Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
In silico analysis of Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) in the Heparin-Binding EGF-like Growth Factor (HBEGF) gene and their allelic profiles in the Sri Lankan population: a comprehensive approach to prioritise SNPs for candidate gene studies

In this paper, using the Heparin-Binding EGF-like growth factor ( HBEGF ) gene, we illustrate a comprehensive approach to select the most appropriate SNP markers for molecular epidemiological studies. Initially an in silico functional analysis was undertaken to verify the SNPs that regulate HBEGF expression. Thereafter based on predefined criteria (the significance of the function identified, ability to represent other SNPs in the gene (being a tagSNP), presence within an evolutionary conserved region, validation status of the SNP, and the minor allele frequency of the SNP) SNPs with putative functional effects were prioritised to identify the most appropriate HBEGF markers for molecular epidemiological studies. Using 30 Sinhalese men and women, we further established the allele and genotype frequencies of the seven highest priority SNPs identified. These frequencies were compared with those of HapMap populations to understand the genetic identity of the Sinhalese in relation to HapMap populations. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.4038/sljbmi.v2i1. 2926 Sri Lanka Journal of Bio-Medical Informatics 2011; 2 :21-37
Informal Social Support Networks and the Maintenance of Voluntary Driving Cessation By Older Rural Women

Seventy-five rural women over the age of 77 participated in this study to describe the impact of informal social support on the maintenance of voluntary driving cessation. After being screened for mental status, they completed a demographic questionnaire and the Lubben Social Network Scale (2006). They also participated in a semistructured interview designed to probe factors leading to driving cessation and the ability to maintain it. Findings suggest that most participants stopped driving due to a decline in physical function and/or involvement in a nonfatal accident. Adequate support from family and friends was critical to the maintenance of driving cessation. Those with a limited informal social network resumed driving due to the lack of transportation, feelings of insecurity and fear for their survival, and the desire to assist friends who were less fortunate. Implications for community health nurses working in rural areas are discussed.
Instant Volumetric Understanding with Order‐Independent Volume Rendering

Rapid, visual understanding of volumetric datasets is a crucial outcome of a good volume rendering application, but few current volume rendering systems deliver this result. Our goal is to reduce the volumetric surfing that is required to understand volumetric features by conveying more information in fewer images. In order to achieve this goal, and in contrast with most current methods which still use optical models and alpha blending, our approach reintroduces the order‐independent contribution of every sample along the ray in order to have an equiprobable visualization of all the volume samples. Therefore, we demonstrate how order independent sampling can be suitable for fast volume understanding, show useful extensions to MIP and X‐ray like renderings, and, finally, point out the special advantage of using stereo visualization in these models to circumvent the lack of depth cues.
Parenting and Child Outcomes of HIV-Infected African American Mothers: A Literature Review

Parenting young children while living with HIV is an important public health concern. This article reviews maternal HIV and the impact it has on the parenting experience of African American mothers. Because living with HIV has been considered a family illness, the Family Systems Model provided a framework for this article. The model demonstrated an important link between maternal HIV and its impact on the health and wellbeing of not only the mother and her children, but her parenting and family roles as well. Research has documented an association between maternal HIV and negative parent–child outcomes among African American mothers. I examined studies on parenting and child outcomes among African American mothers living with HIV. The review assists in conceptualizing parenting with HIV as an area of increasing importance in health services delivery to HIV-infected African American mothers who are caring for young children.
Parametric Generation of Facial Expressions Based on FACS

This paper presents a parametric performance‐based model for facial animation that was inspired by Facial Action Coding System (FACS) developed by P. Ekman and F. W. Friesen. The FACS consists of 44 Action Units (AUs) corresponding to visual changes on the face. Additionally, predefined co‐occurrence rules describe how different AUs influence each other. In our model, each facial animation parameter corresponds to one of the AUs as defined in FACS. Implementation of the model is completed with methods for accumulating displacement from separate AUs together, and fuzzy‐logical adaptation of co‐occurrence rules from the FACS. We also describe the method for adapting our model to a specific person.
Image Registration in a Coarse Three‐Dimensional Virtual Environment

In recent years, the availability of off‐the‐shelf geometric data for an urban environment has increased. During rendering, ground level images are mapped onto the façades of the buildings to improve the visual quality of the scene. This paper focuses on a technique that enables ground level images to be automatically integrated into an existing coarse three‐dimensional environment. The approach utilises the planar nature of architectural scenes to enable the automatic extraction of a building façade from an image and its registration into the virtual environment.
Accurate Depth of Field Simulation in Real Time

We present a new post processing method of simulating depth of field based on accurate calculations of circles of confusion. Compared to previous work, our method derives actual scene depth information directly from the existing depth buffer, requires no specialized rendering passes, and allows easy integration into existing rendering applications. Our implementation uses an adaptive, two‐pass filter, producing a high quality depth of field effect that can be executed entirely on the GPU, taking advantage of the parallelism of modern graphics cards and permitting real time performance when applied to large numbers of pixels.
The importance of play in promoting healthy child development and maintaining strong parent–child bonds

Play is essential to development as it contributes to the cognitive, physical, social, and emotional well-being of children and youth. Play also offers an ideal opportunity for parents to engage fully with their children. Despite the benefits derived from play for both children and parents, time for free play has been markedly reduced for some children. This report addresses a variety of factors that have reduced play, including a hurried lifestyle, changes in family structure, and increased attention to academics and enrichment activities at the expense of recess or free child-centered play. This report offers guidelines on how pediatricians can advocate for children by helping families, school systems, and communities consider how best to ensure play is protected as they seek the balance in children's lives to create the optimal developmental milieu.
A Framework for Interactive Hypertexture Modelling

Hypertexturing can be a powerful way of adding rich geometric details to surfaces at low memory cost by using a procedural three‐dimensional (3D) space distortion. However, this special kind of texturing technique still raises a major problem: the efficient control of the visual result. In this paper, we introduce a framework for interactive hypertexture modelling. This framework is based on two contributions. First, we propose a reformulation of the density modulation function. Our density modulation is based on the notion of shape transfer function. This function, which can be easily edited by users, allows us to control in an intuitive way the visual appearance of the geometric details resulting from the space distortion. Second, we propose to use a hybrid surface and volume‐point‐based representation in order to be able to dynamically hypertexture arbitrary objects at interactive frame rates. The rendering consists in a combined splat‐ and raycasting‐based direct volume rendering technique. The splats are used to model the volumetric object while raycasting allows us to add the details. An experimental study on users shows that our approach improves the design of hypertextures and yet preserves their procedural nature.
An Integrative Review of Factors Associated with Patient Attrition from Community Health Worker Programs that Support Diabetes Self-Care

ABSTRACT An integrative review was conducted using PubMed and CINAHL databases to answer: What is known about adult attrition from community health worker (CHW) programs on diabetes self-care? The 14 articles described patients of multiple races who were mainly of lower socioeconomic status. CHW interventions were given in individual meetings and/or group sessions. Incentives to reduce attrition came in different forms. Barriers involved transportation, family obligations, and scheduling conflicts. Attrition from these programs is a multifactorial problem. Alleviating transportation barrier appears to be protective. Program planners should consider these barriers when planning CHW programs.
Emergent use of retrograde left ventricular support in patients after transcatheter aortic valve replacement

Transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) is currently a therapeutic alternative to open aortic valve replacement for high‐risk patients with severe symptomatic aortic valve stenosis. The procedure is associated with some life‐threatening complications including circulatory collapse which may require temporary hemodynamic support. We describe our experience with the use of the Impella 2.5 system to provide emergent left ventricular support in cases of hemodynamic collapse after TAVR with the Edwards SAPIEN prosthesis. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Fast Gauss Bilateral Filtering

In spite of high computational complexity, the bilateral filter and its modifications and extensions have recently become very popular image and shape processing tools. In this paper, we propose a fast and accurate approximation of the bilateral filter. Our approach combines a dimension elevation trick with a Fast Gauss Transform. First we represent the bilateral filter as a convolution in a high dimensional space. Then the convolution is efficiently approximated by using space partitioning and Gaussian function expansions. Advantages of our approach include linear computational complexity, user‐specified precision, and an ability to process high dimensional and non‐uniformly sampled data. We demonstrate capabilities of the approach by considering its applications to the image and volume denoising and high‐dynamic‐range tone mapping problems.
Multi‐Scale Geometry Interpolation

Interpolating vertex positions among triangle meshes with identical vertex‐edge graphs is a fundamental part of many geometric modelling systems. Linear vertex interpolation is robust but fails to preserve local shape. Most recent approaches identify local affine transformations for parts of the mesh, model desired interpolations of the affine transformations, and then optimize vertex positions to conform with the desired transformations. However, the local interpolation of the rotational part is non‐trivial for more than two input configurations and ambiguous if the meshes are deformed significantly. We propose a solution to the vertex interpolation problem that starts from interpolating the local metric (edge lengths) and mean curvature (dihedral angles) and makes consistent choices of local affine transformations using shape matching applied to successively larger parts of the mesh. The local interpolation can be applied to any number of input vertex configurations and due to the hierarchical scheme for generating consolidated vertex positions, the approach is fast and can be applied to very large meshes.
Exploring Non‐Linear Relationship of Blendshape Facial Animation

