capture point control

To achieve dynamic balancing and natural walking for a bipedal robot we propose a novel force-based control framework. Given 6-dimensional pose vector representing robot's posture and attitude, desired force and moment in the task space are computed. To generate the force and moment as desired, we propose the use of virtual gravity compensation (VGC), essentially a dynamic controller that outputs joint torques. By using the VGC-based balancing controller, the robot can maintain a desired pose stably even on a tilting plate. We also propose to extend the VGC-based balancing controller to implement a walking algorithm that controls the desired pose in terms of capture point using a finite state machine. The control algorithm was tested with torque-controlled humanoid platforms developed by our group to demonstrate robust and natural gaits under various walking environments. The robot walked robustly on irregular surfaces and recovered from external pushes. The robot also exhibited natural walking motions such as pendulum-like leg swings and heel-to-toe transitions, a characteristic feature of human gait, all without explicitly designating joint angle trajectories.
Heritability of resistance to oxidative stress in early life

Oxidative stress has recently been suggested to play an important role in life‐history evolution, but little is known about natural variation and heritability of this physiological trait. Here, we explore phenotypic variation in resistance to oxidative stress of cross‐fostered yellow‐legged gull (Larus cachinnans) chicks. Resistance to oxidative stress was not related to plasma antioxidants at hatching, which are mostly derived from maternal investment into eggs. Common environmental effects on phenotypic variation in resistance to oxidative stress were not significant. Heritability was relatively low and nonsignificant in hatchlings, but interestingly, the chicks of age 8 days showed high and significant heritability (h2 = 0.59). Our results suggest that resistance to oxidative stress is determined mainly by the genotype as chicks grow. Further work is required to explore the genetic role of oxidative stress in life‐history evolution.
Monte Carlo Methods Final Project Nests and Tootsie Pops : Bayesian Sampling with Monte Carlo

We explore two methods for the problem of computing the evidence or integrated likelihood Z under a model; the Nested Sampling method and the TootsiePop algorithm. After presenting their main features, we discuss their similarities and differences, along with their drawbacks and the key objections they have received from other authors. We provide explicit implementations of the two methods and test them on two practical problems: a model gaussian problem and an example of statistical mechanics using the Ising Model.
Kinetic modeling of the dynamic PET brain data using blind source separation methods

Image-based definition of regions of interest is a typical prerequisite step for estimation of time-activity curves in dynamic positron emission tomography (PET). This procedure is done manually by a human operator and therefore suffers from subjective errors. Another such problem is to estimate the input function. It can be measured from arterial blood or it can be searched for a vascular structure on the images which is hard to be done, unreliable, and often impossible. In this study, we focus on blind source separation methods with no needs of manual interaction. Recently, we developed sparse blind source separation and deconvolution (S-BSS-vecDC) method for separation of original sources from dynamic medical data based on probability modeling and Variational Bayes approximation methodology. We apply the methods on dynamic brain PET data and application and comparison of our S-BSS-vecDC algorithm with those of similar assumptions are given. The S-BSS-vecDC algorithm is publicly available for download.
The Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI): A Multidimensional Self-Report Instrument for the Assessment of Female Sexual Function

This article presents the development of a brief, self-report measure of female sexual function. Initial face validity testing of questionnaire items, identified by an expert panel, was followed by a study aimed at further refining the questionnaire. It was administered to 131 normal controls and 128 age-matched subjects with female sexual arousal disorder (FSAD) at five research centers. Based on clinical interpretations of a principal components analysis, a 6- domain structure was identified, which included desire, subjective arousal, lubrication, orgasm, satisfaction, and pain. Overall test-retest reliability coefficients were high for each of the individual domains (r=0.79 to 0.86) and a high degree of internal consistency was observed (Cronbach’s alpha values of 0.82 and higher) Good construct validity was demonstrated by highly significant mean difference scores between the FSAD and control groups for each of the domains (p<0.001). Additionally, divergent validity with a scale of marital satisfaction was observed. These results support the reliability and psychometric(as well as clinical) validity of the Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI) in the assessment of key dimensions of female sexual function in clinical and nonclinical samples. Our findings also suggest important gender differences in the patterning of female sexual function in comparison with similar questionnaire studies in males.
Generation of Corneal Epithelial Cells from Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells Derived from Human Dermal Fibroblast and Corneal Limbal Epithelium

Induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells can be established from somatic cells. However, there is currently no established strategy to generate corneal epithelial cells from iPS cells. In this study, we investigated whether corneal epithelial cells could be differentiated from iPS cells. We tested 2 distinct sources: human adult dermal fibroblast (HDF)-derived iPS cells (253G1) and human adult corneal limbal epithelial cells (HLEC)-derived iPS cells (L1B41). We first established iPS cells from HLEC by introducing the Yamanaka 4 factors. Corneal epithelial cells were successfully induced from the iPS cells by the stromal cell-derived inducing activity (SDIA) differentiation method, as Pax6+/K12+ corneal epithelial colonies were observed after prolonged differentiation culture (12 weeks or later) in both the L1B41 and 253G1 iPS cells following retinal pigment epithelial and lens cell induction. Interestingly, the corneal epithelial differentiation efficiency was higher in L1B41 than in 253G1. DNA methylation analysis revealed that a small proportion of differentially methylated regions still existed between L1B41 and 253G1 iPS cells even though no significant difference in methylation status was detected in the specific corneal epithelium-related genes such as K12, K3, and Pax6. The present study is the first to demonstrate a strategy for corneal epithelial cell differentiation from human iPS cells, and further suggests that the epigenomic status is associated with the propensity of iPS cells to differentiate into corneal epithelial cells.
Design of dual-band frequency selective surfaces with gridded-square elements

Two examples are demonstrated to design a narrow dual-band Frequency Selective Surfaces with gridded-square elements respectively. The equivalent circuit model combined with optimization algorithm, differential evolution strategy is employed. The simulation results are in good agreement with the measurement results. The good results are obtained in very short computational time and trial-and-error process is avoided.
The Blizzard Challenge 2010

The Blizzard Challenge 2010 was the sixth annual Blizzard Chal- lenge. As in 2008 and 2009, UK English and Mandarin Chinese were the chosen languages for the 2010 Challenge, which was again organised by the University of Edinburgh with assistance from the other members of the Blizzard Challenge committee - Prof. Keiichi Tokuda and Prof. Alan Black. Two English cor- pora were used: the 'rjs' corpus provided by Phonetic Arts, and the 'roger' corpus from the University of Edinburgh. The Man- darin corpus was provided by the National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation of Chinese Academy of Sci- ences. As usual, all participants (including those with limited re- sources or limited experience in these languages) had the option of using labels that were provided for both corpora and for the test sentences. The tasks were organised in the form of 'hubs' and 'spokes' where each hub task involved building a general-purpose voice and each spoke task involved building a voice for a specific situation or under specified conditions. A set of test sentences was released to participants, who were given a limited time in which to synthesise them and submit the synthetic speech. An online listening test was conducted to evalu- ate naturalness, intelligibility and degree of similarity to the orig- inal speaker. Index Terms: Blizzard Challenge, speech synthesis, evaluation, listening test
The Modulation Transfer Function for Speech Intelligibility

We systematically determined which spectrotemporal modulations in speech are necessary for comprehension by human listeners. Speech comprehension has been shown to be robust to spectral and temporal degradations, but the specific relevance of particular degradations is arguable due to the complexity of the joint spectral and temporal information in the speech signal. We applied a novel modulation filtering technique to recorded sentences to restrict acoustic information quantitatively and to obtain a joint spectrotemporal modulation transfer function for speech comprehension, the speech MTF. For American English, the speech MTF showed the criticality of low modulation frequencies in both time and frequency. Comprehension was significantly impaired when temporal modulations <12 Hz or spectral modulations <4 cycles/kHz were removed. More specifically, the MTF was bandpass in temporal modulations and low-pass in spectral modulations: temporal modulations from 1 to 7 Hz and spectral modulations <1 cycles/kHz were the most important. We evaluated the importance of spectrotemporal modulations for vocal gender identification and found a different region of interest: removing spectral modulations between 3 and 7 cycles/kHz significantly increases gender misidentifications of female speakers. The determination of the speech MTF furnishes an additional method for producing speech signals with reduced bandwidth but high intelligibility. Such compression could be used for audio applications such as file compression or noise removal and for clinical applications such as signal processing for cochlear implants.
Expression of Hepatoma-Derived Growth Factor Is Correlated with Lymph Node Metastasis and Prognosis of Gastric Carcinoma

