Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Circadian rhythm abnormalities and autonomic dysfunction in patients with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME) patients frequently show autonomic symptoms which may be associated with a hypothalamic dysfunction. This study aimed to explore circadian rhythm patterns in rest and activity and distal skin temperature (DST) and their association with self-reported outcome measures, in CFS/ME patients and healthy controls at two different times of year. Ten women who met both the 1994 CDC/Fukuda definition and 2003 Canadian criteria for CFS/ME were included in the study, along with ten healthy controls matched for age, sex and body mass index. Self-reported measures were used to assess fatigue, sleep quality, anxiety and depression, autonomic function and health-related quality of life. The ActTrust actigraph was used to record activity, DST and light intensity, with data intervals of one minute over seven consecutive days. Sleep variables were obtained through actigraphic analysis and from subjective sleep diary. The circadian variables and the spectral analysis of the rhythms were calculated. Linear regression analysis was used to evaluate the relationship between the rhythmic variables and clinical features. Recordings were taken in the same subjects in winter and summer. Results showed no differences in rhythm stability, sleep latency or number of awakenings between groups as measured with the actigraph. However, daily activity, the relative amplitude and the stability of the activity rhythm were lower in CFS/ME patients than in controls. DST was sensitive to environmental temperature and showed lower nocturnal values in CFS/ME patients than controls only in winter. A spectral analysis showed no differences in phase or amplitude of the 24h rhythm, but the power of the second harmonic (12h), revealed differences between groups (controls showed a post-lunch dip in activity and peak in DST, while CFS/ME patients did not) and correlated with clinical features. These findings suggest that circadian regulation and skin vasodilator responses may play a role in CFS/ME.
Yule's "Nonsense Correlation" Solved!

In this paper, we resolve a longstanding open statistical problem. The problem is to mathematically confirm Yule's 1926 empirical finding of "nonsense correlation" (\cite{Yule}). We do so by analytically determining the second moment of the empirical correlation coefficient \beqn \theta := \frac{\int_0^1W_1(t)W_2(t) dt - \int_0^1W_1(t) dt \int_0^1 W_2(t) dt}{\sqrt{\int_0^1 W^2_1(t) dt - \parens{\int_0^1W_1(t) dt}^2} \sqrt{\int_0^1 W^2_2(t) dt - \parens{\int_0^1W_2(t) dt}^2}}, \eeqn of two {\em independent} Wiener processes, $W_1,W_2$. Using tools from Fred- holm integral equation theory, we successfully calculate the second moment of $\theta$ to obtain a value for the standard deviation of $\theta$ of nearly . 5. The "nonsense" correlation, which we call "volatile" correlation, is volatile in the sense that its distribution is heavily dispersed and is frequently large in absolute value. It is induced because each Wiener process is "self-correlated" in time. This is because a Wiener process is an integral of pure noise and thus its values at different time points are correlated. In addition to providing an explicit formula for the second moment of $\theta$, we offer implicit formulas for higher moments of $\theta$.
Cardiotocographic Diagnosis of Fetal Health based on Multiclass Morphologic Pattern Predictions using Deep Learning Classification

Medical complications of pregnancy and pregnancy-related deaths continue to remain a major global challenge today. Internationally, about 830 maternal deaths occur every day due to pregnancy-related or childbirth-related complications. In fact, almost 99% of all maternal deaths occur in developing countries. In this research, an alternative and enhanced artificial intelligence approach is proposed for cardiotocographic diagnosis of fetal assessment based on multiclass morphologic pattern predictions, including 10 target classes with imbalanced samples, using deep learning classification models. The developed model is used to distinguish and classify the presence or absence of multiclass morphologic patterns for outcome predictions of complications during pregnancy. The testing results showed that the developed deep neural network model achieved an accuracy of 88.02%, a recall of 84.30%, a precision of 85.01%, and an F-score of 0.8508 in average. Thus, the developed model can provide highly accurate and consistent diagnoses for fetal assessment regarding complications during pregnancy, thereby preventing and/or reducing fetal mortality rate as well as maternal mortality rate during and following pregnancy and childbirth, especially in low-resource settings and developing countries.
BIOLOGICAL SAFETY EVALUATION OF STEALTH SOLID LIPID NANOPARTICLES OF RISPERIDONE: EFFECT OF SURFACE CHARACTERISTICS ON THEIR HYDROPHOBICITY, HAEMOLYSIS AND MACROPHAGE PHAGOCYTOSIS

