Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Locally Linear Embedding based on Rank-order Distance

Dimension reduction has become an important tool for dealing with high dimensional data. Locally linear embedding (LLE) is a nonlinear dimension reduction method which can preserve local configurations of nearest neighbors. However, finding the nearest neighbors requires the definition of a distance measure, which is a critical step in LLE. In this paper, the Rank-order distance measure is used to substitute the traditional Euclidean distance measure in order to find better nearest neighbor candidates for preserving local configurations of the manifolds. The Rank-order distance between the data points is calculated using their neighborsâ ranking orders, and is shown to be able to improve the clustering of high dimensional data. The proposed method is called Rank-order based LLE (RLLE). The RLLE method is evaluated by comparing with the original LLE, ISO-LLE and IED-LLE on two handwritten datasets. It is shown that the effectiveness of a distance measure in the LLE method is closely related to whether it can be used to find good nearest neighbors. The experimental results show that the proposed RLLE method can improve the process of dimension reduction effectively, and C-index is another good candidate for evaluating the dimension reduction results.
The Ag85B protein of Mycobacterium tuberculosis may turn a protective immune response induced by Ag85B‐DNA vaccine into a potent but non‐protective Th1 immune response in mice

Clarifying how an initial protective immune response to tuberculosis may later loose its efficacy is essential to understand tuberculosis pathology and to develop novel vaccines. In mice, a primary vaccination with Ag85B‐encoding plasmid DNA (DNA‐85B) was protective against Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) infection and associated with Ag85B‐specific CD4+ T cells producing IFN‐γ and controlling intramacrophagic MTB growth. Surprisingly, this protection was eliminated by Ag85B protein boosting. Loss of protection was associated with a overwhelming CD4+ T cell proliferation and IFN‐γ production in response to Ag85B protein, despite restraint of Th1 response by CD8+ T cell‐dependent mechanisms and activation of CD4+ T cell‐dependent IL‐10 secretion. Importantly, these Ag85B‐responding CD4+ T cells lost the ability to produce IFN‐γ and control MTB intramacrophagic growth in coculture with MTB‐infected macrophages, suggesting that the protein‐dependent expansion of non‐protective CD4+ T cells determined dilution or loss of the protective Ag85B‐specific CD4+ induced by DNA‐85B vaccination. These data emphasize the need of exerting some caution in adopting aggressive DNA‐priming, protein‐booster schedules for MTB vaccines. They also suggest that Ag85B protein secreted during MTB infection could be involved in the instability of protective anti‐tuberculosis immune response, and actually concur to disease progression.
Clinical and Dermoscopic Changes in Common Melanocytic Nevi in School Children: The Framingham School Nevus Study

Background: Nevi are potential precursors of malignant melanoma and are important risk factors for the development of the disease. Childhood may be a critical time for the formation and evolution of nevi. Objectives: To document the development of new nevi and to document the clinical and dermoscopic changes in index nevi in school children during a 1-year follow-up. Methods: Digital photographs and dermoscopic images of the back of subjects were compared at baseline and 1-year follow-up to assess changes in nevi counts and in clinical and dermoscopic features of index nevi. Results: Overall participation rate was 81% (42/52). 56.4% of study participants were found to have an increased number of nevi at 1-year follow-up. All nevi were small and clinically insignificant. Fifty percent of study participants were found to have dermoscopic changes in their index nevi at 1-year follow-up. Eighty-five percent of these changes were classified as subtle and 15.0% as obvious. Conclusions: A significant portion of students developed new nevi over the course of 1 year. Most index nevi remained stable in pattern and structure. Benign dermoscopic changes occurred in 50.0% of index nevi. However, none of the dermoscopically changed nevi revealed any major changes and the overall nevus pattern remained unchanged. The relevance of these changes is uncertain and further follow-up may elucidate their significance.
Pyruvate Protects the Brain Against Ischemia–Reperfusion Injury by Activating the Erythropoietin Signaling Pathway

