Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Association between Psychological Distress and Alcohol Consumption Behaviour in Risky Driving

The present research explores how mental health related factors such as psychological distress and alcohol consumption patterns predict risky driving behaviour, as measured by the Driver Behaviour Questionnaire (DBQ). Questionnaire data from 1,365 drivers who took part in a case-control study were used. Psychological distress was seen to be predictive of errors, lapses, violations and aggressive violations, whilst alcohol consumption was associated with violations and aggressive violations only. These findings demonstrate the significant contribution of mental health in risky driving behaviour.
The dynamic HomeFinder: evaluating dynamic queries in a real-estate information exploration system

We designed, implemented, and evaluated a new concept for visualizing and searching databases utilizing direct manipulation called dynamic queries. Dynamic queries allow users to formulate queries by adjusting graphical widgets, such as sliders, and see the results immediately. By providing a graphical visualization of the database and search results, users can find trends and exceptions easily. User testing was done with eighteen undergraduate students who performed significantly faster using a dynamic queries interface compared to both a natural language system and paper printouts. The interfaces were used to explore a real-estate database and find homes meeting specific search criteria.
A key agreement scheme for smart cards using biometrics

Locking the cryptographic key is as imperative as the security of the confidential data. A secure key agreement protocol ensures a secure session between two or more parties. Once a key has been shared, the users can communicate resourcefully. The authors look to certify secure key sharing making use of a transmitter engendered vth order polynomial and the users personal biometrics like fingerprints. Genuine points are generated, using the key and the biometrics, which lie on the polynomial. Chaff points are added in order to upsurge confusion and augment security. These points united with the Message Authentication Code (MAC) of the key and timestamp form the fuzzy vault which is communicated to the other end. The receiver needs to select the genuine points using the biometric features to retrieve the cryptographic key.
A High Throughput MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks in Surveillance Applications

Monitoring a given environment is a kind of major applications in wireless sensor networks. These WSNs should often meet special requirements, such as high throughput support, service differentiation support and energy efficiency. However, related works always emphasis on one or two of them, and hardly consider comprehensively. In this paper, we propose a new-style MAC protocol, which based on the above-mentioned factors. Cluster-based multi-hop scheduling and priority-aware schedule switching are crucial technologies in the MAC protocol. Moreover, idle listening energy consumption is reduced by using a synchronized duty cycle. Experiments show that the proposed strategy achieves our goals. The energy consumption of the radio module is reduced while high throughput is provided.
Performance Analysis of Binary and Quaternary Modulations on a κ − μ Frequency-Nonselective Fading Channel

This paper presents the performance analysis of binary and quaternary modulations on a κ−μ nonselective fading channel. The κ−μ distribution is used to model a frequency-nonselective fading channel considering similar time delays for the scattered waves arriving at the receiver. The modulations analyzed are: BPSK, BFSK Coherent, BFSK Noncoherent, DPSK, QPSK, OQPSK and π/4−DQPSK. This analysis shows that BPSK, QPSK and OQPSK present a better performance than the other modulations with respect to the average bit error probability. It will be shown that for one value of the Nakagami parameter, m, it is possible to obtain different average bit error probability performance. Thus, it permits better fit of the experimental data to the theoretical curves, by choosing the appropriates values of the κ−μ parameters.
Natalizumab Exerts Direct Signaling Capacity and Supports a Pro-Inflammatory Phenotype in Some Patients with Multiple Sclerosis

Natalizumab is a recombinant monoclonal antibody raised against integrin alpha-4 (CD49d). It is approved for the treatment of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), a chronic inflammatory autoimmune disease of the CNS. While having shown high therapeutic efficacy, treatment by natalizumab has been linked to progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML) as a serious adverse effect. Furthermore, drug cessation sometimes induces rebound disease activity of unknown etiology. Here we investigated whether binding of this adhesion-blocking antibody to T lymphocytes could modulate their phenotype by direct induction of intracellular signaling events. Primary CD4+ T lymphocytes either from healthy donors and treated with natalizumab in vitro or from MS patients receiving their very first dose of natalizumab were analyzed. Natalizumab induced a mild upregulation of IL-2, IFN-γ and IL-17 expression in activated primary human CD4+ T cells propagated ex vivo from healthy donors, consistent with a pro-inflammatory costimulatory effect on lymphokine expression. Along with this, natalizumab binding triggered rapid MAPK/ERK phosphorylation. Furthermore, it decreased CD49d surface expression on effector cells within a few hours. Sustained CD49d downregulation could be attributed to integrin internalization and degradation. Importantly, also CD4+ T cells from some MS patients receiving their very first dose of natalizumab produced more IL-2, IFN-γ and IL-17 already 24 h after infusion. Together these data indicate that in addition to its adhesion-blocking mode of action natalizumab possesses mild direct signaling capacities, which can support a pro-inflammatory phenotype of peripheral blood T lymphocytes. This might explain why a rebound of disease activity or IRIS is observed in some MS patients after natalizumab cessation.
An Enhanced Primal-Dual Method For Total Variation-Based