The aim of this study was to prepare stealth solid lipid nanoparticles (SLN S ) of risperidone, for controlled delivery through the intravenous (i.v.) route to reduce the frequency of administration, dose and adverse effects during the short-term management of manifestation of psychotic disorders. Stealth SLNs were prepared by emulsification-solvent diffusion and sonication method by adding acetone/ethanol containing drug, lipid and stabilizer to aqueous phase, containing surfactant, under homogenization. The effect of lipid type, lipid percentage, stabilizer type and stabilizer percentage were evaluated on the particle size, zeta potential, drug loading efficiency and drug release for optimization of SLNs. Dialysis bag membrane was used to determine drug release, the Rose Bengal binding constant for surface hydrophobicity and serum protein adsorption. The cytotoxicity of SLNs on macrophages and red blood cells were also assessed in order to evaluate the impact of surface modifications on toxicity of the different formulations. The optimized formulation was composed of 0.05% stearyl alcohol (relative to the total volume of dispersion) and 25% PEG 40 stearate (relative to the weight of lipid) using a homogenization speed of 1000 rpm and 4 minutes sonication. The results showed that the in vitro specifications of stealth SLN S of risperidone are suitable for i.v. administration. Rezumat Studiul si-a propus prepararea si caracterizarea farmaco-tehnologică a unor noi nanoparticule cu risperidonă, in scopul eficientizării farmacoterapiei acestui medicament antipsihotic. Formularea risperidonei sub forma de nanoparticule cu cedare lentă poate reduce frecvenţa administrării dozelor de risperidonă necesare obţinerii efectului antipsihotic, precum si scăderea incidenţei apariţiei reacţiilor adverse. S-au evaluat următorii parametri: marimea nanoparticulelor, potenţialul zeta, cedarea substanţei active din noua formulă farmaceutică, constanta de legare Rose Bengal, precum si efectul hemolitic al noilor nanoparticule obţinute.
Genetic variation affecting exon skipping contributes to brain structural atrophy in Alzheimer’s disease

Genetic variation in cis-regulatory elements related to splicing machinery and splicing regulatory elements (SREs) results in exon skipping and undesired protein products. We developed a splicing decision model to identify actionable loci among common SNPs for gene regulation. The splicing decision model identified SNPs affecting exon skipping by analyzing sequence-driven alternative splicing (AS) models and by scanning the genome for the regions with putative SRE motifs. We used non-Hispanic Caucasians with neuroimaging, and fluid biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and identified 17,088 common exonic SNPs affecting exon skipping. GWAS identified one SNP (rs1140317) in HLA-DQB1 as significantly associated with entorhinal cortical thickness, AD neuroimaging biomarker, after controlling for multiple testing. Further analysis revealed that rs1140317 was significantly associated with brain amyloid-f deposition (PET and CSF). HLA-DQB1 is an essential immune gene and may regulate AS, thereby contributing to AD pathology. SRE may hold potential as novel therapeutic targets for AD.
A NOVEL APPROACH FOR R-PEAK DETECTION IN THE ELECTROCARDIOGRAM ( ECG ) SIGNAL

The research article proposes the effective method for R-peak detection in the ECG signal. The improper beating of the heart called cardiac arrhythmia which is risk to human. The ECG samples are taken from physionet (physio bank ATM). Analysis of ECG signal and detection of R-Peaks is discussed in this paper. Initially the noise is removed from the signal using FFT technique, windowing technique and thresholding technique to detect R-peaks. In the ECG signal processing one can encounter the difficulties like unequal distance between peaks, irregular peak form, occurrence of lowfrequency components due to patient breathing etc., In order to resolve and reduce the effect of these factors processing pipeline should contain particular stages which is discussed in the paper and the R-peak detection algorithm is implemented in MATLAB R 2012b.
Early math interest and the development of math skills: An understudied relationship

Prior models suggest that math attitudes and ability might strengthen each other over time in a reciprocal fashion (Ma, 1997). The current study investigated the relationship between math interest and skill both concurrently and over time in a preschool sample. Analyses of concurrent relationships indicated that high levels of interest were related to strong math skills. Even when controlling for initial interest and a brief intelligence measure, math skills predicted math interest approximately 5 months later; in the same way, early interest predicted later skill, even controlling for initial interest. These findings suggest that a reciprocal relationship between math interest and math ability may be in place as early as preschool.
Structure and determinants of the alpha-lactalbumin molten globule

The structure and determinants of the molten globule folding intermediate of a-lactalbumin (c-LA) are investigated using a combination of site-directed mutagenesis, disulfide chemistry, and spectroscopy. The a-LA molten globule folding intermediate may best be described as a bipartite structure consisting of a molten globule helical domain containing helices arranged in a native-like topology and a largely unstructured beta sheet domain (Chapter 2). Analysis of thiol-disulfide effective concentrations for native and non-native cysteine pairs in the helical domain of the a-LA molten globule reveals local preferences for native-like structure (Chapter 3). Analysis of hydrophobic core mutants defines a stabilizing subdomain containing specific native-like sidechain interactions (Chapter 4). Finally, simultaneous mutation of all hydrophobic sidechains to a representative hydrophobic residue leucine in a recombinant model of the isolated helical domain suggests that specific hydrophobic sidechain diversity may not be necessary to establish the native-like fold of the a-LA molten globule (Chapter 5). The appendix describes studies aimed at clarifying the requirements for forming fixed tertiary interactions from the molten globule state. It is shown that acquisition of specific tertiary interactions requires calcium-dependent organization of the beta sheet domain and the interdomain regions of a-LA. Thesis Supervisor: Peter S. Kim Title: Professor of Biology
Detecting Foot-Chases from Police Body-Worn Video