Background and Purpose— Pyruvate is known to be cytoprotective through antioxidant and anti-inflammatory mechanisms. We tested the hypothesis that pyruvate protects the brain against ischemia–reperfusion injury by inducing endogenous erythropoietin (EPO) expression. Methods— Pyruvate's protective effect was evaluated in C6 glioma cells and HT22 neuronal cells subjected to transient oxygen glucose deprivation. Cell viability (calcein AM assay) and expression of hypoxia-inducible factor-1&agr;, EPO, Akt and Erk (immunoblot), and EPO receptor (reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction) were analyzed. Transient focal cerebral ischemia in rats was induced by 2 hours middle cerebral artery occlusion followed by 24 hours reperfusion. Pyruvate or saline was infused from 60 minutes occlusion until 30 minutes reperfusion. Lesion volume and DNA fragmentation were assessed by 2,3,5-triphenyltetrazolium staining and terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase-mediated dUTP nick end-labeling assay, respectively. Immunoblots were conducted to determine cerebral EPO contents. Results— Pyruvate increased cell viability, hypoxia-inducible factor-1&agr;, EPO, and Akt phosphorylation. Small interfering RNA suppression of hypoxia-inducible factor-1&agr; and EPO abolished pyruvate-induced cytoprotection. In the rat stroke model, pyruvate reduced lesion volume by 84% and DNA fragmentation by 77% versus controls; increased EPO content paralleled these cerebroprotective actions of pyruvate. Conclusions— Pyruvate activation of the hypoxia-inducible factor-1&agr;–EPO signaling cascade in neurons and glia could protect the brain from ischemia–reperfusion injury.
Schedulability Analysis for Rate-Monotonic Algorithm in Parallel Real-Time Systems

Content RateMonotonic algorithm (RMA) is a widely used static priority scheduling algorithm. For application of RMA on various systems, first it is essential to determine the system’s feasibility. Various existing algorithms perform the analysis by reducing the scheduling points in a given task set. In this paper, we develop an algorithm to compute the RMA schedulability in a parallel real-time system. We discuss the bottlenecks of serial execution and show that the parallel algorithm to overcomes these limitation. The proposed algorithm is parallelized using OpenMP. The results obtained show the improvement due to the use of parallel algorithm in a multiprocessor environment.
THE ABORTION POLICY MAKING PROCESS, THE HISTORICAL ANALYSIS AND THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY REGULATIONS IMPACT A Case Study of the Republic of Ireland

Abortion, as a measure of fertility regulation, has been a well-known practice in all human societies. With the rise of modern state this special issue, with the large and complex medical, social and legal implications, begins to be regulated by the specific legislation within a single state. The present paper focuses on the abortion legislation process in the Republic of Ireland from 1921 up to 1992. A special emphasis is laid on the legislation changes, policy making process and abortion policy historical background. Moreover, the location of the main factors and circumstances, with a particular stress on the impact of the European Community regulations, which have influenced these changes, is made. In dealing with the topic one might expect a strong ideological impact, as the powerful Catholic philosophy has been one of the most evident historical characteristics marking the former British colony. Finally, the Esping-Andersen's typology of welfare regimes as an explanatory theoretical model of the Irish social policy system and the specific area of AB policy is used.
The Short-Term Assessment of Risk and Treatability (START): A Prospective Study of Inpatient Behavior

Structured professional judgment guides (SPJs) have gained acceptance for the prediction of future violence. We conducted a prospective study of 44 psychiatric inpatients with a variety of mental health problems to test whether the Short-Term Assessment of Risk and Treatability (START; Webster, Martin, Brink, Nicholls, & Middleton, 2004) was able to predict a range of problem behaviors. We obtained outcome behaviors from the nursing record for a period of up to 6 months after the assessment. For all types of behavior tested (violence to others, self-harm, self-neglect, and being victimized), the clinical judgment of risk based on the START was a good predictor. However, the actuarial scores on the Strength and Risk scales of the START were only useful for the prediction of violence. The results provide a strong evidence base for the use of START to predict a range of problem behaviors, and confirms that the START should be used as an adjunct to clinical decision making and not with a blind adherence to the actuarial scores. The difference in efficacy between START used in an actuarial manner and as a SPJ suggests that schemes using other items may prove more effective in guiding the clinician to assess and managing these risks.
Estrogen therapy selectively enhances prefrontal cognitive processes: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study with functional magnetic resonance imaging in perimenopausal and recently postmenopausal women

Objective: Estrogen therapy (ET) seems to differentially effect cognitive processes in younger versus older postmenopausal women, suggesting a window of opportunity when ET is most beneficial. Cognitive improvement in younger postmenopausal women has been attributed to ET's influence on hot flushes and sleep, but empiric examination of the mediating role of menopause symptoms versus direct effects of ET on the brain is limited. Design: In a double-blind trial, 52 women were randomly assigned to estradiol 0.05 mg/day (n = 26) or placebo transdermal patches (n = 26) for 12 weeks. Women completed tests of memory, learning, and executive functioning, and hot flush and sleep assessments at baseline and study end. A subset of women (five ET treated, six placebo treated) also underwent blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies. Results: Nondepressed perimenopausal and postmenopausal women were studied. The majority had hot flushes and sleep impairment. Compared with placebo, ET selectively reduced errors of perseveration during verbal recall (P = 0.03), a frontal system-mediated function, but did not influence other cognitive processes. Women with baseline hot flushes had greater cognitive benefit with ET (P < 0.05). Cognitive benefit was not associated with sleep problems or its improvement. Measures of fMRI BOLD activation during tests of verbal and spatial working memory showed significant increases in frontal system activity with ET (P < 0.001). Conclusions: Estrogen therapy selectively improves executive functioning as demonstrated by reduced perseverative errors and prefrontal cortex activation during verbal recall tasks. Cognitive improvement with ET is associated with hot flushes, but not with sleep, suggesting that ET has a direct central nervous system effect, rather than an indirect effect mediated through improvement of sleep.
How to Evaluate It: The Role of Story‐Evaluative Tone in Agenda Setting and Priming

