Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fusion of different frequency SAR images for DInSAR-based land subsidence monitoring

In this paper, we present a method for fusing different frequency synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images for improving the accuracy of land subsidence estimation using differential interferometric SAR (DInSAR) technique. Our study area, Kansai International Airport, Osaka, Japan, consists of two landfilled islands, and the subsidence velocity of an island is much larger than that of the other one. In the preliminary examination, we observed that DInSAR analysis using multi-temporal TerraSAR-X (TSX), X-band SAR images, is subject to unwrapping errors in the second island. On the other hand, the analysis using multi-temporal Advanced Land Observing Satellite-2 (ALOS-2) / Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Rader-2 (PALSAR2) images was found to include errors in estimating local subsidence velocity. The proposed method calibrates the mean subsidence velocity derived from TSX images by using the mean subsidence velocity derived from PALSAR-2 for avoiding the unwrapping errors. The validation results indicate the proposed method generates better accuracy of subsidence velocity than those derived from TSX or PALSAR2 images.
SDF1-A Facilitates Lin−/Sca1+ Cell Homing following Murine Experimental Cerebral Ischemia

Background Hematopoietic stem cells mobilize to the peripheral circulation in response to stroke. However, the mechanism by which the brain initiates this mobilization is uncharacterized. Methods Animals underwent a murine intraluminal filament model of focal cerebral ischemia and the SDF1-A pathway was evaluated in a blinded manner via serum and brain SDF1-A level assessment, Lin−/Sca1+ cell mobilization quantification, and exogenous cell migration confirmation; all with or without SDF1-A blockade. Results Bone marrow demonstrated a significant increase in Lin−/Sca1+ cell counts at 24 hrs (272±60%; P<0.05 vs sham). Mobilization of Lin−/Sca1+ cells to blood was significantly elevated at 24 hrs (607±159%; P<0.05). Serum SDF1-A levels were significant at 24 hrs (Sham (103±14), 4 hrs (94±20%, p = NS) and 24 hrs (130±17; p<0.05)). Brain SDF1-A levels were significantly elevated at both 4 hrs and 24 hrs (113±7 pg/ml and 112±10 pg/ml, respectively; p<0.05 versus sham 76±11 pg/ml). Following administration of an SDF1-A antibody, Lin−/Sca1+ cells failed to mobilize to peripheral blood following stroke, despite continued up regulation in bone marrow (stroke bone marrow cell count: 536±65, blood cell count: 127±24; p<0.05 versus placebo). Exogenously administered Lin−/Sca1+ cells resulted in a significant reduction in infarct volume: 42±5% (stroke alone), versus 21±15% (Stroke+Lin−/Sca1+ cells), and administration of an SDF1-A antibody concomitant to exogenous administration of the Lin−/Sca1+ cells prevented this reduction. Following stroke, exogenously administered Lin−/Sca1+ FISH positive cells were significantly reduced when administered concomitant to an SDF1-A antibody as compared to without SDF1-A antibody (10±4 vs 0.7±1, p<0.05). Conclusions SDF1-A appears to play a critical role in modulating Lin−/Sca1+ cell migration to ischemic brain.
Product of Experts for Statistical Parametric Speech Synthesis

Multiple acoustic models are often combined in statistical parametric speech synthesis. Both linear and non-linear functions of an observation sequence are used as features to be modeled. This paper shows that this combination of multiple acoustic models can be expressed as a product of experts (PoE); the likelihoods from the models are scaled, multiplied together, and then normalized. Normally these models are individually trained and only combined at the synthesis stage. This paper discusses a more consistent PoE framework where the models are jointly trained. A training algorithm for PoEs based on linear feature functions and Gaussian experts is derived by generalizing the training algorithm for trajectory HMMs. However for non-linear feature functions or non-Gaussian experts this is not possible, so a scheme based on contrastive divergence learning is described. Experimental results show that the PoE framework provides both a mathematically elegant way to train multiple acoustic models jointly and significant improvements in the quality of the synthesized speech.
Poverty and Worklessness in Britain

