Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Identification of mutations in the MYO9A gene in patients with congenital myasthenic syndrome

Congenital myasthenic syndromes result from defects in the neuromuscular junction. Using whole exome sequencing, O'Connor et al. identify mutations in a novel candidate gene, MYO9A, which encodes an unconventional myosin. They provide preliminary evidence that MYO9A contributes to formation of the neuromuscular junction via effects on the presynaptic motor axon.
Objective quality measures for glottal inverse filtering of speech pressure signals

Glottal inverse filtering is a process where the effects of the vocal tract are cancelled from the speech signal in order to estimate the voice source. Traditionally, inverse filtering methods have involved a high level of manual tuning of parameters, such as the vocal tract model order. We present objective heuristics for the measurement of the quality of the resulting glottal flow estimate. In addition, we propose an automatic method for determining the order of the vocal tract all-pole model in inverse filtering based on phase-plane analysis and estimation of the glottal flow kurtosis.
Surviving the infarct: A profile of cardiac myosin binding protein-C pathogenicity, diagnostic utility, and proteomics in the ischemic myocardium

Cardiac myosin binding protein‐C (cMyBP‐C) is a regulatory protein of the contractile apparatus within the cardiac sarcomere. Ischemic injury to the heart during myocardial infarction (MI) results in the cleavage of cMyBP‐C in a phosphorylation‐dependent manner and release of an N‐terminal fragment (C0C1f) into the circulation. C0C1f has been shown to be pathogenic within cardiac tissue, leading to the development of heart failure. Based on its high levels and early release into the circulation post‐MI, C0C1f may serve as a novel biomarker for diagnosing MI more effectively than current clinically used biomarkers. Over time, circulating C0C1f could trigger an autoimmune response leading to myocarditis and progressive cardiac dysfunction. Given the importance of cMyBP‐C phosphorylation state in the context of proteolytic cleavage and release into the circulation post‐MI, understanding the posttranslational modifications (PTMs) of cMyBP‐C would help in further elucidating the role of this protein in health and disease. Accordingly, recent studies have implemented the latest proteomics approaches to define the PTMs of cMyBP‐C. The use of such proteomics assays may provide accurate quantitation of the levels of cMyBP‐C in the circulation following MI, which could, in turn, demonstrate the efficacy of using plasma cMyBP‐C as a cardiac‐specific early biomarker of MI. In this review, we define the pathogenic and potential immunogenic effects of C0C1f on cardiac function in the post‐MI heart. We also discuss the most advanced proteomics approaches now used to determine cMyBP‐C PTMs with the aim of validating C0C1f as an early biomarker of MI.
Is Placebo Acupuncture What It Is Intended to Be?

Randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials are recommended for evaluation of a treatment's efficacy with the goal of separating the specific effects (verum) from the non-specific ones (placebo). In order to be able to carry out placebo-controlled acupuncture trials, minimal/sham acupuncture procedures and a sham acupuncture needle has been used with the intention of being inert. However, clinical and experimental results suggest that sham/minimal acupuncture is not inert since it is reported that both verum acupuncture and sham/minimal acupuncture induce a significant alleviation of pain. This alleviation is as pronounced as the alleviation obtained with standard treatment and more obvious than the one obtained with placebo medication or by the use of waiting list controls. These results also suggest that sham acupuncture needles evoke a physiological response. In healthy individuals sham acupuncture results in activation of limbic structures, whereas a deactivation is seen in patients with pain, i.e. results from healthy individuals do not reflect what is seen in clinical conditions. Also, depending on the etiology of pain (or any under clinical condition under investigation), the response to sham acupuncture is varying. The acupuncture ritual may also be seen as an emotional focused therapy allowing for psychological re-orientation. Sham needling in such context may be as powerful as verum acupuncture. We recommend that the evaluated effects of acupuncture could be compared with those of standard treatment, also taking the individual response into consideration, before its use or non-use is established.
Cytomegalovirus (CMV)-Specific Perforin and Granzyme B ELISPOT Assays Detect Reactivation of CMV Infection in Inflammatory Bowel Disease

The role of cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection in the pathogenesis and exacerbation of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) has been unresolved. Typically, the CMV genome remains dormant in infected cells, but a breakdown of immune surveillance can lead to re-activation of viral replication in the gut mucosa, which is not necessarily associated with viremia or changes in antibody titers. We hypothesized that the detection of CMV-specific CD8 effector T cells should permit the distinction between dormant and active CMV infection. As CD8 effector T cells, unlike memory CD8 T cells, have perforin (PFN) and granzyme B (GzB) preformed in their cytoplasmic granules, we employed single cell resolution ELISPOT assays to measure the CMV antigen-triggered release of these molecules by CD8 T cells isolated from subjects with IBD, and age-matched healthy controls. The frequencies of CMV-specific (GzB) and PFN-producing CD8 T cells were increased in IBD patients compared to healthy controls. Furthermore, the increased CMV reactivity was associated with active IBD disease and with longer disease duration. Notably, PCR on serum frequently failed to detect CMV DNA during flares. The data show that during active IBD there is a flare of CD8 T cell activity against CMV in a substantial proportion of IBD patients, suggesting CMV reactivation that serum PCR does not detect. While it remains open whether CMV reactivation is a cause or consequence of IBD, our data suggest that monitoring CMV antigen-specific effector CD8 T cells with GzB and PFN ELISPOT analysis can provide novel insights into the role of CMV infection in IBD. Additionally, our data have implications for the fields of transplantation, HIV, cancer, and autoimmune diseases, in all of which patient care critically depends on sensitive and reliable detection of a reactivation of CMV infection.
An Improved Classification Method of Unstructured P2P Multicast Video Streaming