Existing methods to record interactions between the public and police officers are unable to capture the entirety of police-public interactions. In order to provide a comprehensive understanding of these interactions, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) intends to utilize Body-Worn Video (BWV) collected from cameras fastened to their officers. BWV provides a novel means to collect fine-grained information about police-public interactions. The purpose of this project is to identify foot-chases from the videos using machine-learning algorithms. Our proposed algorithm uses the Bag-of-Intrinsic-Words algorithm followed by classification via support-vector machines. Our training dataset consists of 100 training videos (20 foot-chase & 80 non-foot-chase), and a test dataset of 60 LAPD videos (4 foot-chase & 56 non-foot-chase). We achieved results of 91.6% testing accuracy.
Topological Data Analysis Made Easy with the Topology ToolKit

This tutorial presents topological methods for the analysis and visualization of scientific data from a user's perspective, with the Topology ToolKit (TTK), a recently released open-source library for topological data analysis. Topological methods have gained considerably in popularity and maturity over the last twenty years and success stories of established methods have been documented in a wide range of applications (combustion, chemistry, astrophysics, material sciences, etc.) with both acquired and simulated data, in both post-hoc and in-situ contexts. While reference textbooks have been published on the topic, no tutorial at IEEE VIS has covered this area in recent years, and never at a software level and from a user's point-of-view. This tutorial fills this gap by providing a beginner's introduction to topological methods for practitioners, researchers, students, and lecturers. In particular, instead of focusing on theoretical aspects and algorithmic details, this tutorial focuses on how topological methods can be useful in practice for concrete data analysis tasks such as segmentation, feature extraction or tracking. The tutorial describes in detail how to achieve these tasks with TTK. First, after an introduction to topological methods and their application in data analysis, a brief overview of TTK's main entry point for end users, namely ParaView, will be presented. Second, an overview of TTK's main features will be given. A running example will be described in detail, showcasing how to access TTK's features via ParaView, Python, VTK/C++, and C++. Third, hands-on sessions will concretely show how to use TTK in ParaView for multiple, representative data analysis tasks. Fourth, the usage of TTK will be presented for developers, in particular by describing several examples of visualization and data analysis projects that were built on top of TTK. Finally, some feedback regarding the usage of TTK as a teaching platform for topological analysis will be given. Presenters of this tutorial include experts in topological methods, core authors of TTK as well as active users, coming from academia, labs, or industry. A large part of the tutorial will be dedicated to hands-on exercises and a rich material package (including TTK pre-installs in virtual machines, code, data, demos, video tutorials, etc.) will be provided to the participants. This tutorial mostly targets students, practitioners and researchers who are not experts in topological methods but who are interested in using them in their daily tasks. We also target researchers already familiar to topological methods and who are interested in using or contributing to TTK.
Locality-adapted Kernel Densities for Tweet Localization

We propose a location prediction method for tweets based on the geographical probability distribution of their terms over a region. In our method, the probabilities are calculated using Kernel Density Estimation (KDE), where the bandwidth of the kernel function for each term is determined separately according to the location indicativeness of the term. Prediction for a new tweet is performed by combining the probability distributions of its terms weighted by their information gain ratio. The method we propose relies on statistical approaches without requiring any parameter tuning. Experiments conducted on three tweet sets from different regions of the world indicate significant improvement in prediction accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art methods.
Contextualizing Corruption: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach to Studying Corruption in Organizations

This paper aims to establish how organization and management research, an extensive field that has contributed a great deal to research on corruption, could apply insights from other disciplines in order to advance the understanding of corruption, often considered as a form of unethical behavior in organizations. It offers an analysis of important contributions of corruption research, taking a ‘rationalist perspective’, and highlights the central tensions and debates within this vast body of literatures. It then shows how these debates can be addressed by applying insights from corruption studies, adopting anthropological lens. The paper thus proposes a cross-disciplinary approach, which focuses on studying corruption by looking at what it means to individuals implicated by the phenomenon while engaging in social relations and situated in different contexts. It also offers an alternative approach to the study of corruption amidst claims that anti-corruption efforts have failed to achieve desirable results.
The Importance of Ground Truth: An Open-Source Biometric Repository

