Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparison of the effectiveness of alternative feature sets in shape retrieval of multicomponent images

Many different kinds of features have been used as the basis for shape retrieval from image databases. This paper investigates the relative effectiveness of several types of global shape feature, both singly and in combination. The features compared include well-established descriptors such as Fourier coefficients and moment invariants, as well as recently-proposed measures of triangularity and ellipticity. Experiments were conducted within the framework of the ARTISAN shape retrieval system, and retrieval effectiveness assessed on a database of over 10,000 images, using 24 queries and associated ground truth supplied by the UK Patent Office . Our experiments revealed only minor differences in retrieval effectiveness between different measures, suggesting that a wide variety of shape feature combinations can provide adequate discriminating power for effective shape retrieval in multi-component image collections such as trademark registries. Marked differences between measures were observed for some individual queries, suggesting that there could be considerable scope for improving retrieval effectiveness by providing users with an improved framework for searching multi-dimensional feature space.
Isolation and Characterization of Sequences Homologous to the Tobacco Clone Axi 1 ( auxin independent ) from a Vicia sativa Nodule cDNA Library

In this research, partial nucleotide sequences of the axi 1 gene, which is related to auxin perception and transduction, isolated from Vicia sativa using cDNA library screening were investigated. Four V. sativa cDNA clones representing homologous of the tobacco axi 1 (auxin independent) cDNA clone were isolated and characterized. With sequence analysis two different clones were observed, called 10/3a and 16/3b. Sequences about 500 bp from the 5' end and 450 bp from the 3' end were determined from the 10/3a clone. The sequences from the 5' end of cDNA clone 10/3a shared about 58 % similarity at the nucleotide level and 61% identity at the polypeptide level with the sequences of the Nicotiana tabacum axi 1 cDNA clone. At the 3' end of 10/3a, 63 % similarity at the nucleotide level was observed with the clone. In 16/3b about 500 bp was sequenced from the 5' end. There was 64 % nucleotide sequence similarity and 61 % polypeptide sequence identity. Northern blot analysis showed that the size of the mRNA was about 2 kb, like that of the axi 1 isolated from tobacco. It was shown that homolog sequences of axi 1 were expressed in flowers, leaves, stems, roots and nodules of the V. sativa plants.
Learning Superpixels with Segmentation-Aware Affinity Loss

Superpixel segmentation has been widely used in many computer vision tasks. Existing superpixel algorithms are mainly based on hand-crafted features, which often fail to preserve weak object boundaries. In this work, we leverage deep neural networks to facilitate extracting superpixels from images. We show a simple integration of deep features with existing superpixel algorithms does not result in better performance as these features do not model segmentation. Instead, we propose a segmentation-aware affinity learning approach for superpixel segmentation. Specifically, we propose a new loss function that takes the segmentation error into account for affinity learning. We also develop the Pixel Affinity Net for affinity prediction. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed algorithm based on the learned segmentation-aware loss performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods. We also demonstrate the use of the learned superpixels in numerous vision applications with consistent improvements.
Experimenting With Qualitative Inquiry

Qualitative inquiry largely stands outside the current policy focus on experimental results—the “what works” agenda. Yet thinking and doing things differently—another form of experiment—could be more prominent in critical qualitative inquiry. The article will look at the ways in which qualitative inquiry is currently positioned in policy debate and reflect on whether or not a different form of “experimentalism” could generate a different form of knowledge about what “might work. ”
Tibetan Cultural Identity in Nepal: Change, Preservation, Prospects

Abstract In the difficult circumstances of institutional discrimination and political pressure, the Tibetan minority in Nepal negotiate their identity with utmost communicative resourcefulness, tying their values to universal ethics. They resort to their spiritual heritage in their daily intercultural encounters, seeing it mostly as an essential mindset. Developing intercultural personhood through universalization does not challenge identity salience, if one’s culture is adhered to consciously. The respondents are optimistic about preserving their culture, provided the positive factors, such as community living and cultural education, persist. The obstacles are seen in materialistic influences, globalization and lack of interest among the young generation.
Recent developments in usage of natu Ral antioxidants to imp Rove chicken meat p Roduction and quality