Relative poverty in the UK has risen massively since 1979 mainly because of increasing worklessness, rising earnings dispersion and benefits indexed to prices, not wages. So poverty is now at a very high level. The economic forces underlying this are the significant shift in demand against the unskilled which has outpaced the shift in relative supply in the same direction. This has substantially weakened the low-skill labour market which has increased both pay dispersion and worklessness, particularly among low-skilled men. The whole situation has been exacerbated by the very long tail in the skill distribution, so that over 20 per cent of the working age population have very low skills indeed (close to illiterate). Practical policies discussed include improving education and overall well-being for children in the lower part of the ability range, raising wage floors, New Deal policies, tax credits and benefits for the workless. Overall, I would argue that without reducing the long tail in the skill distribution, there is no practical possibility of policy reducing relative poverty to 1979 levels.
Is dispersal guided by the environment? A comparison of interspecific gene flow estimates among differentiated regions of a newt hybrid zone

How frequently genes pass through a hybrid zone may be influenced by the environment. Accordingly, in long hybrid zones that span more than one environmental setting, different patterns may emerge. The varied conditions allow testing of hypotheses on dispersal as a function of the environment. We reconstruct the amount and direction of gene flow across a heterogeneous hybrid zone of two species of marbled newts (Triturus marmoratus and Triturus pygmaeus), in four widely separated areas of the Iberian Peninsula from one mitochondrial and three nuclear genes. The main variables associated with the position of the contact zone are precipitation, rivers, altitude and relief. In some sections of the contact zone, however, its position is not correlated with any environmental factor and is instead determined by the shortest geographical distance between fixed positions at either side (mountains in the East and river in the West). In areas where the position of the zone is stable, gene flow was bidirectional. External data show that T. pygmaeus has superseded T. marmoratus over a large area and here gene flow was unidirectional. The prediction that a major river would reduce gene flow was not confirmed.
Properties of purified T cell subsets. I. In vitro responses to class I vs. class II H-2 alloantigens

In light of the widely accepted view that Ia-restricted L3T4+ T helper cells play a decisive role in controlling the differentiation of Lyt-2+ cells, experiments were designed to examine whether Lyt-2+ cells can respond to antigen in the absence of L3T4+ cells. The results showed that highly purified Lyt-2+ cells gave high primary mixed lymphocyte reactions (MLR) to various class I differences, including both mutant and allelic differences; responses to class II (Ia) differences were generally undetectable with Lyt-2+ cells. The intensity of MLR to class I differences was not affected by addition of anti-L3T4 monoclonal antibodies (mAb) to the cultures or by removing T cells from the stimulator populations. Negative selection experiments showed that Lyt- 2+ cells could respond to class I differences across Ia barriers. MLR of purified Lyt-2+ cells peaked on days 3-4 and then fell sharply; background responses with syngeneic stimulators (auto-MLR) were virtually absent. Parallel experiments with purified L3T4+ cells showed that this subset responded in MLR only to class II (Ia) and not class I differences, reached peak responses only on day 6 rather than days 3-4, and often gave high auto-MLR. Within the first 3-4 d of culture, MLR were generally higher with Lyt-2+ cells than L3T4+ cells. Although no evidence could be found that Ia-restricted L3T4+ cells were required for the response of Lyt-2+ cells, presentation of antigen by Ia+ cells appeared to be essential. Thus, responses were ablated by pretreating stimulator cells with anti-Ia mAb plus C'. Significantly the failure of Lyt-2+ cells to respond to anti-Ia plus C'-treated stimulators could not be restored by adding syngeneic spleen cells; addition of IL-2 led to only a minor (15%) restoration of the response. It is suggested that Ia+ cells provide an obligatory second signal required by Lyt-2+ cells.
Molecular and ecological features of the soft-muzzled trout Salmo obtusirostris (Heckel, 1852) in the Zeta River, Montenegro