Purpose: Hepatoma-derived growth factor (HDGF) is a unique nuclear/growth factor and might play an important role in the development and progression of carcinomas. In the present study, association of HDGF expression with recurrence and prognosis of gastric carcinoma was examined. Patients and Methods: HDGF expression in 317 patients with gastric carcinoma (233 males and 84 females) with ages ranging from 26 to 81 years (median, 60 years) was analyzed by immunohistochemistry. Samples with >90% of tumor cells to express positive immunoreactivity similar to or stronger than that in endothelial cells both for nucleus and cytoplasm were regarded as HDGF index level 2, and others as HDGF index level 1. Results: One hundred and eighty-two cases showed level 1 HDGF expression, whereas 135 cases showed level 2 HDGF expression. Patients with level 2 expression showed higher rates of proximal tumor location (P < 0.0001), large tumor size (P < 0.0001), infiltrative tumor growth (P < 0.0001), presence of vascular and lymphatic invasion (P < 0.0001 for both), presence of lymph node metastasis (P < 0.0001), deep tumor invasion (P < 0.0001), and poorer disease-free and overall survival (P < 0.0001 for both) compared to those with level 1 expression. Multivariate analysis revealed HDGF expression level as an independent prognosticator for disease-free and overall survival. Conclusion: HDGF expression level was shown to be a prognostic factor for gastric carcinoma.
of Recent Trends in Engineering , Vol 2 , No . 4 , November 2009 5 Hybrid Algorithmical Approach for VLSI Physical Design – Floorplanning

─The traditional floor planning is that usually handles only block packing to minimize silicon area, So modern floor planning could be formulated as a fixedoutline floor planning. It uses some algorithms such as BTREE representation, simulated annealing and adaptive fast simulated annealing. Comparing above three algorithms the better efficient solution came from adaptive fast simulated annealing, it leads to faster and more stable convergence to the desired floorplan solutions. But the results are not an optimal solution. To get an optimal solution it is necessary to choose effective algorithm. Combining global and local search is a strategy used by many hybrid optimization approaches. Memetic Algorithm (MA) is an evolutionary algorithm that includes one or more local search phases within its evolutionary cycle. MA applies some sort of local search to improve the fitness of individuals in the population. The algorithm combines a hierarchical design technique, Genetic algorithms, constructive techniques and advanced local search to solve VLSI floor planning problem. MA quickly produces optimal or nearly optimal solutions for all the popular benchmark problems. Index Terms ─Floorplan Problem, Memetic algorithm, Genetic Algorithm, Delay, Cut size.
Discrete-time Robust Fault Detection Observer design: A genetic algorithm approach

With the fast development of digital computers, more industrial processes are controlled by digital processors and there is an increasing demand for improving the system reliabilities. The robustness in model-based fault detection has received a lot of attention during the last two decades, and RFDO (robust fault detection observer) forms an important branch of fault detection. However, most of current research focuses on continuous-time domain and needs relative more computation. Further studies on DRFDO (discrete-time robust fault detection observer) are required. In this paper, a frequency weighted robustness index is proposed and a left-eigenvector assignment based DRFDO design method is presented. A genetic algorithm is applied to optimize such an observer. As illustrated in the simulation, a better disturbance attenuation and faster fault detection are achieved. The main contribution of this paper is that the disturbance is attenuated further by combining frequency dependent performance indices and genetic algorithms.
Contour localization based on matching dense HexHoG descriptors