The main contribution of this study to the understanding of agenda-setting and priming effects is its focus on the role of evaluative tone in all stages of the agenda setting/ priming process. First, the public’s evaluation of issue importance, which is the dependent variable in most agenda-setting studies, is influenced by the issue saliency in the news and by the evaluative tone of media coverage (positive, negative, or neutral). This evaluative tone or affective attribute attached to the issue is part of the second-level agenda setting. Second, these affective attributes that people attach to issues further play an important role in the process of priming, on which they have both indirect and direct impacts. Priming, therefore, carries with it an affective component: It is a combination of message strength and direction. Third, the political judgments of individuals are also directly influenced by media-affective attributes. All of the arguments are supported by the empirical analyses.
Extended deterministic edge router marking

In this paper, a novel deterministic edge router marking scheme to mitigate denial of service (DoS) attacks and perform traceback is proposed. The scheme is compatible to packet fragmentation and at the same time does not add space overhead. The proposed technique produces low false positive as well as adds very low processing and storage overhead at the edge router. An issue with existing filtering scheme for DoS attacks is that they suffer from heavy collateral damage. Our proposed scheme minimises collateral damage using signature pushback and allows legitimate traffic to be served smoothly. We optimise pushback by using Lamport hash chain and filtering time by sorting the attack feature based on its entropy. Empirical results confirm that our system is fast, accurate, scalable and greatly reduces blocking of legitimate traffic during the filtering phase.
Texture analysis of terrain images: exploiting directional properties of a local-feature statistics operator using small masks

The texture discrimination properties of a directional operator, using a window based histogram correlation technique, are described for test images and natural scene imagery. The natural image examples are drawn from digitized monochrome aerial photographs of volcanic terrain, and of coastal dune fields in the region of West Lancashire, England. The operator masks use directionally encoded local difference parameters and are of two sizes, 3 by 3 and 2 by 2 pixels, scanning over a window size of 25 by 25 pixels to create an autocorrelation map, normalized to the output gray-scale range. Comparisons of the outputs are discussed in terms of ability to detect specific types of texture feature associated with known lava flow regimes demonstrate the viability of the technique down to single pixel resolution, particularly for folded or striated topography. The vegetation cover of the volcanic terrain is also characterized in terms of its response to these texture operators. The output from the dune field images, which contain a wider variety of vegetation cover, also demonstrates the discrimination capability of the technique and its potential usefulness in environmental and conservation management.
An Advanced Hardware Platform to Verify 5G Wireless Communication Concepts

Verification of first 5G concepts of a new air interface with real hardware prototypes is challenging. In this paper, we highlight a flexible software-defined radio (SDR) platform which can be used to implement novel 5G communication concepts. The proposed software and hardware architecture was previously used to implement early LTE-Advanced features, e.g. flexible multiband carrier-aggregation (CA). Furthermore, the prototype was used for transmission experiments of new multi carrier waveforms. The proposed setup allows early proof-of-concepts (PoC) by extending hardware-in-the-loop (HILO) experiments to small laboratory experiments and finally real outdoor test trials of a novel 5G air interface and concepts.
Image fusion method for infrared and visible light images based on SWT and regional gradient

A novel image fusion method based on region gradient and SWT is proposed to improve the visual effect of the fused image. The source images are first decomposed into low frequency and high frequency parts. Low frequency parts are fused using the fusion rule of larger region gradient, and the absolute value is adopted as the fusion rule for high frequency parts. The final fused image is obtained by inverse SWT. The experimental results show that the regional gradient and SWT methods can better maintain the background details of visible light image and target feature information of infrared image. Besides, it can improve the objective indexes such as mean, standard deviation, information entropy and mutual information. The proposed method is an effective fusion method.
An optimized Relevance Vector Machine with incremental learning strategy for lithium-ion battery remaining useful life estimation