This paper reports about the occurrence of soft-muzzled trout in Montenegro. It was found only in the Zeta River, at three localities, always in low abundance. Results of genetic investigation on twelve microsatellite loci (i.e., high Fst and high heterozygozity values) as well as lack of hybridization with the putative brown trout unequivocally confirm that the soft-muzzled trout from the Zeta River is a species distinct from the putative brown (Salmo cf. farioides) and marble (Salmo marmoratus) trout that live in sympatry with it. This paper also confirms high genetic diversity of Zeta River soft - muzzled trout population. Habitat and feeding analyses revealed that soft-muzzled trout reduce the competition with syntopic putative brown trout by displacing as the bottom-dweller in their common type of habitat, as well as by narrowing its feeding niche and feeding dominantly with the benthic macroinvertebrates, the Gammarus shrimps as their far dominant feeding item. Results also revealed that they did not share the same habitat with marble trout. Due to this population low abundance and their importance on species level, Zeta River soft-muzzled trout conservation needs are urgent in terms of in situ protection and repopulation measures.
Valuing Modularity as a Real Option

We provide a general valuation approach for capital budgeting decisions involving the modularization in the design of a system. Within the framework developed by Baldwin and Clark (Baldwin, C. Y., K. B. Clark. 2000. Design Rules: The Power of Modularity. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA), we implement a valuation approach using a numerical procedure based on the least-squares Monte Carlo method proposed by Longstaff and Schwartz (Longstaff, F. A., E. S. Schwartz. 2001. Valuing American options by simulation: A simple least-squares approach. Rev. Financial Stud.14(1) 113--147). The approach is accurate, general, and flexible.
Using Compression to Identify Classes of Inauthentic Texts

Recent events have made it clear that some kinds of technical texts, generated by machine and essentially meaningless, can be confused with authentic, technical texts written by humans. We identify this as a potential problem, since no existing systems for, say the web, can or do discriminate on this basis. We believe that there are subtle, shortand longrange word or even string co-occurrences extant in human texts, but not in many classes of computer generated texts, that can be used to discriminate based on meaning. In this paper we employ the universal lossless source coding algorithms to generate features in a high-dimensional space and then apply support vector machines to discriminate between the classes of authentic and inauthentic texts. Compression profiles for the two kinds of text are distinct— the authentic texts being bounded by various classes of more compressible or less compressible texts that are computer generated. This in turn led to the high prediction accuracy of our models which support our conjecture that there exists a relationship between meaning and compressibility. Our results show that the learning algorithm based upon the compression profile outperformed standard term-frequency text categorization schemes on several non-trivial classes of
The effects of apelin on mesenteric ischemia and reperfusion damage in an experimental rat model.

OBJECTIVE Intestinal ischemia-reperfusion (I/R) injury is associated with high morbidity and mortality rates. There is ongoing research to find an effective preventive or treatment agent. We aimed to evaluate the effects of apelin 13 (AP) on intestinal I/R injury in a rat model. MATERIAL AND METHODS Twenty-four male Sprague-Dawley rats aged 6-8 weeks and weighing 280±20 g were equally divided into three groups (control, I/R and I/R+AP). The control group underwent superior mesenteric artery (SMA) mobilization alone without any clamping. In the I/R and I/R+AP groups, an atraumatic microvascular bulldog clamp was placed across the SMA at its point of origin from the aorta. In the I/R+AP group, 2 μg/kg/d apelin was administered intraperitoneally. After 60 minutes of ischemia, relaparotomy was performed to remove the microvascular clamp on the SMA for 3 hours of reperfusion. After 3 hours, tissue samples were obtained for biochemical [malondialdehyde (MDA) and glutathione (GSH) levels] and histopathological analyses. RESULTS MDA levels were significantly higher in the I/R group compared to the control group. Although MDA levels were lower in the I/R+AP group compared tothe I/R group, the difference was not statistically significant. There was also no significant difference between the I/R+AP and I/R groups regarding GSH levels. The median histopathological grade was significantly lower in the I/R+AP group compared to the I/R group (p=0.001). CONCLUSION Apelin appeared to have a positive effect on oxidative injury; this did not reach statistical significance. Thus, the role of apelin and associated findings in the initial treatment of intestinal ischemia needs further large-scale animal studies before human use.
Oriented Object Proposals