Human face is a complex biomechanical system and non‐linearity is a remarkable feature of facial expressions. However, in blendshape animation, facial expression space is linearized by regarding linear relationship between blending weights and deformed face geometry. This results in the loss of reality in facial animation. To synthesize more realistic facial animation, aforementioned relationship should be non‐linear to allow the greatest generality and fidelity of facial expressions. Unfortunately, few existing works pay attention to the topic about how to measure the non‐linear relationship. In this paper, we propose an optimization scheme that automatically explores the non‐linear relationship of blendshape facial animation from captured facial expressions. Experiments show that the explored non‐linear relationship is consistent with the non‐linearity of facial expressions soundly and is able to synthesize more realistic facial animation than the linear one.
Flexible and Accurate Transparent‐Object Matting and Compositing Using Refractive Vector Field

In digital image editing, environment matting and compositing are fundamental and interesting operations that can capture and simulate the refraction and reflection effects of light from an environment. The state‐of‐the‐art real‐time environment matting and compositing method is short of flexibility, in the sense that it has to repeat the entire complex matte acquisition process if the distance between the object and the background is different from that in the acquisition stage, and also lacks accuracy, in the sense that it can only remove noises but not errors. In this paper, we introduce the concept of refractive vector and propose to use a refractive vector field as a new representation for environment matte. Such refractive vector field provides great flexibility for transparent‐object environment matting and compositing. Particularly, with only one process of the matte acquisition and the refractive vector field extraction, we are able to composite the transparent object into an arbitrary background at any distance. Furthermore, we introduce a piecewise vector field fitting algorithm to simultaneously remove both noises and errors contained in the extracted matte data. Experimental results show that our method is less sensitive to artefacts and can generate perceptually good composition results for more general scenarios.
User Experience of On-Screen Interaction Techniques: An Experimental Investigation of Clicking, Sliding, Zooming, Hovering, Dragging, and Flipping

From scrolling and clicking to dragging, flipping, sliding, hovering, and zooming, the wide array of interaction techniques has vastly expanded the range of user actions on an interface. Each of these interaction techniques affords a distinct action. But do these techniques differ in their ability to engage users and contribute to their user experience? Furthermore, do they affect how users view the content and how much they learn from it? We address these questions via two between-subjects laboratory experiments. Study 1 (N = 128) investigated the relative effects of six on-screen interaction techniques (click-to-download, drag, mouseover, slide, zoom, and 3D carousel) on users' assessment of—as well as their engagement with—an informational website. The site for each condition was identical in content and design, except for the interaction technique used, so that we could isolate the effects of each technique on various cognitive, attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Study 2 (N = 127) examined the relative effects of four combinations of interaction techniques (slide+click, slide+mouseover, drag+mouseover, and drag+zoom) on the same dependent variables. Data from Study 1 suggest that although the 3D carousel generates more user action, the slide is better at aiding memory. The zoom-in/out tool was the least favored, whereas the mouseover feature fostered greater engagement among power users. Findings from Study 2, which was conducted with a different content domain, replicated the positive effects of slide and negative effects of drag in influencing user experience. Path analyses, using structural equation modeling, revealed the importance of users' assessment of the interface (perceived levels of natural mapping, intuitiveness, and ease of use), which can have significant consequences for user engagement as well as resulting attitudes and behavioral outcomes. Design insights, theories, and techniques to test and capture user experience are discussed.
Not Even Past: Information Aging and Temporal Privacy in Online Social Networks

Online social networks (OSNs) make information accessible for unlimited periods and provide easy access to past information by arranging information in time lines or by providing sophisticated search mechanisms. Despite increased concerns over the privacy threat that is posed by digital memory, there is little knowledge about retrospective privacy: the extent to which the age of the exposed information affects sharing preferences. In this article, we investigate how information aging impacts users’ sharing preferences on Facebook. Our findings are based on a between-subjects experiment (n = 272), in which we measured the impact of time since first publishing an OSN post on its sharing preferences. Our results quantify how willingness to share is lower for older Facebook posts and show that older posts have lower relevancy to the user’s social network and are less representative of the user’s identity. We show that changes in the user’s social circles, the occurrence of significant life changes and a user’s young age are correlated with a further decrease in the willingness to keep sharing past information. We discuss our findings by juxtaposing digital memory theories and privacy theories and suggest a vision for mechanisms that can help users manage longitudinal privacy.
Light‐Field Retargeting