In most industrial fields, it needs to evaluate the performance degradation and remaining useful life (RUL) of lithium-ion battery. With the uncertainty representation of the RUL, the Relevance Vector Machine (RVM) becomes an effective approach in lithium-ion battery RUL prognostics. But, the small sample size and low precision of multi-step prediction will bring district to RUL prediction for sparse RVM algorithm. With the on-line monitoring data updating, the dynamic training ability and online algorithm are necessary to improve the prediction precision for battery RUL model. Moreover, the operating efficiency and computing complexity are needed for on-line and real-time processing. A simple and effective on-line training strategy is introduced for RVM algorithm to realize high prediction performance. An incremental optimized RVM algorithm is proposed to achieve efficient online training for model updating. Furthermore, with the on-line training strategy, the prediction precision can increase for battery RUL estimation. Using proposed method, we carry out experiments with NASA battery data and the results show that our method has excellent performance on predicting the RUL of lithium-ion battery.
A Neural Stimulator Frontend With High-Voltage Compliance and Programmable Pulse Shape for Epiretinal Implants

This paper presents an integrated neural stimulator with highly efficient and flexible frontend which is intended for an epiretinal implant with 1024 electrodes. It features programmable stimulation pulse shapes, a high-voltage (HV) output driver with compliance monitor for supply voltage adaptation, active and passive charge balancers, and electrode impedance measurement. Area and power efficiency is achieved by global timing assignment and local amplitude control over a bus at the local stimulation units. Major power savings in the distributed digital control units are realized by implementing global and local clock gating. Two stimulator frontends have been fabricated in a 0.35 μm HVCMOS process. Each frontend features four demultiplexed outputs and consumes 0.2 mm2 core area. A maximum voltage compliance of 20 V is achieved and up to 1 mA of output current can be adjusted with up to 50 dB dynamic range. In vitro experimental results performed on a platinum black electrode in 0.9% saline solution are given.
The Dąbska Tumor: A Thirty-Year Retrospect

The Dąbska tumor is a rare low-grade angiosarcoma also known as malignant endovascular papillary angioendothelioma of childhood. It primarily affects the skin of children and has a distinctive histologic pattern of anastomosing vascular channels with intravascular papillary outpouchings projecting, sometimes, in a glomerulus-like pattern, into a lumen lined by atypical columnar endothelial cells. Since its original description 30 years ago by one of us, knowledge in this area has expanded.
The complete chloroplast genome sequence of Fatsia japonica (Apiales: Araliaceae) and the phylogenetic analysis

Abstract In this study, we have sequenced the complete chloroplast genome of Fatsia japonica, a well-known ornamental and potential medicinal plant. The complete chloroplast genome of F. japonica is 155 613 bp in length with 62.09% AT content, has a typical quadripartite structure with large (LSC 86 487 bp) and small (SSC 17 866 bp) single-copy regions separated by a pair of inverted repeats (IRs 25 929 bp) and contains 114 unique genes with 18 genes duplicated in the IR making a total of 132 genes. The phylogenetic analysis indicated the position of F. japonica in Apiales and has the potential to facilitate a better understanding of the intergeneric relationships in the family.
Incremental Convolutional Neural Network Training

Experimenting novel ideas on deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) with big datasets is hampered by the fact that network training requires huge computational resources in the terms of CPU and GPU power and hours. One option is to downscale the problem, e.g., less classes and less samples, but this is undesirable with DCNNs whose performance is largely data-dependent. In this work, we take an alternative route and downscale the networks and input images. For example, the ImageNet problem of 1,000 classes and 1,2M training images can be solved in hours on a commodity laptop without GPU by downscaling images and the network to the resolution of 8 × 8. We attempt to provide the solution to transfer the knowledge (parameters) of a trained DCNN with lower resolution to improve the efficiency of training a DCNN with higher resolution, and continue training incrementally until the full resolution is achieved. In our experiments, this approach achieves clear boost in computing time without the loss of performance.
Traversing Boundaries: Understanding the Experiences of Ageing Saudis

This is a methods paper that draws from our fieldwork conducted in Saudi Arabia to understand ageing people's experiences. This paper focuses on insights gained when using qualitative methods to understand the experiences of ageing Saudis. The aim is to highlight some of the cultural considerations, opportunities, challenges, and issues that influenced our approach and deployment of interviews and probes. Influences of social-cultural practices and religion led to interesting challenges for recruitment, conducting cross-gender communications, and how participants reported their experiences. This paper offers methodological considerations that include the influences of local culture, gender, religion, etc. We also discuss how we shaped our fieldwork tools based upon considerations of local cultural and religious contexts. In particular, we highlight the usefulness of probes in traversing cultural boundaries.