In this paper, we propose a new approach to generate oriented object proposals (OOPs) to reduce the detection error caused by various orientations of the object. To this end, we propose to efficiently locate object regions according to pixelwise object probability, rather than measuring the objectness from a set of sampled windows. We formulate the proposal generation problem as a generative probabilistic model such that object proposals of different shapes (i.e., sizes and orientations) can be produced by locating the local maximum likelihoods. The new approach has three main advantages. First, it helps the object detector handle objects of different orientations. Second, as the shapes of the proposals may vary to fit the objects, the resulting proposals are tighter than the sampling windows with fixed sizes. Third, it avoids massive window sampling, and thereby reducing the number of proposals while maintaining a high recall. Experiments on the PASCAL VOC 2007 dataset show that the proposed OOP outperforms the state-of-the-art fast methods. Further experiments show that the rotation invariant property helps a class-specific object detector achieve better performance than the state-of-the-art proposal generation methods in either object rotation scenarios or general scenarios. Generating OOPs is very fast and takes only 0.5s per image.
Development and Validation of a Measure of Threatening Gender Stereotypes in Science

Despite increasing evidence that negative stereotypes adversely affect the career development of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, measuring their effects has been a challenge. This study focuses specifically on the sciences, since some, particularly physics, are notably imbalanced in terms of gender diversity. Our aim was to develop and begin to validate a measure of gender stereotypes in science, referred to as the Stereotype Threat in Science Scale-Gender (STSS-G). Participants consisted of 629 undergraduate women enrolled in biology, chemistry, and physics courses. Results of exploratory and factor mixture analyses yielded support for a 7-item scale consisting of two factors, social identity and identity threat, and five latent classes underlying a heterogeneous population. Results of structural equation modeling indicated that the two latent variables were significantly associated with scores on existing measures of science identity and stereotype threat. The construct, differential, and concurrent validity of the STSS-G are discussed.
An Ensemble Approach to Classifier Construction based on Bootstrap Aggregation

paper, we introduce a new approach to the classification of streaming data based on bootstrap aggregation (bagging). The proposed approach creates an ensemble model by using ID3 classifier, naive Bayesian classifier, and k-Nearest-Neighbor classifier for a learning scheme where each classifier gives the weighted prediction. ID3, naive Bayesian, and k-Nearest- Neighbor classifiers are very well known data mining methods, which have been already used in many real life classification problems. The proposed approach addresses the practical problems of the classification of streaming data and successfully tested on a number of benchmark problems including large intrusion detection dataset from the UCI machine learning repository to produce a comparison with the established approaches. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed ensemble classifier achieved high classification rates and generated very low misclassification error.
Factors contributing to teachers' successful implementation of IT

It has become increasingly important for educators to examine successful ICT implementations with the aim of understanding precisely what makes them successful in teaching and learning. In this study, an analysis of data from qualitative case studies of four Canadian schools illuminates factors that facilitate successful ICT implementation. Findings suggest that informal ICT education, such as 'just-in-time' learning, is most influential. Furthermore, supportive and collaborative relationships among teachers, a commitment to pedagogically sound implementation of new technologies, and Principals who encourage teachers to engage in their own learning are viewed as highly useful factors.
An Efficient Algorithm for Mutiple Direction of Arrival Tracking Based on the Constrained Projection Approximation Approach and Kalman Filter