The filling in of missing region in the image is known as image inpainting. Recently various methods have been proposed to tackle the inpainting problem. But they had their own disadvantages, but one of the best method chosen for inpainting problem is ―primal-dual method for total variation-based wavelet domain inpainting‖(9). But it is not up-to-the-mark, because it has lag-city-of -time (i.e. it take more number of iterations) due to this there is a delay in time to produce the output. Therefore in this paper we proposed an efficient scheme called ―an enhanced primal dual method for total variation based wavelet domain inpainting‖ which put fourths the work done in image inpainting within a mean time to get the output by using the ―primal dual vertex cover algorithm‖(EPDVC) (11).
Is climate change responsible for changing landslide activity in high mountains?

Climate change, manifested by an increase in mean, minimum, and maximum temperatures and by more intense rainstorms, is becoming more evident in many regions. An important consequence of these changes may be an increase in landslides in high mountains. More research, however, is necessary to detect changes in landslide magnitude and frequency related to contemporary climate, particularly in alpine regions hosting glaciers, permafrost, and snow. These regions not only are sensitive to changes in both temperature and precipitation, but are also areas in which landslides are ubiquitous even under a stable climate. We analyze a series of catastrophic slope failures that occurred in the mountains of Europe, the Americas, and the Caucasus since the end of the 1990s. We distinguish between rock and ice avalanches, debris flows from de‐glaciated areas, and landslides that involve dynamic interactions with glacial and river processes. Analysis of these events indicates several important controls on slope stability in high mountains, including: the non‐linear response of firn and ice to warming; three‐dimensional warming of subsurface bedrock and its relation to site geology; de‐glaciation accompanied by exposure of new sediment; and combined short‐term effects of precipitation and temperature. Based on several case studies, we propose that the following mechanisms can significantly alter landslide magnitude and frequency, and thus hazard, under warming conditions: (1) positive feedbacks acting on mass movement processes that after an initial climatic stimulus may evolve independently of climate change; (2) threshold behavior and tipping points in geomorphic systems; (3) storage of sediment and ice involving important lag‐time effects. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Image Copy-Move Forgery Detection Based on SURF

As the advent and growing popularity of image editing software, digital images can be manipulated easily without leaving obvious visual clues. If the tampered images are abused, it may lead to potential social, legal or private consequences. To this end, it’s very necessary and also challenging to find effective methods to detect digital image forgeries. In this paper, a fast method to detect image copy-move forgery is proposed based on the SURF (Speed up Robust Features) descriptors, which are invariant to rotation, scaling etc. Results of experiments indicate that the proposed method is valid in detecting the image region duplication and quite robust to additive noise and blurring.
Eurographics Symposium on Point-based Graphics (2007) Interactive Editing of Large Point Clouds

This paper describes a new out-of-core multi-resolution data structure for real-time visualization and interactive editing of large point clouds. In addition, an editing system is discussed that makes use of the novel data structure to provide interactive editing tools for large scanner data sets. The new data structure provides efficient rendering and allows for handling very large data sets using out-of-core storage. Unlike related previous approaches, it also provides dynamic operations for online insertion, deletion and modification of points with time mostly independent of scene complexity. This permits local editing of huge models in real time while maintaining a full multi-resolution representation for visualization. The data structure is used to implement a prototypical editing system for large point clouds. It provides real-time local editing tools for huge data sets as well as a two-resolution scripting mode for planning large, non-local changes which are subsequently performed in an externally efficient offline computation. We evaluate our implementation on several synthetic and real-world examples of sizes up to 63GB.
miRNAs as therapeutic agents in neurodegeneration : a pilot study