Advances in forensic technologies and procedures seek to produce better and more efficient policing for safer societies. Little is understood, however, about how effectively the human forensic professional employs such technologies, or the cognitive and perceptual processes of judgment and decision making the forensic professional engages in during the course of evidence evaluation. For this, experimenters need materials that approximate the realism of crime scene evidence, while ensuring the ground truth about the source of this information. These two goals are often incompatible. We discuss the development of an open-source biometric repository to address the issue of ground truth. This repository contains a range of crime related materials such as fingerprints and palm-prints, shoe-prints, faces, handwriting, voices, and irises. Our goal is to provide a large, open-source repository of forensic information, where certainty of the source in built into the system, to help advance research on identification by humans and technology.
Separation and Purification Technologies for Lactic Acid – A Brief Review

Lactic acid is an important platform chemical with a wide range of applications. Production of lactic acid by fermentation is advantageous because renewable and low cost raw materials can be used as substrates. After fermentation, the broth needs to be purified to obtain pure lactic acid for further uses. Thus, efficient downstream processes are very important because they account for 50% of the production costs. This review discusses different processes that are currently employed for lactic acid recovery, focusing on precipitation, solvent extraction, and separation with membranes. Advances in such recovery processes and drawbacks that limit the application of these technologies at the industrial level are also presented.
Maxillary Sinus Floor Elevation Techniques with Recent Advances: A Literature Review

Background: In the rehabilitation of atrophic posterior maxilla, factors such as age, extraction of teeth result in loss of alveolar bone height together with increased pneumatization of sinus contradicting the implant surgery. Although adequate bone height can be achieved using various maxillary sinus augmentation techniques, these procedures have been practiced successfully. However, significant complications occur such as perforations or tearing. To maintain the integrity of Schneiderian membrane subsequently increasing the success rate a retrospective analysis is carried out on various techniques with complications which occur during and after treatment.Methods: A systematic online and manual review of the literature identified articles dealing with SFE. Applying rigid inclusion criteria, screening and data abstraction were performed independently by two reviewers. The follow-up of was a minimum of 6 months. The articles selected were carefully read and data of interest were tabulated. The identified articles were analyzed regarding implant outcome, with or without graft using different surgical techniques with complication rates using random-effects Poisson regression models to obtain summary estimates/ year proportions. This article reviews various sinus lift techniques for intact elevation of Schneiderian membrane based on advanced PUBMED, Medline, Cochrane database system search of English-language literature from the year 2004 to present in order to compare and evaluate the success rate with minimal complications selecting the most suitable which can fulfill the criteria of being non-invasive, less time-consuming, more reliable and less traumatic.Result:After reviewing various sinus elevation techniques; nasal suction technique(NaSucT), balloon antral elevation technique(BAOSFE), and Hydraulic Sinus Lift technique(HySiLift) emerges as more favourable among all these and can efficiently lift the Schneiderian membrane with minimal trauma. We must emphasize that these are new techniques and cannot replace the conventional techniques as a whole.
POSITIONING THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION FOR THE UTILIZATION ERA

The completed International Space Station (ISS) is among the greatest of international cooperative endeavors in the history of science and technology. While the design, assembly and operations to date are remarkable human achievements in their own right, the opening of the utilization era over the next decade presents unprecedented opportunities for advancing research and development of space resources. NASA has been working with international partners in Canada, Europe, Japan and Russia, as well as the U.S. White House and Congress to maximize the value of this extraordinary global asset. Scientific, technological and industrial uses are being enabled through new initiatives that are designed to contribute to both the future of space exploration and the missions of organizations other than space agencies in the domains of public health, energy, the environment and education. International humanitarian projects are on the drawing boards, as is a U.S. independent non-profit foundation for the advancement of scientific research into the realm of applied products and services. During the next 12-18 months, the ISS will be strategically positioned to best support success in these initiatives and unequivocally demonstrate the benefits of international cooperation for peaceful purposes and value-added applications. A new global economy in space is approaching the tipping point.
WAMBy: An information retrieval approach to web-based question answering

Nowadays, most answers to natural language questions can be found in the first few results of web search engines. We describe the WAMBy question answering system that attempts to extract answers from the top 10 results of Google. We propose a new ranking method for factoid answers that among others takes into account the semantic similarity of the context of each answer candidate with the question and named entities found in the titles and the snippets of search results. The proposed method gave very promising results in a variety of questions. Also we describe the methods used for non-factoid answer extraction and ranking. An important part of the system is a new text similarity measure that extends TF-IDF by utilizing word vectors. The new text similarity measure solves the problem of synonyms and improves the performance of TF-IDF in the paraphrase identification task. The source code of WAMBy is publicly available as well as two datasets that were created for question classification and factoid question answering evaluation.