In this paper, we present a direction of arrival (DOA) tracking scheme involving a subspace tracking algorithm and a Kalman filter. The proposed subspace tracking algorithm is based on an interpretation of the signal subspace as the solution of a minimization of a constrained projection approximation task. We show that we can apply the matrix inversion lemma to solve this problem recursively. The proposed algorithm avoids the orthonormalization process after each update for post-processing algorithms which need orthonormal basis of the signal subspace. The DOA's are obtained via a Newton-type method initialized with the DOA's predicted by the Kalman filter. The tracking capability of the proposed algorithm is verified by computer simulations in a scenario involving targets with crossing trajectories.
Technology as Teammate: Examining the Role of External Cognition in Support of Team Cognitive Processes

In this paper we advance team theory by describing how cognition occurs across the distribution of members and the artifacts and technology that support their efforts. We draw from complementary theorizing coming out of cognitive engineering and cognitive science that views forms of cognition as external and extended and integrate this with theorizing on macrocognition in teams. Two frameworks are described that provide the groundwork for advancing theory and aid in the development of more precise measures for understanding team cognition via focus on artifacts and the technologies supporting their development and use. This includes distinctions between teamwork and taskwork and the notion of general and specific competencies from the organizational sciences along with the concepts of oﬄoading and scaffolding from the cognitive sciences. This paper contributes to the team cognition literature along multiple lines. First, it aids theory development by synthesizing a broad set of perspectives on the varied forms of cognition emerging in complex collaborative contexts. Second, it supports research by providing diagnostic guidelines to study how artifacts are related to team cognition. Finally, it supports information systems designers by more precisely describing how to conceptualize team-supporting technology and artifacts. As such, it provides a means to more richly understand process and performance as it occurs within sociotechnical systems. Our overarching objective is to show how team cognition can both be more clearly conceptualized and more precisely measured by integrating theory from cognitive engineering and the cognitive and organizational sciences.
In Situ Random Microseeding and Streak Seeding Used for Growth of Crystals of Cold-Adapted β-d-Galactosidases: Crystal Structure of βDG from Arthrobacter sp. 32cB

There is an increasing demand for cold-adapted enzymes in a wide range of industrial branches. Nevertheless, structural information about them is still scarce. The knowledge of crystal structures is important to understand their mode of action and to design genetically engineered enzymes with enhanced activity. The most difficult task and the limiting step in structural studies of cold-adapted enzymes is their crystallization, which should provide well-diffracting monocrystals. Herein, we present a combination of well-established crystallization methods with new protocols based on crystal seeding that allowed us to obtain well-diffracting crystals of two cold-adapted β-d-galactosidases (βDGs) from Paracoccus sp. 32d (ParβDG) and from Arthrobacter sp. 32cB (ArthβDG). Structural studies of both βDGs are important for designing efficient and inexpensive enzymatic tools for lactose removal and synthesis of galacto-oligosaccharides (GOS) and hetero-oligosaccharides (HOS), food additives proved to have a beneficial effect on the human immune system and intestinal flora. We also present the first crystal structure of ArthβDG (PDB ID: 6ETZ) determined at 1.9 A resolution, and compare it to the ParβDG structure (PDB ID: 5EUV). In contrast to tetrameric lacZ βDG and hexameric βDG from Arthrobacter C2-2, both of these βDGs are dimers, unusual for the GH2 family. Additionally, we discuss the various crystallization seeding protocols, which allowed us to obtain ParβDG and ArthβDG monocrystals suitable for diffraction experiments.
Recognizing Occluded 3D Faces Using an Efficient ICP Variant

This paper proposes an efficient variant of the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm for 3D face recognition in the presence of occlusion. The new ICP variant improves the original one in two aspects: the computational efficiency and the robustness to occlusion changes. For the former one, a facial surface is firstly described as a Spherical Depth Map (SDM), based on which uniform down-sampling can be conveniently applied to remove redundant vertices, aiming to decrease the consumed time of ICP. For the latter one, since occlusions can be considered as face outliers, a rejection strategy is embedded into ICP to eliminate their impacts. The proposed method is validated in face verification and identification scenarios on the Bosphorus database, and the experimental results clearly demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency.