Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Leap Motion Robot Maneuver in Midair for Multi-Finger Control System

The primary goal of the human hand tracking system in this suggested system is to establish communication between the robotic module and the human hand. Human- computer interaction establishes a connection between people and computers. The robotic module is going to be controlled in the X, Y, and Z directions using leap motion controllers. A tiny gadget called the Leap Motion Sensor can detect and track human hands above it. The user will therefore have an engaging touch-free control experience while operating the robot. Leap motion controllers can be used to convert hand gestures into commands for mobile robots. Hand motions are observed and fed into the computer in this study. The robot may then be controlled by converting the incoming leap motion signals into commands. Motion control, gesture recognition, and natural user interface make up the core technologies of Leap.
Who won the 1976 blind tasting of French Bordeaux and US Cabernets? Parametrics to the rescue

Abstract The author revisits the heralded 1976 Paris blind tasting of US Cabernets and French Bordeaux. The conclusion reported in 1976, 1999, 2001 and 2003 was that the Americans won the competition outright. This conclusion derives from a non-parametric analysis of the data that converts wine rating scores to ranks, thereby producing invalid results. The author discusses: the biostatistical importance of the reanalysis; the practical impact of the earlier conclusions upon the economics of the California wine industry; and the heuristic importance of the burgeoning body of data analytic strategies for further elucidating the scientific understanding of judges' evaluations of wines.
The matrix protein CCN1 (CYR61) induces apoptosis in fibroblasts

Integrin-mediated cell adhesion to extracellular matrix proteins is known to promote cell survival, whereas detachment from the matrix can cause rapid apoptotic death in some cell types. Contrary to this paradigm, we show that fibroblast adhesion to the angiogenic matrix protein CCN1 (CYR61) induces apoptosis, whereas endothelial cell adhesion to CCN1 promotes cell survival. CCN1 induces fibroblast apoptosis through its adhesion receptors, integrin α6β1 and the heparan sulfate proteoglycan (HSPG) syndecan-4, triggering the transcription-independent p53 activation of Bax to render cytochrome c release and activation of caspase-9 and -3. Neither caspase-8 activity nor de novo transcription or translation is required for this process. These results show that cellular interaction with a specific matrix protein can either induce or suppress apoptosis in a cell type–specific manner and that integrin α6β1-HSPGs can function as receptors to induce p53-dependent apoptosis.
Quantification of reachable attractors in asynchronous discrete dynamics

Motivation: Models of discrete concurrent systems often lead to huge and complex state transition graphs that represent their dynamics. This makes difficult to analyse dynamical properties. In particular, for logical models of biological regulatory networks, it is of real interest to study attractors and their reachability from specific initial conditions, i.e. to assess the potential asymptotical behaviours of the system. Beyond the identification of the reachable attractors, we propose to quantify this reachability. Results: Relying on the structure of the state transition graph, we estimate the probability of each attractor reachable from a given initial condition or from a portion of the state space. First, we present a quasi-exact solution with an original algorithm called Firefront, based on the exhaustive exploration of the reachable state space. Then, we introduce an adapted version of Monte Carlo simulation algorithm, termed Avatar, better suited to larger models. Firefront and Avatar methods are validated and compared to other related approaches, using as test cases logical models of synthetic and biological networks. Availability: Both algorithms are implemented as Perl scripts that can be freely downloaded from http://compbio.igc. gulbenkian.pt/nmd/node/59 along with Supplementary Material.
The Construct Validity of Divergent Scores in the Structure-Of-Intellect Learning Abilities Test

This study was conducted to determine the effects that a creativity training program would have on the divergent production subtests of the Structure-of-Intellect Learning Abilities test. These subtests measure the production of units, relations, or transformations. The creativity training was designed to enhance the production of units. A total of 56 college students served as subjects with 27 receiving creativity training and 29 receiving an alternate training. Univariate analyses of covariance showed significant main effects of creativity training on divergent production of symbolic units (F(1, 51) = 10.41, p < . 01), on divergent production of figural units (F(1, 51) = 4.69, p < . 05), and on divergent production of semantic units (F(1, 51) = 7.57, p < . 01). The training was thus inferred to be effective in increasing the production of units but not the production of relations or transformations. The differentiation made between these types of products in the Structure-of-Intellect model was supported.
Visible Korean Human: Improved serially sectioned images of the entire body

The data from the Visible Human Project (VHP) and the Chinese Visible Human (CVH), which are the serially sectioned images of the entire cadaver, are being used to produce three-dimensional (3-D) images and software. The purpose of our research, the Visible Korean Human (VKH), is to produce an enhanced version of the serially sectioned images of an entire cadaver that can be used to upgrade the 3-D images and software. These improvements are achieved without drastically changing the methods developed for the VHP and CVH; thus, a complementary solution was found. A Korean male cadaver was chosen without anything perfused into the cadaver; the entire body was magnetic resonance (MR) and computed tomography (CT) scanned at 1.0-mm intervals to produce MR and CT images. After scanning, entire body of the cadaver was embedded and serially sectioned at 0.2-mm intervals; each sectioned surface was inputted into a personal computer to produce anatomical images (pixel size: 0.2 mm) without any missing images. Eleven anatomical organs in the anatomical images were segmented to produce segmented images. The anatomical and segmented images were stacked and reconstructed to produce 3-D images. The VKH is an ongoing research; we will produce a female version of the VKH and provide more detailed segmented images. The data from the VHP, CVH, and VKH will provide valuable resources to the medical image library of 3-D images and software in the field of medical education and clinical trials.
Pathogenesis of granulocytopenia and bone marrow atrophy during classical swine fever involves apoptosis and necrosis of uninfected cells.

Granulocytopenia, a hematological hallmark of classical swine fever, is partially responsible for the suppression of innate immune defenses during classical swine fever. The present report demonstrates that this depletion was apparent as early as 3 days postinfection (p.i.). Both mature peripheral and bone marrow neutrophils were affected, whereas immature neutrophils increased absolutely in the periphery and coincidentally immature myeloid progenitors in the bone marrow. These data suggest that a pathogenic relationship exists between these compartments. The central event was not the arrest of hematopoietic cell proliferation or of the mobilization process, but instead apoptosis and possibly also necrosis were shown to play a role. This increase in apoptotic and dead cells was detected as early as 1-3 days p.i. In contrast, viral RNA in bone marrow hematopoietic cells (BMHC) was first detected 5 days p.i. , and significant amounts of infected BMHC were detected only 7 days p.i. , with the major target being the myeloid compartment. The increased caspase-3 activity observed supported a role for apoptotic cell death. Furthermore, the elevated caspase-9 activity indicated the involvement of the mitochondrial apoptotic pathway. Taken together, the results demonstrate that granulocytopenia and bone marrow atrophy are mediated by hematopoietic cell death and that indirect virus-host-mediated mechanisms are likely to be responsible.
Masked Face Detection and Recognition Using a Unified Feature Extractor

The research field of computer vision has recently taken an interest in the active computer vision problem of masked face recognition due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The use of face masks as a preventative measure against the spread of COVID-19 has presented a new challenge for the technology of face recognition. Masked Face Recognition (MFR) is a specific type of facial occlusion issues that obstruct vital facial features such as the mouth, nose, or chin. The purpose of research on Masked Face Detection and Recognition is to fine-tune a pre-trained model that can more accurately recognize masked faces and detect whether the person is wearing a mask or not, which can be advantageous in various applications, like security and surveillance, healthcare, retail, law enforcement, the workplace, and social media. This paper proposes an approach to enhance the performance of the single neural network architecture as a unified model capable of both detection and recognition of masked face images by achieving 99% and 98% respectively, on the MFR2 dataset. Also, a detection model is proposed that is evaluated on publicly available datasets for the detection of masked faces, which are the MDMFR dataset, the Kaggle face mask detection dataset, and the Facedatahybrid dataset. The findings of this research offer valuable insights into the potential of a pre-trained network with transfer learning to make an efficient masked face detection and recognition system and pave the way for future research in this area.
China Coast Pidgin: Texts and contexts

In this paper we revisit some long-standing questions regarding the origins and structure of China Coast Pidgin (CCP), also known as Chinese Pidgin English. We first review the historical context of the China Trade which formed the ecology for the development of CCP. We then review the available sources, focusing on newly transcribed data from Chinese-language instructional materials. These sources provide fresh evidence for grammatical structure in CCP, and demonstrate strong influence from Cantonese as the major substrate language. Comparison with English-language sources shows systematic contrasts which point to likely variation between Anglophone and Sinophone lects, as in the case of wh-questions which show regular wh-fronting in English sources and pervasive use of wh-in-situ in Chinese sources. This conclusion helps to resolve the debate over the Sinitic features of CCP.
Time-Sensitive Bayesian Information Aggregation for Crowdsourcing Systems

Many aspects of the design of efficient crowdsourcing processes, such as defining worker's bonuses, fair prices and time limits of the tasks, involve knowledge of the likely duration of the task at hand. In this work we introduce a new time-sensitive Bayesian aggregation method that simultaneously estimates a task's duration and obtains reliable aggregations of crowdsourced judgments. Our method, called BCCTime, uses latent variables to represent the uncertainty about the workers' completion time, the tasks' duration and the workers' accuracy. To relate the quality of a judgment to the time a worker spends on a task, our model assumes that each task is completed within a latent time window within which all workers with a propensity to genuinely attempt the labelling task (i.e., no spammers) are expected to submit their judgments. In contrast, workers with a lower propensity to valid labelling, such as spammers, bots or lazy labellers, are assumed to perform tasks considerably faster or slower than the time required by normal workers. Specifically, we use efficient message-passing Bayesian inference to learn approximate posterior probabilities of (i) the confusion matrix of each worker, (ii) the propensity to valid labelling of each worker, (iii) the unbiased duration of each task and (iv) the true label of each task. Using two real-world public datasets for entity linking tasks, we show that BCCTime produces up to 11% more accurate classifications and up to 100% more informative estimates of a task's duration compared to state-of-the-art methods.
High Frequency of Tropheryma whipplei in Culture-Negative Endocarditis

ABSTRACT “Classical” Whipple's disease (cWD) is caused by Tropheryma whipplei and is characterized by arthropathy, weight loss, and diarrhea. T. whipplei infectious endocarditis (TWIE) is rarely reported, either in the context of cWD or as isolated TWIE without signs of systemic infection. The frequency of TWIE is unknown, and systematic studies are lacking. Here, we performed an observational cohort study on the incidence of T. whipplei infection in explanted heart valves in two German university centers. Cardiac valves from 1,135 patients were analyzed for bacterial infection using conventional culture techniques, PCR amplification of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene, and subsequent sequencing. T. whipplei-positive heart valves were confirmed by specific PCR, fluorescence in situ hybridization, immunohistochemistry, histological examination, and culture for T. whipplei. Bacterial endocarditis was diagnosed in 255 patients, with streptococci, staphylococci, and enterococci being the main pathogens. T. whipplei was the fourth most frequent pathogen, found in 16 (6.3%) cases, and clearly outnumbered Bartonella quintana, Coxiella burnetii, and members of the HACEK group (Haemophilus species, Actinobacillus actinomycetemcomitans, Cardiobacterium hominis, Eikenella corrodens, and Kingella kingae). In this cohort, T. whipplei was the most commonly found pathogen associated with culture-negative infective endocarditis.
Transformational leadership across hierarchical levels in UK manufacturing organizations

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report on an empirical study of the effectiveness of transformational, transactional and laissez‐faire leadership across hierarchical levels in manufacturing organizations in the UK. The aim was to develop a framework of leadership across hierarchical levels that would be useful for leadership development programmes and interventions.Design/methodology/approach – Managers from 38 companies completed a 360‐degree version of the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire. Multiple responses – self, superior, subordinate and peer ratings – were obtained for 367 managers of whom 15 per cent were female and 85 per cent male, aged between 21 and 62 years (mean=42 years), from 38 organizations in the UK manufacturing sector. Of the 367 subjects, unanimous (cases were used only if all ratings agreed on the hierarchical level of the subject) opinions on hierarchical level were gained for 215 (58 per cent), which includes 30 top‐level managers, 33 directors, 54 senior managers, 4.
On Writing and Reading Artistic Computational Ecosystems

We study the use of the generative systems known as computational ecosystems to convey artistic and narrative aims. These are virtual worlds running on computers, composed of agents that trade units of energy and emulate cycles of life and behaviors adapted from biological life forms. In this article we propose a conceptual framework in order to understand these systems, which are involved in processes of authorship and interpretation that this investigation analyzes in order to identify critical instruments for artistic exploration. We formulate a model of narrative that we call system stories (after Mitchell Whitelaw), characterized by the dynamic network of material and conceptual processes that define these artefacts. They account for narrative constellations with multiple agencies from which meaning and messages emerge. Finally, we present three case studies to explore the potential of this model within an artistic and generative domain, arguing that this understanding expands and enriches the palette of the language of these systems.
A Steering Environment for Online Parallel Visualization of Legacy Parallel Simulations

In the context of scientific computing, the computational steering consists in the coupling of numerical simulations with 3D visualization systems through the network. This allows scientists to monitor online the intermediate results of their computations in a more interactive way than the batch mode, and allows them to modify the simulation parameters on-the-fly. While most of existing computational steering environments support parallel simulations, they are often limited to sequential visualization systems. This may lead to an important bottleneck and increased rendering time. To achieve the required performance for online visualization, we have designed the EPSN framework, a computational steering environment that enables to interconnect legacy parallel simulations with parallel visualization systems. For this, we have introduced a redistribution algorithm for unstructured data, that is well adapted to the context of M times N computational steering. Then, we focus on the design of our parallel viewer and present some experimental results obtained with a particle-based simulation in astrophysics
Analysis of T4SS-induced signaling by H. pylori using quantitative phosphoproteomics

Helicobacter pylori is a Gram-negative bacterial pathogen colonizing the human stomach. Infection with H. pylori causes chronic inflammation of the gastric mucosa and may lead to peptic ulceration and/or gastric cancer. A major virulence determinant of H. pylori is the type IV secretion system (T4SS), which is used to inject the virulence factor CagA into the host cell, triggering a wide range of cellular signaling events. Here, we used a phosphoproteomic approach to investigate tyrosine signaling in response to host-pathogen interaction, using stable isotope labeling in cell culture (SILAC) of AGS cells to obtain a differential picture between multiple infection conditions. Cells were infected with wild type H. pylori P12, a P12Δ CagA deletion mutant, and a P12Δ PAI deletion mutant to compare signaling changes over time and in the absence of CagA or the T4SS. Tryptic peptides were enriched for tyrosine (Tyr) phosphopeptides and analyzed by nano-LC-Orbitrap MS. In total, 85 different phosphosites were found to be regulated following infection. The majority of phosphosites identified were kinases of the MAPK family. CagA and the T4SS were found to be key regulators of Tyr phosphosites. Our findings indicate that CagA primarily induces activation of ERK1 and integrin-linked factors, whereas the T4SS primarily modulates JNK and p38 activation.
Yet Another Visit to Paxos

This paper presents a modular decomposition of crashtolerant and Byzantine-tolerant protocols for reaching consensus that use the method introduced by the Paxos algorithm of Lamport and by the viewstamped replication algorithm of Oki and Liskov. The consensus protocol runs a sequence of epoch abstractions as governed by an epoch-change abstraction. Implementations of epoch and epochchange that tolerate crash faults yield the consensus algorithm in Paxos and in viewstamped replication. Implementations of epoch and epochchange that tolerate Byzantine faults yield the consensus algorithm in the PBFT protocol of Castro and Liskov.
Strengthening Positive Parenting Through Intervention

This study examined the effectiveness of an evidence-based intervention in changing the positive and negative parenting practices of 120 mothers who experienced intimate partner violence (IPV) in the last 2 years. Mothers assigned to the treatment group participated in a 10-session evidence-based intervention, known as the Moms' Empowerment Program, which targets the mental health problems of women and works to increase access to resources and improve parenting abilities of women exposed to IPV. Participants were interviewed at baseline and immediately following the intervention or waitlist period, representing an elapsed time of approximately 5 weeks. After controlling for relevant demographic variables, violence severity, and mental health, women showed significantly more change in their positive parenting scores if they were in the treatment condition. No significant differences were found between the treatment and comparison groups in their negative parenting practices change scores. These findings suggest that even short-term intervention can improve positive parenting skills and parenting knowledge for women who have experienced partner abuse.
Determination of Chlorogenic Acid in Plant Samples by Using Near-Infrared Spectrum with Wavelet Transform Preprocessing

By theoretical analysis, it is found that wavelet transform (WT) with a wavelet function can be regarded as a smoothing and a differentiation process, and that the order of differentiation is determined by the vanishing moment, which is an important property of a wavelet function. Therefore, a method based on the continuous wavelet transform (CWT) for removing the background in the near-infrared (NIR) spectrum is proposed, and it is used in the determination of the chlorogenic acid in plant samples as a preprocessing tool for partial least square (PLS) modeling. It is shown that the benefit of the proposed method lies not only in its performance to improve the quality of PLS model and the prediction precision, but also in its simplicity and practicability. It may become a convenient and efficient tool for preprocessing NIR spectral data sets in multivariate calibration.
The NMR Structures of the Major Intermediates of the Two-domain Tick Carboxypeptidase Inhibitor Reveal Symmetry in Its Folding and Unfolding Pathways*

There is a lack of experimental structural information about folding intermediates of multidomain proteins. Tick carboxypeptidase inhibitor (TCI) is a small, disulfide-rich protein consisting of two domains that fold and unfold autonomously through the formation of two major intermediates, IIIa and IIIb. Each intermediate contains three native disulfide bonds in one domain and six free cysteines in the other domain. Here we have determined the NMR structures of these two intermediates trapped and isolated at acidic pH in which they are stable and compared their structures with that of the native protein analyzed under the same conditions. Both IIIa and IIIb were found to contain a folded region that corresponds to the N- and C-terminal domains of TCI, respectively, with structures very similar to the corresponding regions of the native protein. The remainder of the polypeptide chains of the intermediates was shown to be unfolded in a random coil conformation. Solvent exchange measurements further indicated that the two protein domains are not completely independent, but affect each other in terms of dynamics and stability, in agreement with reported inhibitory activity data. The derived results provide structural evidence for symmetric TCI folding and unfolding mechanisms that converge in IIIa and IIIb and reveal the structural basis that accounts for the strong and simultaneous accumulation of both intermediates. Altogether, this work has important implications for a better understanding of the folding mechanisms of multidomain, disulfide-rich proteins.