Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bulimia nervosa in Rochester, Minnesota from 1980 to 1990

SYNOPSIS Numerous studies have estimated the frequency of bulimia nervosa among high school girls and college women, but population-based trends in incidence in a community have not been reported. In this study we determined the incidence of bulimia nervosa by identifying persons residing in the community of Rochester, Minnesota, who had the disorder initially diagnosed during the 11-year period from 1980 to 1990. Using our comprehensive population-based data resource (the Rochester Epidemiology Project), we identified cases by screening 777 medical records with diagnoses of bulimia; feeding disturbance; rumination syndrome; adverse effects of cathartics, emetics, or diuretics; polyphagia; sialosis; or vomiting. We identified 103 Rochester residents (100 female and 3 male) who fulfilled DSM-III-R diagnostic criteria for bulimia nervosa during the 11-year study period. Mean ± S.D. age for females at the time of diagnosis was 23·0 ± 6·1 years (range, 14·4 to 40·2 years). Yearly incidence in females rose sharply from 7·4 per 100000 population in 1980 to 49·7 in 1983, and then remained relatively constant around 30 per 100000 population. The annual age-adjusted incidence rates were 26·5 per 100000 population for females and 0·8 per 100000 population for males. The overall age-and sex-adjusted annual incidence was 13·5 per 100000 population. Bulimia nervosa is a common disorder in adolescent girls and young women from 15 to 24 years of age. Histories of alcohol or drug abuse, depression, or anorexia nervosa were higher than expected in the general population.
Location Authentication, Tracking, and Emergency Signaling through Power Line Communication: Designs and Protocols for New Out-of-Band Strategies

Abstract We propose using Power Line Communication (PLC) as a second channel for data origin authentication, and we present a system architecture and protocol for doing so taking advantage of existing infrastructure for communicating over power lines. Our system connects a user's computer to a secure electric meter in his building via a secure Human Authorization Detector (HAD). The meter, which has a unique secret identifier and encryption key, communicates securely with the trusted Power Grid Server (PG) through PLC. Upon request from an Internet Application Server (AS), the user sends a location certificate to the AS, obtained via PLC from the PG and signed by the PG. Because PLC requires physical access to the meter permanently attached to the building, our system offers fine-grain location authentication. The user authorizes certificate requests by reading the HAD's display including transaction details and pushing a button, thus mitigating the threat of malware on the user's computer maliciously requesting or forwarding location certificates unauthorized by the user. Our system provides strong location authentication useful to many on-line applications, including banking and SCADA systems. We present our architecture and protocols in sufficient detail to permit further implementation and analysis. We also outline applications for anti-theft and emergency signaling.
Structure and Capsid Association of the Herpesvirus Large Tegument Protein UL36

ABSTRACT The tegument of all herpesviruses contains a high-molecular-weight protein homologous to herpes simplex virus (HSV) UL36. This large (3,164 amino acids), essential, and multifunctional polypeptide is located on the capsid surface and present at 100 to 150 copies per virion. We have been testing the idea that UL36 is important for the structural organization of the tegument. UL36 is proposed to bind directly to the capsid with other tegument proteins bound indirectly by way of UL36. Here we report the results of studies carried out with HSV type 1-derived structures containing the capsid but lacking a membrane and depleted of all tegument proteins except UL36 and a second high-molecular-weight protein, UL37. Electron microscopic analysis demonstrated that, compared to capsids lacking a tegument, these capsids (called T36 capsids) had tufts of protein located at the vertices. Projecting from the tufts were thin, variably curved strands with lengths (15 to 70 nm) in some cases sufficient to extend across the entire thickness of the tegument (∼50 nm). Strands were sensitive to removal from the capsid by brief sonication, which also removed UL36 and UL37. The findings are interpreted to indicate that UL36 and UL37 are the components of the tufts and of the thin strands that extend from them. The strand lengths support the view that they could serve as organizing features for the tegument, as they have the potential to reach all parts of the tegument. The variably curved structure of the strands suggests they may be flexible, a property that could contribute to the deformable nature of the tegument.
Parallel and Distributed Block-Coordinate Frank-Wolfe Algorithms

We study parallel and distributed Frank-Wolfe algorithms; the former on shared memory machines with mini-batching, and the latter in a delayed update framework. In both cases, we perform computations asynchronously whenever possible. We assume block-separable constraints as in Block-Coordinate Frank-Wolfe (BCFW) method (Lacoste-Julien et al., 2013), but our analysis subsumes BCFW and reveals problemdependent quantities that govern the speedups of our methods over BCFW. A notable feature of our algorithms is that they do not depend on worst-case bounded delays, but only (mildly) on expected delays, making them robust to stragglers and faulty worker threads. We present experiments on structural SVM and Group Fused Lasso, and observe significant speedups over competing state-of-the-art (and synchronous) methods.
Automatic Piano Transcription

e piano is seen by some to be a good instrument for starting to tackle the problem of polyphonic music transcription. Martin (1996) chose piano music because it serves as an interesting and useful starting point because [it embodies] a very structured domain of musical practice.e importance of a structured domain is that it allows the transcribing agent to exploit the structure, thereby reducing the difficulty of the task. Polyphonic transcription seeks to take an audio input as a source, and produce a MIDI, CSOUND or similar score that is able to be manipulated by humans and computers. Given this problem, there have been a number of different approaches to solving it with varying results. Moorer (1975) is widely recognized to have been the first person to attempt polyphonic music transcription through a combination of comb filtering and autocorrelation. His earliest experiments worked with a highly limited number of possibilities (limited to two octaves, no simultaneous octaves sounding, two voices of differing timbre). Martin (1996) implemented a 'blackboard' system of polyphonic music transcription. His approach used a series of 'expert' modules that are presented with a problem, and each of those experts then tackles the problem independently. For example, in his system, the 'Chord_MissingInterval' uses its musical knowledge to scan the blackboard for potential chord hypothesis and if it detects that a chord hypothesis is missing a required interval (m3, M3, P5) it adds it in. is system worked, but was 'static'-that is, it did not adapt its behaviour depending on given input. A similar approach was implemented by Bello, Monti and Sandler (2000a, 2000b) with the exception of the inclusion of a neural network chord analyser. is blackboard system differed from Martin's in that instead of using a static 'expert' to recognize chords, the neural network could adjust its hypothesis network so that multiple note hypotheses could survive, therefore building a chord from the input. Raphael (2002) proposes an approach based on Hidden Markov Models. ese HMMs are trained with a signal-score pair, meaning that it can match probable chord hypotheses with actual score data. Using this model, they analysed the 3rd movement of Mozart's Sonata 18, K. 570. ey achieved a 'note error rate' of 39% (530 out of 1360 notes were 'wrong.')
Assessment of a program of promotion of empathy implemented at primary school

A agressivos, ao de ações pró-sociais e a melhor psicossocial. O presente estudo relata uma pesquisa-intervenção realizada com 36 crianças (5 e 6 anos – 16 meninos e 20 meninas), alunos de uma escola municipal de educação infantil de Juiz de Fora/MG. A intervenção envolveu pré e pós-avaliação de um programa promotor do desenvolvimento de habilidades empáticas. Utilizou-se a Escala de Empatia para Crianças e Adolescentes de Bryant (1982), adaptada. Os resultados comparativos das etapas de pré e pós-avaliação do programa indicam um incremento das habilidades empáticas. Defende-se a importância das intervenções preventivas no contexto educativo e a relevância da promoção do desenvolvimento da empatia enquanto fator de proteção ao desenvolvimento infantil. ABSTRACT Empathy has been linked to inhibition of aggressive behavior, the development of pro social activities and to a better psychosocial adjustment. This paper reports a research intervention with 36 children (5 and 6 years old – 16 boys and 20 girls), attending a public school of early childhood education in Juiz de Fora / MG. The intervention involved pre and post evaluation of a program promoting the development of empathic skills. It was used the Empathy Scale for Children and Adolescents of Bryant (1982), adapted. The comparative results of the stages of pre-and-post program evaluation indicated an increase in empathic skills. It defends the importance of preventive interventions in the educational context and importance of promoting the development of empathy as a protective factor for child development.
Mission design and performance for systematic deformation measurements with a spaceborne SAR system

Tandem-L is an L-band SAR satellite mission currently under study at DLR. It is intended to serve a number of geophysical applications in several domains, like solid Earth, ecosystems and cryosphere. The various applications compete for the system resources and the mission design optimization requires that a performance model is developed for each application in order to allow motivated choices. We describe the adopted approach for deformation measurements, which is based on recent formulations of the Crame´r-Rao bound for multi-image SAR interferometry and on the a-posteriori combination of the measurements from different lines of sight. We also discuss the limitations that the use of a reduced set of interferograms would entail.
Acoustic integrated extinction

The integrated extinction (IE) is defined as the integral of the scattering cross section as a function of wavelength. Sohl et al. (2007 J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 122, 3206–3210. (doi:10.1121/1.2801546)) derived an IE expression for acoustic scattering that is causal, i.e. the scattered wavefront in the forward direction arrives later than the incident plane wave in the background medium. The IE formula was based on electromagnetic results, for which scattering is causal by default. Here, we derive a formula for the acoustic IE that is valid for causal and non-causal scattering. The general result is expressed as an integral of the time-dependent forward scattering function. The IE reduces to a finite integral for scatterers with zero long-wavelength monopole and dipole amplitudes. Implications for acoustic cloaking are discussed and a new metric is proposed for broadband acoustic transparency.
A molecular, phylogenetic and functional study of the dADAR mRNA truncated isoform during Drosophila embryonic development reveals an editing-independent function

Adenosine Deaminases Acting on RNA (ADARs) have been studied in many animal phyla, where they have been shown to deaminate specific adenosines into inosines in duplex mRNA regions. In Drosophila, two isoform classes are encoded, designated full-length (contains the editase domain) and truncated (lacks this domain). Much is known about the full-length isoform, which plays a major role in regulating functions of voltage-gated ion channel proteins in the adult brain. In contrast, almost nothing is known about the functional significance of the truncated isoform. In situ hybridization shows that both isoform mRNA classes are maternally derived and transcripts for both localize primarily to the developing central nervous system. Quantitative RT-PCR shows that about 35% of all dADAR mRNA transcripts belong to the truncated class in embryos. 3′-RACE results show that abundance of the truncated isoform class is developmentally regulated, with a longer transcript appearing after the mid-blastula transition. 3′-UTR sequences for the truncated isoform have been determined from diverse Drosophila species and important regulatory regions including stop codons have been mapped. Western analysis shows that both mRNA isoform classes are translated into protein during embryonic development, as full-length variant levels gradually diminish. The truncated protein isoform is present in every Drosophila species studied, extending over a period spanning about 40 × 106 years, implying a conserved function. Previous work has shown that a dADAR protein isoform binds to the evolutionarily conserved rnp-4f pre-mRNA stem-loop located in the 5′-UTR to regulate splicing, while no RNA editing was observed, suggesting the hypothesis that it is the non-catalytic truncated isoform which regulates splicing. To test this hypothesis, we have utilized RNAi technology, the results of which support the hypothesis. These results demonstrate a novel, non-catalytic function for the truncated dADAR protein isoform in Drosophila embryonic development, which is very likely evolutionarily conserved.
Identification of gender from children's speech by computers and humans

This paper presents results on gender identiﬁcation (GI) for children’s speech, using the OGI Kids corpus and GMM-UBM and GMM-SVM systems. Regions of the spectrum containing important gender information for children are identiﬁed by conducting GI experiments over 21 frequency sub-bands. Results show that the frequencies below 1.8 kHz and above 3.8 kHz are most useful for GI for older children, while the frequencies above 1.4 kHz are most useful for the youngest children. The effect of using age-independent and age-dependent gender modelling (including the effects of puberty on boys voices) is explored. The application of intersession variability compensation is explored but experiments showed only little improvement. Experiments on human GI were also conducted and the results show that the humans do not achieve the performance of the machine.
Nonparametric Detection of Signals by Information Theoretic Criteria: Performance Analysis and an Improved Estimator

Determining the number of sources from observed data is a fundamental problem in many scientific fields. In this paper we consider the nonparametric setting, and focus on the detection performance of two popular estimators based on information theoretic criteria, the Akaike information criterion (AIC) and minimum description length (MDL). We present three contributions on this subject. First, we derive a new expression for the detection performance of the MDL estimator, which exhibits a much closer fit to simulations in comparison to previous formulas. Second, we present a random matrix theory viewpoint of the performance of the AIC estimator, including approximate analytical formulas for its overestimation probability. Finally, we show that a small increase in the penalty term of AIC leads to an estimator with a very good detection performance and a negligible overestimation probability.
Age-related epigenetic drift and phenotypic plasticity loss: implications in prevention of age-related human diseases

Aging is considered as one of the most important developmental processes in organisms and is closely associated with global deteriorations of epigenetic markers such as aberrant methylomic patterns. This altered epigenomic state, referred to ‘epigenetic drift’, reflects deficient maintenance of epigenetic marks and contributes to impaired cellular and molecular functions in aged cells. Epigenetic drift-induced abnormal changes during aging are scantily repaired by epigenetic modulators. This inflexibility in the aged epigenome may lead to an age-related decline in phenotypic plasticity at the cellular and molecular levels due to epigenetic drift. This perspective aims to provide novel concepts for understanding epigenetic effects on the aging process and to provide insights into epigenetic prevention and therapeutic strategies for age-related human disease.
Familial Transmission of Major Affective Disorders