The ability to detect and localize an object of interest from a captured image containing a cluttered background is an essential function for an autonomous robot operating in an unconstrained environment. In this paper, we present a novel approach to refining the pose estimate of an object and directly labelling its contours by dense local feature matching. We perform this task using a new image descriptor we have developed called the HexHoG. Our key novel contribution is the formulation of HexHoG descriptors comprising hierarchical groupings of rotationally invariant (S)HoG fields, sampled on a hexagonal grid. These HexHoG groups are centred on detected edges and therefore sample the image relatively densely. This formulation allows arbitrary levels of rotation-invariant HexHoG grouped descriptors to be implemented efficiently by recursion. We present the results of an evaluation based on the ALOI image dataset which demonstrates that our proposed approach can significantly improve an initial pose estimation based on image matching using standard SIFT descriptors. In addition, this investigation presents promising contour labelling results based on processing 2892 images derived from the 1000 image ALOI dataset.
Hubble Space Telescope far-ultraviolet imaging of the jet in 3C 273 : a common emission component from optical to X-rays

We present far-ultraviolet (far-UV) observations at ∼150 nm of the jet of quasar 3C 273 obtained with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) Solar Blind Channel onboard the Hubble Space Telescope. While the jet morphology is very similar to that in the optical and near-UV, the spectral energy distributions of the jet's subregions show an upturn in νfν at 150 nm compared to 300 nm everywhere in the jet. Moreover, the 150-nm flux is compatible with extrapolating the X-ray power law down to the UV region. This constitutes strong support for a common origin of the jet's far-UV and X-ray emission. It implies that even a substantial fraction of the visible light in the X-ray brightest parts of the jet arises from the same spectral component as the X-rays, as had been suggested earlier based on Spitzer Space Telescope observations. We argue that the identification of this UV/X-ray component opens up the possibility to establish the synchrotron origin of the X-ray emission by optical polarimetry.
Interactive Infrastructures: Towards a Language for Distributed Interfaces

An interactive infrastructure allows people to have access to the parameters of an interactive environment in real time, potentially leading to an increased productivity, decrease of energy and material consumption, and generally greater satisfaction and experience. However, there is a need for a universal communication language between the elements of such an infrastructure and the real world. A language that can connect the Internet of Things, media contents, and people. The workshop will bring together a number of participants from the field of Tangible and Embedded Interaction, who have ideas, insights and experience in developing communication languages. Rather than a symposium or mini-conference format, the format for the day is that of a working group consisting experts and contributors. This working group will establish the groundwork for the interactive infrastructures language.
Origin of the abundance patterns in Galactic globular clusters: constraints on dynamical and chemical properties of globular clusters

Aims. We analyse the effects of a first generation of fast rotating massive stars on the dynamical and chemical properties of globular clusters. Methods. We use stellar models of fast rotating massive stars, losing mass through a slow mechanical equatorial winds to produce material rich in H-burning products. We propose that stars with high Na and low O abundances (hereafter anomalous stars) are formed from matter made of slow winds of individual massive stars and of interstellar matter. The proportion of slow wind and of interstellar material is fixed in order to reproduce the observed Li-Na anticorrelation in NGC 6752. Results. In the case that globular clusters, during their lifetime, did not lose any stars, we found that to reproduce the observed ratio of normal to anomalous stars, a flat initial mass function (IMF) is needed, with typically a slope x = 0.55 (a Salpeter’s IMF has x = 1.35). In the case that globular clusters suffer from an evaporation of normal stars, the IMF slope can be steeper: to have x = 1.35, about 96% of the normal stars would be lost. We make predictions for the distribution of stars as a function of their [O/Na] and obtain quite reasonable agreement with that one observed for NGC 6752. Predictions for the number fraction of stars with different values of helium, of the 12 C/ 13 Ca nd 16 O/ 17 O ratios are discussed, as well as the expected relations between values of [O/Na] and those of helium, of [C/N], of 12 C/ 13 C and of 16 O/ 17 O. Future observations might test these predictions. We also provide predictions for the present day mass of the clusters expressed in units of mass of the gas used to form stars, and for the way the present day mass is distributed between the first and second generation of stars and the stellar remnants.