FOTINA, A. A. , V. I. FISININ and P. F. SURAI, 2013. Recent developments in usage of natural antioxidants to improve chicken meat production and quality. Bulg. J. Agric. Sci., 19: 889-896 For the majority of organisms on Earth, life without oxygen is impossible. Animals, plants and many microorganisms rely on oxygen for the efficient production of energy. However, the high oxygen concentration in the atmosphere is potentially toxic for living organisms. Recently free radical research has generated valuable information for further understanding not only detrimental, but also beneficial role of free radicals in cell signalling and other physiological processes. The benefit or harm of free radicals ultimately depends on the level of their production and efficiency of antioxidant defence. During evolution, living organisms have developed specific antioxidant protective mechanisms to deal with ROS. Therefore, the presence of natural antioxidants in living organisms is the major factor that enables their survival in an oxygen-rich environment. The protective antioxidant compounds are located in organelles, sub cellular compartments or the extra cellular space, enabling maximum cellular protection to occur. Natural antioxidants, including vitamin E, Se, carotenoids, carnitine and some others play important roles in chicken nutrition by maintaining antioxidant defences of their tissues. Optimal antioxidant supplementation is shown to be important to maintain high growth rate, immunocompetence and meat quality of growing broiler chicks. A new technology based on vita-gene concept has been developed to deal with various stresses by supplementing a complex mixture of antioxidants and other important elements via drinking water.
On the interaction between overlay routing and underlay routing

In this paper, we study the interaction between overlay routing and traffic engineering (TE) in a single autonomous system (AS). We formulate this interaction as a two-player non-cooperative non-zero sum game, where the overlay tries to minimize the delay of its traffic and the TE's objective is to minimize network cost. We study a Nash routing game with best-reply dynamics, in which the overlay and TE have equal status, and take turns to compute their optimal strategies based on the response of the other player in the previous round. We prove the existence, uniqueness and global stability of Nash equilibrium point (NEP) for a simple network. For general networks, we show that the selfish behavior of an overlay can cause huge cost increases and oscillations to the whole network. Even worse, we have identified cases, both analytically and experimentally, where the overlay's cost increases as the Nash routing game proceeds even though the overlay plays optimally based on TE's routing at each round. Experiments are performed to verify our analysis.
Dimensionality Reduction for BCI Classification using Riemannian Geometry

In the past few years, there has been an increasing interest among the Brain-Computer Interface research community in classification algorithms that respect the intrinsic geometry of covariance matrices. These methods are based on concepts of Riemannian geometry and, despite demonstrating good performances on several occasions, do not scale well when the number of electrodes increases. In this paper, we evaluate two methods for reducing the dimension of the covariance matrices in a geometry-aware fashion. Our results on three different datasets show that it is possible to considerably reduce the dimension of covariance matrices without losing classification power.
Supporting language in schools: Evaluating an intervention for children with delayed language in the early school years

Extensive evidence exists that many children who experience early socio-economic disadvantage have delayed language development. These delays have been shown to exist when children start school and appear to persist through their education. Interventions that can help these children are desirable to ease the difficulties they have in school and to address the loss in human capital which these children represent. We evaluated an intervention (Talk Boost) to treat children’s receptive and expressive language in the early school years. A between-schools design was used. Eighteen schools in socially deprived areas were randomly assigned to receive the intervention or to act as waiting controls. Children in reception classes and in Years 1 and 2 attended language groups. The evaluation used the standard procedure for the intervention. Teachers were given guidance on selecting appropriate children, and the intervention was carried out by teaching assistants; 180 children participated. Those with English as their first language and those learning it as an additional language increased their scores significantly more than did controls. Most of the children selected had significant delays, which did not diminish as they advanced in school. Despite their improvement the treated children remained behind the expected level for their age after the intervention. These findings add to previous evidence that intervention can help children who start school with delayed language. There appears to be insufficient awareness of the communication needs of these children and of their likely inability to access other areas of the curriculum as a result.
Learning the Best Kth Channel for QoS Provisioning in Cognitive Networks

A learning strategy for distributed channel selection in Cognitive Radio networks is proposed. The goal of the learning is quality of service (QoS) provisioning by which competing secondary users cooperatively converge to their rank-optimal channels while channel availability statistics are initially unknown. By this convergence, collisions reaches zero since users eventually work on their own channels. The proposed learning strategy, k −MAB, is inspired from the MultiArmed Bandit problem but it converges to the k best arm. The rank-optimal channel for each user\player is identified based on the user’s QoS demands. We believe that under this learning and allocation policy, cognitive users get services proportional to their QoS level since evaluation results represent order optimality in terms of average throughput.
Role of Bacterial Biofilm in Refractory Post Tympanostomy Tube Otorrhea

Background/Aim: Bacterial biofilm formation has been implicated in the high rate of refractory otorrhea after tympanostomy tube (TT) insertion. The aim of the work was to assess the role of bacterial biofilm in refractory posttympanostomy tube otorrhea (PTTO) and to determine the types of bacteria that grow on the surface of the TT and their pattern of antibiotic susceptibility. Subjects & Methods: The study was carried out on 40 patients (22 males and 18 females) with TT insertion for treatment of secretory otitis media. Their ages were ranged from 5-13 years with mean of 9.2 ± 2.19 years. Patients are followed up with continuous ENT examination for about 12 months after the TT insertion and then patients were classified into two groups: group1(n=24): the patients not developed PTTO and group 2 (n=16): the patients developed PTTO. Patients of group 2 were treated with local ear drops of antibiotic /corticosteroid combination (ciprocort). According to the results after treatment, group 2 was classified into two subgroups: group 2a (n=4): patients responded to treatment and group 2b (n=12): patients not responded to treatment. From each patient of group 2b, a swab was taken from the external canal and examined bacteriologically and the TT was removed and examined for detection of the bacterial biofilm by two methods (semiquantitative culture and Acridine Orange (AO) staining). The organisms isolated from tube culture were identified by the standard bacteriological methods, tested for antibiotic sensitivity and examined for slime (biofilm) production by two methods: Congo red agar (CRA) plate method and tube method. Results: There were no significant differences between the studied groups as regard age or sex distribution of the patients (P>0.05). Out of the 12 cases of PTTO, only 9 were positive by tube culture and S.aureus was the most frequently isolated organism (55.6%) followed by P.aeuroginosa (44.4%). 60% of the isolated S.aureus and 50% of the isolated P.aeuroginosa were multidrug resistant against most antibiotics used. When comparing AO staining with the semiquantitative tube culture, the AO staining had poor sensitivity and specificity (77.8 % and 66.7 % respectively). Only 8 out of 9 isolated strains were biofilm producer as detected by CRA method whereas only 7 were positive as detected by tube method. There was a very good agreement between the two methods.
Deception on facebook : relation between personality, deviation from reality and channels of deception

Purpose: The purpose of this explorative study is to investigate to what extent facebook users engage in deceptive self-impression management, publishing an enhanced version of their self. Further purpose of this study was to explore to which degree personality can be related to the deviation from reality and the channels of deception on facebook. Method: A group of 94 respondents filled in an online survey containing questions about their facebook use and deceptive behaviour. Further, estimates about the facebook use of others were asked. Finally the respondents filled in the Brief HEXACO Inventory (BHI). Results: Prevalence analyses revealed that deception is a very common phenomenon on facebook. The majority of the respondents admitted to deceive when presenting themselves on the social network. The estimates about others’ deceptive behaviour were even higher. The results showed personality can be related to the likelihood to deceive on facebook. Openness to Experience is thereby the personality dimension that is most strongly related to dishonesty in selfpresentation. Extravert individuals in turn are most honest. Discussion: The findings are interpreted in light of personality and impression management theories. Further research to the new findings is suggested and strengths and limitations of the study are discussed. Finally, practical applications of the findings are suggested.
Functional Analysis of the Transmembrane and Cytoplasmic Domains of Pcdh15a in Zebrafish Hair Cells

Protocadherin 15 (PCDH15) is required for mechanotransduction in sensory hair cells as a component of the tip link. Isoforms of PCDH15 differ in their cytoplasmic domains (CD1, CD2, and CD3), but share the extracellular and transmembrane (TMD) domains, as well as an intracellular domain known as the common region (CR). In heterologous expression systems, both the TMD and CR of PCDH15 have been shown to interact with members of the mechanotransduction complex. The in vivo significance of these protein–protein interaction domains of PCDH15 in hair cells has not been determined. Here, we examined the localization and function of the two isoforms of zebrafish Pcdh15a (CD1 and CD3) in pcdh15a-null mutants by assessing Pcdh15a transgene-mediated rescue of auditory/vestibular behavior and hair cell morphology and activity. We found that either isoform alone was able to rescue the Pcdh15a-null phenotype and that the CD1- or CD3-specific regions were dispensable for hair bundle integrity and labeling of hair cells with FM4-64, which was used as a proxy for mechanotransduction. When either the CR or TMD domain was deleted, the mutated proteins localized to the stereocilial tips, but were unable to rescue FM4-64 labeling. Disrupting both domains led to a complete failure of Pcdh15a to localize to the hair bundle. Our findings demonstrate that the TMD and cytoplasmic CR domains are required for the in vivo function of Pcdh15a in zebrafish hair cells. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Tip links transmit force to mechanotransduction channels at the tip of hair bundles in sensory hair cells. One component of tip links is Protocadherin 15 (PCDH15). Here, we demonstrate that, when transgenically expressed, either zebrafish Pcdh15a-cytodomain 1 (CD1) or Pcdh15a-CD3 can rescue the phenotype of a pcdh15a-null mutant. Even when lacking the specific regions for CD1 or CD3, truncated Pcdh15a that contains the so-called common region (CR) at the cytoplasmic/membrane interface still has the ability to rescue similar to full-length Pcdh15a. In contrast, Pcdh15a lacking the entire cytoplasmic domain is not functional. These results demonstrate that the CR plays a key role in the mechanotransduction complex in hair cells.
The arterial anatomy of the Achilles tendon: Anatomical study and clinical implications

The Achilles tendon is the most frequently ruptured tendon in the lower limb and accounts for almost 20% of all large tendon injuries. Despite numerous published studies describing its blood supply, there has been no uniformity in describing its topography. The current study comprises a detailed anatomical study of both the intrinsic and extrinsic arterial supply of the Achilles tendon, providing the detail sought from studies calling for improved planning of surgical procedures where damage to the vascularity of the Achilles tendon is likely. A dissection, microdissection, histological, and angiographic study was undertaken on 20 cadaveric lower limbs from 16 fresh and four embalmed cadavers. The Achilles tendon is supplied by two arteries, the posterior tibial and peroneal arteries. Three vascular territories were identified, with the midsection supplied by the peroneal artery, and the proximal and distal sections supplied by the posterior tibial artery. The midsection of the Achilles tendon was markedly more hypovascular that the rest of the tendon. The Achilles tendon is at highest risk of rupture and surgical complications at its midsection. Individuals with particularly poor supply of the midsection may be at increased risk of tendon rupture, and approaches to the tendon operatively should consider the route of supply by the peroneal artery to this susceptible part of the tendon. Clin. Anat. 22:377–385, 2009. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Occupational Therapy and Primary Care: Updates and Trends

&NA; As our health care system continues to change, so do the opportunities for occupational therapy. This article provides an update to a 2012 Health Policy Perspectives on this topic. We identify new initiatives and opportunities in primary care, explore common challenges to integrating occupational therapy in primary care environments, and highlight international works that can support our efforts. We conclude by discussing next steps for occupational therapy practitioners in order to continue to progress our efforts in primary care.
Project Control and Computational Intelligence: Trends and Challenges

Project monitoring and control by using key performance indicators has become a widespread method for decisionmaking in project-oriented organizations. However, the current schools and IT tools created for this purpose require an upgrade in design due to imprecision, vagueness or uncertainty present in the raw data and changing conditions in management styles. Moreover, the use of proprietary technologies in developing nations represents high costs for governments and obstacles to achieving its technological sovereignty. This paper studies the trends and challenges in project control through computational intelligence methods. It also examines schools and technological tools to manage projects, as well as open source software for the application of computational intelligence techniques over the past decades. Current tendencies and improvement areas, valuing niche markets with high applicability around the thematic goal it is also analyzed. The contribution of this study is related to the predicted necessity of constructing new models and IT tools for project control which integrate machine learning-based approaches and treatment of imprecision, vagueness or uncertainty in the information, using key performance indicators linked to fundamental knowledge areas. The implementation of new libraries for learning evaluation in project control with open source software tools, opens a field of research related to increase technological integration with IT project management tools. The content under discussion provides support to improve decision-making in project-oriented organizations.
Numerical Study on the Flow over a Simplified Vehicle Door Gap – an Old Benchmark Problem Is Revisited

A simplified automobile door gap model, defined at the Third Computational Aeroacoustics (CAA) Workshop on Benchmark Problems (Category 6) was investigated. After a thorough mesh study compressible and incompressible simulations were carried out and various turbulence models were tried. The influence of three dimensional effects and boundary layer thickness effects were examined too. In case of compressible simulations stability problems were encountered with the non-reflective boundary condition of CFX (beta version at the time of the simulations). It was found that for deep cavities incompressible simulations are not applicable. In spite of the diculties a good agreement between measurements and simulations was found when the flow speed was 50m/s. In case of 26.8m/s flow speed it was found that the presence of the upper channel wall, not taken into account by the previous authors simulating this problem plays an important role – a hitherto unexplained peak in the measured spectrum appeared this way in the simulation.
Deformed 3D model identification using combined depth image

In this paper, we proposed 2D view-based 3D model identification method using depth images, scale-invariant feature transform(SIFT), random sample consensus(RANSAC) and pose normalization. The existing method uses bag-of-feature method using SIFT algorithm. However, the proposed method is not used. In this paper, we perform pose normalization for 3D model to pre-processing. After pre-processing, we get depth images and the combine depth image as one depth image, then use the SIFT algorithm to build feature DB. In the matching process, we remove outlier features to increase match rate using RANSAC algorithm. In the experiment, we compose the database of 3D models from 16 classes in the SHREC benchmark database. Each of classes includes 4 to 5 non-rigid models. The deformed 3D model is used as query 3D model. The match rate of the proposed method is 87.2%.