Summary The two-threshold multifactorial polygenic (MFP) model was applied to blind family study data, collected in a long-term follow-up and family study of major affective disorders. This model tested whether bipolar and unipolar disorders are manifestations of the same underlying factors or if they are independently caused disorders. The hypothesis that bipolar and unipolar disorders are, respectively, severe and mild forms of the same disorder was supported. There was little evidence for different familial aetiologies for bipolar and unipolar disorders in our sample.
Integration of P2P and Clouds to support Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments

Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments (MMVEs) are attracting millions of players from all over the world. Currently used Client/Server infrastructures and technologies are reaching their limits of flexibility and scalability. We propose an approach that combines the technological advantages of two different paradigms, namely P2P networking and Cloud Computing. Our proposal leverages known P2P techniques like Virtual Nodes and consistent hashing, as well as separate overlays for different purposes, e.g. interest and object management. We propose combining these techniques with the definition of a specific role in the overlay for Cloud-based, trusted resources. This enables the distribution of the MMVE on top of a mix of Cloud and user resources. The solution outlined allows building key-value distributed storage systems that can resize at run-time (elasticity) and provide scalability and load balancing features to the MMVE platform.
Designing the Interactions in the Museum

In cultural productions, and specifically in the context of museums and exhibitions, the process of construction of meanings has historically involved the audience in a relationship with the product. Nevertheless, this relationship is still designed using traditional language aimed at constraining the interpretation within the pattern suggested by the producer and reducing the room left for free interpretation by the user. Innovation, then, takes place in the offer of services and tools to support the process, and not in a proposal of a new approach to the construction of meaning. Our research discusses a case of an Italian cultural institution as a model for proposing a new approach to the process of interpretation of the relationship between the users and the product. The innovation in this case is the result of a redesign of the language offered to the users, and it is aimed at involving them in the process of sense making. Our article sheds light on the way in which innovation of language may impact the world of signs and symbols that determine the meaning of the product.
Collective activity localization by spatiality preservation search

In this paper, we propose a collective activity localization method based on the spatial contextual information among people. In contrast to previous works of collective activity recognition, the collective activity localization method recognizes groups of people participating in a consistent activity as well as their activity labels. The biggest challenge of collective activity localization is efficient computation, due to exponential growth of the number of possible groups. The combinatorial search methods cannot be naively applied for collective activity localization, because the participant’s position dramatically changes by adding new participants to the groups. In this work, we introduce a novel search algorithm named the Spatiality Preservation Search (SPS), which provides exact solutions in polynomial time. By determining participants on the group boundaries first, the SPS enumerates groups without changing the participant’s position in the groups. Also, using Haar-like contextual descriptors, the SPS extracts groups efficiently using integral images. Experiments on an existing data-set and challenging new data-sets show efficiency of the proposed method. Graphical Abstract
An Approach to Adaptive Swarm Surveillance Using Social Potential Fields

Swarm robotics is a field of research inspired from how a biological system coordinates in a distributed and decentralized fashion. This distributed autonomous control mechanism makes swarm robotics a better alternative for mobile surveillance application. This paper presents a swarm intelligence algorithm to detect intrusion on a land under surveillance. The system consists of hundreds of robots governed by a set of decentralized control laws. Social Potential Field, a popular approach for distributed autonomous control, is used for the controlling motion of every robot in a swarm. Since intrusion is highly dynamic in nature, a parameter optimization approach using online gradient descent is introduced to make intrusion detection and response fast and effective. An artificial simulation environment consisting of Guard robots, Castle and Invader is created to verify the working of the proposed approach. Computer simulation results are presented for illustration and a comparison is made with the results obtained when the system lacks the ability to adapt to the changing surrounding environment.
Building a Digital Model of Michelangelo's Florentine Pietà

We present the methodology we used to acquire the data and construct a computer model of Michelangelo's Florentine Pieta with enough detail and accuracy to make it useful in scientific studies. We describe the project to acquire and build the 3D model. The work we describe is unique in that an art historian, not a technologist, conceived and specified the project. Our goal wasn't simply to produce the statue's model but also to provide the art historian with material and tools to enable him to answer his own research questions. The project gave us the opportunity to explore the value of 3D scanning and visualization in a nontechnical discipline, art history. The project's second goal was to develop scanning technology accessible to other cultural heritage projects both in terms of cost and usability.
Identification of nonlinear systems with kernel methods

This paper present a nonlinear system identification based kernel methods, such as regularization networks, support vector regression and kernel principal component analysis. In this case, black-box models are used in a particular space named reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) which only considered the input/output signals of the nonlinear system. In this particular space, the model is a linear combination of kernel functions applied to transform the observed data from the input space to a high dimensional feature space of vectors, this idea known as the kernel trick. To prove the performances of the kernel methods, identification examples are illustrated with three single-input single-output (SISO) benchmark models.