Alzheimer's disease (AD) and related tauopathies comprise a large group of neurodegenerative diseases associated with the pathological aggregation of tau protein. While much effort has focused on understanding the function of tau, little is known about the endogenous mechanisms regulating tau metabolism in vivo and how these contribute to disease. Previously, we have shown that the microRNA (miRNA) cluster miR-132/212 is downregulated in tauopathies such as AD. Here, we report that miR-132/212 deficiency in mice leads to increased tau expression, phosphorylation and aggregation. Using reporter assays and cell-based studies, we demonstrate that miR-132 directly targets tau mRNA to regulate its expression. We identified GSK-3β and PP2B as effectors of abnormal tau phosphorylation in vivo. Deletion of miR-132/212 induced tau aggregation in mice expressing endogenous or human mutant tau, an effect associated with autophagy dysfunction. Conversely, treatment of AD mice with miR-132 mimics restored in part memory function and tau metabolism. Finally, miR-132 and miR-212 levels correlated with insoluble tau and cognitive impairment in humans. These findings support a role for miR-132/212 in the regulation of tau pathology in mice and humans and provide new alternatives for therapeutic development.
LAIR: A Language for Automated Semantics-Aware Text Sanitization Based on Frame Semantics

We present \lair{}: A domain-specific language that enables users to specify actions to be taken upon meeting specific semantic frames in a text, in particular to rephrase and redact the textual content. While \lair{} presupposes superficial knowledge of frames and frame semantics, it requires only limited prior programming experience. It neither contain scripting or I/O primitives, nor does it contain general loop constructions and is not Turing-complete. We have implemented a \lair{} compiler and integrated it in a pipeline for automated redaction of web pages. We detail our experience with automated redaction of web pages for subjectively undesirable content; initial experiments suggest that using a small language based on semantic recognition of undesirable terms can be highly useful as a supplement to traditional methods of text sanitization.
Keyword Extraction of Radio News using Term Weighting for Speech Recognition

In this paper, we propose a method for keyword extraction using term weighting in radio news. In our method, rstly, keywords which characterize each domain are automatically extracted from newspaper articles. Next, feature vectors whose elements are 2 values between each keyword and each domain are calculated. Using the feature vectors, a domain of each part of radio news is selected. Then keywords are extracted by using the selected domain. The results of experiments show that the proposed methods are robust and e ective for the speech recognition system.
Codon bias and frequency-dependent selection on the hemagglutinin epitopes of influenza A virus

Although the surface proteins of human influenza A virus evolve rapidly and continually produce antigenic variants, the internal viral genes acquire mutations very gradually. In this paper, we analyze the sequence evolution of three influenza A genes over the past two decades. We study codon usage as a discriminating signature of gene- and even residue-specific diversifying and purifying selection. Nonrandom codon choice can increase or decrease the effective local substitution rate. We demonstrate that the codons of hemagglutinin, particularly those in the antibody-combining regions, are significantly biased toward substitutional point mutations relative to the codons of other influenza virus genes. We discuss the evolutionary interpretation and implications of these biases for hemagglutinin's antigenic evolution. We also introduce information-theoretic methods that use sequence data to detect regions of recent positive selection and potential protein conformational changes.
General and LGBTQ-specific factors associated with mental health and suicide risk among LGBTQ students

ABSTRACT This study investigated general and LGBTQ-specific factors associated with having a current mental health problem, use of mental health services, suicide risk and self-harm in 1948 LGBTQ university students (ages 16-25) who took part in the Youth Chances community study in the UK. In multivariate logistic regression, factors associated with all four outcomes were female gender, sexual abuse, other abuse or violence, and being transgender. Further factors that were significantly associated with one or more of the outcomes included: being bisexual; thinking they were LGBTQ under the age of 10; coming out as LGBTQ under the age of 16; not feeling accepted where they live; having no out staff at university and experiencing LGBTQ-related crime. In addition to general risk factors, negative experiences relating to being LGBTQ may be associated with the increased risk for mental health problems, suicide risk and self-harm in LGBTQ students.
Channel prediction for adaptive coded modulation in Rayleigh fading

Adaptive coded modulation (ACM) is a spectrally efficient wireless transmission scheme when the transmitter has perfect channel knowledge. We analyze how the performance of ACM schemes deteriorate when only partial channel state information (CSI) is available due to imperfect channel prediction. The results hold for Rayleigh fading, constant transmit power, perfect coherent detection in the receiver, an arbitrary number of independent receive antenna branches, maximum ratio combining (MRC), and any linear fading predictor based on periodically transmitted pilot symbols.
The downside of markup: examining the harmful effects of CSS and javascript on indexing today's web

The continued development and maturation of advanced HTML features such as Cascading style sheets (CSS), Javascript, and AJAX, as well as their widespread adoption by browsers, has enabled web pages to flourish with sophistication and interactivity. Unfortunately, this presents challenges to the web search community, as a web page's representation in the browser (i.e., what users see) can diverge dramatically from its raw HTML content (i.e., what search engines index and retrieve). For example, interactive pages may contain content in regions that are not visible before a user action, such as focusing a tab, but which are nonetheless still contained within the raw HTML. We study this divergence by comparing raw HTML to its fully rendered form across a number of metrics spanning presentation, geometry, and content, using a large, representative sample of popular web pages. We find that a large divergence currently exists, and we show via a historical analysis that this divergence has grown more pronounced over the last decade. The general finding of our study is that continuing to index the web via simple HTML parsing will diminish the effectiveness of retrieval on the modern web, and that the IR community should work toward more sophisticated web page processing in indexing technology.
Clover: A Distributed File System of Expandable Metadata Service Derived from HDFS

To store and manage data efficiently is the critical issue which modern information infrastructures confront with. To accommodate the massive scale of data in the Internet environment, most common solutions utilize distributed file systems. However there still exist disadvantages preventing these systems from delivering satisfying performance. In this paper, we present a Name Node cluster file system based on HDFS, which is named Clover. This file system exploits two critical features: an improved 2PC protocol which ensures consistent metadata update on multiple metadata servers and a shared storage pool which provides robust persistent metadata storage and supports the operation of distributed transactions. Clover is compared with HDFS and its key virtues are shown. Further experimental results show our system can achieve better metadata expandability ranging from 10% to 90% by quantized metrics when each extra server is added, while preserving similar I/O performance.
On a Recent Problem of Communication-Storage Tradeoffs for Secure Multicast for Large Networks

A variety of rooted-tree based secure multicast networks with di erent e ciencies and storage requirement that is linear in group size have been proposed [15, 16, 18, 19]. Recently, Canetti et al presented a scheme [21] based on clustering that had sub-linear storage requirements at the group controller. However, they were unable to prove or disprove that the scheme was optimal, and posed it as an open question. In this paper we answer the question with a rmative NO! Additionally we use our results from [25, 26] to show that the optimal clustering in this context is related to maximum entropy of member revocation event, and corresponding optimal strategy is to partition members such that each cluster has the same probability of being revoked.
RNA-Mediated Gene Silencing in Hematopoietic Cells

In the past few years, the discovery of RNA-mediated gene silencing mechanisms, like RNA interference (RNAi), has revolutionized our understanding of eukaryotic gene expression. These mechanisms are activated by double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) and mediate gene silencing either by inducing the sequence-specific degradation of complementary mRNA or by inhibiting mRNA translation. RNAi now provides a powerful experimental tool to elucidate gene function in vitro and in vivo, thereby opening new exciting perspectives in the fields of molecular analysis and eventually therapy of several diseases such as infections and cancer. In hematology, numerous studies have described the successful application of RNAi to better define the role of oncogenic fusion proteins in leukemogenesis and to explore therapeutic approaches in hematological malignancies. In this review, we highlight recent advances and caveats relating to the application of this powerful new methodology to hematopoiesis.
A cap binding protein that may mediate nuclear export of RNA polymerase II-transcribed RNAs

It has previously been shown that efficient export of U1 snRNA or of microinjected, in vitro synthesized, RNA transcripts from the nucleus of Xenopus oocytes is facilitated by their monomethyl guanosine cap structures. Nuclear exit of these transcripts could be competitively inhibited by microinjection of an excess of a cap analog, the dinucleotide m7GpppG (Hamm, J., and I. W. Mattaj. 1990. Cell. 63:109- 118). We have now analyzed the ability of several other related cap analogs to inhibit the export of U1 snRNA from the nucleus. The results define the recognition specificity of a factor(s) involved in RNA transport, and indicate that the cap binding activity (CBA) involved in RNA export is different from cap binding proteins (CBPs) involved in the initiation of translation. A CBP, whose specificity for different analogs correlates with the ability of the analogs to inhibit U1 snRNA export, is identified in nuclear extracts prepared from HeLa cells. We propose that this protein may have a role in the export of capped RNAs from the nucleus.
Edinburgh Research Explorer Population Genomics of Cardiometabolic Traits

Substantial advances have been made in identifying common genetic variants influencing cardiometabolic traits and disease outcomes through genome wide association studies. Nevertheless, gaps in knowledge remain and new questions have arisen regarding the population relevance, mechanisms, and applications for healthcare. Using a new high-resolution custom single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array (Metabochip) incorporating dense coverage of genomic regions linked to cardiometabolic disease, the University College-London School-Edinburgh-Bristol (UCLEB) consortium of highly- phenotyped population-based prospective studies, aims to: (1) fine map functionally relevant SNPs; (2) precisely estimate individual absolute and population attributable risks based on individual SNPs and their combination; (3) investigate mechanisms leading to altered risk factor profiles and CVD events; and (4) use Mendelian randomisation to undertake studies of the causal role in CVD of a range of cardiovascular biomarkers to inform public health policy and help develop new preventative therapies.