We present a first approach to light‐field retargeting using z‐stack seam carving, which allows light‐field compression and extension while retaining angular consistency. Our algorithm first converts an input light field into a set of perspective‐sheared focal stacks. It then applies 3D deconvolution to convert the focal stacks into z‐stacks, and seam‐carves the z‐stack of the center perspective. The computed seams of the center perspective are sheared and applied to the z‐stacks of all off‐center perspectives. Finally, the carved z‐stacks are converted back into the perspective images of the output light field. To our knowledge, this is the first approach to light‐field retargeting. Unlike existing stereo‐pair retargeting or 3D retargeting techniques, it does not require depth information.
Beyond the beaten path: improving natural products bioprospecting using an eco-evolutionary framework – the case of the octocorals

Abstract Marine natural products (NPs) represent an impressive source of novel bioactive molecules with major biotechnological applications. Nevertheless, the usual chemical and applied perspective leading most of bioprospecting projects come along with various limitations blurring our understanding of the extensive marine chemical diversity. Here, we propose several guidelines: (i) to optimize bioprospecting and (ii) to refine our knowledge on marine chemical ecology focusing on octocorals, one of the most promising sources of marine NPs. We identified a significant phylogenetic bias in the octocoral bioprospecting, which calls for the development of a concerted discovery strategy. Given the gap existing between the number of isolated NPs and the knowledge regarding their functions, we provide an ecologically centered workflow prioritizing biological function ahead of chemical identification. Furthermore, we illustrate how -omic technologies should rapidly increase our knowledge on solving different aspects of the ecology and evolution of marine NPs.
Concrete Crack Detection by Multiple Sequential Image Filtering

Abstract: This article presents a new robust automated image processing method for detecting cracks in surface images of concrete structures. This method involves two steps: (1) development of an image filter for detecting major cracks using genetic programming (GP), and (2) elimination of residual noise after filtering and detection of indistinct cracks by iterative applications of the image filter to the local regions surrounding the cracks. The proposed method can be used for the accurate detection of cracks in surface images recorded under various conditions. Moreover, the widths of the detected cracks can be quantified on the basis of the spatial derivatives of the brightness patterns. The estimated crack widths are in good agreement with those measured manually.
Rheumatoid Arthritis of the Wrist

Summary: Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic, systemic, autoimmune-mediated, inflammatory disease, and affects the joints. Wrist involvement in RA is common and affects up to 50% of patients within the first 2 years after the onset of the disease, increasing to >90% after 10 years. Bilateral involvement is observed in 95% of patients. RA of the wrist is therefore also associated with personal and social impairment. A stable and pain-free wrist is a prerequisite for normal hand function. Because the wrist joint is involved early in rheumatoid disease and progress is rapid, operative treatment is of major importance. It is indicated not only for treatment of established osseous changes with instability, deformation, and extensor tendon ruptures, but for early treatment of drug-resistant synovitis and monarthritis of the wrist. A considerable number of operative procedures is available and will be discussed in this issue. When choosing the procedure, the type and stage of wrist changes, as well as the pathobiomechanic situation, have to be considered. The individual course of the disease and patient requirements have to be taken into account.
The substitutions G245C and G245D in the Zn2+-binding pocket of the p53 protein result in differences of conformational flexibility of the DNA-binding domain

Transcription activation of the proapoptotic target genes is a means by which the p53 protein implements its function of tumor suppression. Zn2+ is a known regulator of p53 binding to the target genes. We have previously obtained an evidence that amino acid substitutions in the p53 Zn2+-binding pocket can presumably exert an influence on Zn2+ position in the Zn2+-p53 complex and thereby affect p53 binding to DNA. With these background considerations, our aim was to estimate the effect of the putative changes in the Zn2+ position in its binding pocket due to the G245C and G245D substitutions on the conformation of the p53 DNA-binding motif. Statistical analysis of the molecular dynamics (MD) trajectories of the mutant p53-Zn2+ complexes was used to detect significant deviations in conformation of the mutant p53 forms. MD simulations demonstrated that (1) the two substitutions in the Zn2+-binding pocket caused changes in the conformation of the p53 DNA-binding motif, as compared with the wild-type (WT) p53; (2) binding of Zn2+ to the p53 mutant forms reduced the effect of the substitutions on conformational change; and (3) Zn2+ binding in the normal position compensated the effect of the mutations on the conformation in comparison to the altered Zn2+ position.