The classification of unstructured P2P multicast video streaming is the premise for playing online linkage and real-time evidence in the process of network monitoring management. Based on the classification method in the preliminary research, an improved classification method is proposed. the method uses an optimal feature vector extraction algorithm to filter the proposed behavior features in the original method, which greatly lower the feature vector dimension. an improved multi-class support vector machines is also used in the improved method, which not only solves the problem of rejecting sub-regional, but also reduces the computational complexity and improves the identification accuracy. Experiments show that the improved method has less computational and storage overhead, and has higher identification accuracy.
Determinants of international tourism: a three-dimensional panel data analysis

International tourism is a fast growing industry generating half a trillion dollars in annual revenues and accounting for almost 10% of total international trade, and almost half of total trade in services. Yet, it has so far failed to receive the attention it deserves from mainstream economics. This paper attempts to provide an initial understanding of the determinants of international tourism. This paper claims that international tourism, as other forms of trade in services, is driven by unique factors of production, and may be better dealt with in a single industry study rather than in a general equilibrium trade model. In order to understand these determinants the world is viewed as a market of differentiated products, and a discrete choice estimation technique is applied to a large three-dimensional data set of tourist flows. It is shown that a relatively simple estimation technique, combined with a rich data set, can deliver reasonable substitution patterns. It is found, among other things, that political risk is very important for tourism, and that exchange rates matter mainly for tourism to developed countries. These have exchange rate elasticity of about one.
Postural stability and quality of life after guided and self-training among older adults residing in an institutional setting

Purpose To evaluate whether rehabilitation of muscle force or balance improves postural stability and quality of life (QoL), and whether self-administered training is comparable with guided training among older adults residing in an institutional setting. Patients and methods A randomized, prospective intervention study was undertaken among 55 elderly patients. Three intervention groups were evaluated: a muscle force training group; a balance and muscle force training group; and a self-administered training group. Each group underwent 1-hour-long training sessions, twice a week, for 3 months. Postural stability was measured at onset, after 3 months, and after 6 months. Time-domain-dependent body sway variables were calculated. The fall rate was evaluated for 3 years. General health related quality of life (HRQoL) was measured with a 15D instrument. Postural stability was used as a primary outcome, with QoL and falls used as secondary outcomes. Results Muscle force trainees were able to undertake training, progressing towards more strenuous exercises. In posturography, the number of spiky oscillations was reduced after training, and stationary fields of torque moments of the ankle increased, providing better postural stability in all groups; in particular, the zero crossing rate of weight signal and the number of low variability episodes in the stabilogram were improved after training. While no difference was found between different training groups in posturography outcomes, a reduction of fall rate was significant in only the guided training groups. A significant part of the variability of the QoL could be explained by the posturography outcome (46%). However, the outcome of training was associated with a reduced QoL. Conclusion Even moderate or severely demented residents could do exercises in five-person groups under the supervision of a physiotherapist. An improvement in postural stability was observed in all training groups, indicating that even self-administered training could be beneficial. Posturography outcome indicated that training alters the postural strategy by reducing the oscillatory fluctuations of body sway signal. However, only guided training tended to reduce falls. Short training intervention programs may decrease QoL by changing the elderly’s daily routine and making it more active and exhausting.
Cognitive, Endocrine and Mechanistic Perspectives on Non-Linear Relationships between Arousal and Brain Function

It has been almost a century since the first paper describing a non-linear relationship between arousal and behavioral performance was published (Yerkes and Dodson 1908). This study, an analysis of the influence of task difficulty and stress on discrimination learning in the dancing mouse, stands apart from all others. The paper was published without statistical analyses (statistics had not yet been conceived) and with sample sizes as small as 2 mice per group (an unacceptably low level of power by modern standards). Despite the limitations of their study, the findings of Yerkes and Dodson were subsequently replicated in cats (Dodson, 1915), rats (Broadhurst, 1957; Telegdy and Cohen 1971) and people (Dickman, 2002; Bregman and McAllister 1982; Anderson, 1994), and became part of the lexicon of the field of psychology as the “Yerkes-Dodson Law” (Young, 1936; Eysenk, 1955). In brief, Yerkes and Dodson found that when mice were given a simple discrimination task their performance improved linearly with increases in arousal. With more difficult tasks, the performance of the mice improved with moderate with increases in arousal, but at the highest levels of arousal their performance was impaired, forming an overall non-linear (inverted-U) shaped relationship between arousal and performance. This task-dependent influence on the shape of arousal-performance curves is illustrated in Figure 1.
VISUALIZING REGION AND SCALE IN INFORMATION SPACES

The geographic concepts of region and scale can be preserved in semantic information spaces and depicted cartographically. Region and scale are fundamental to geographical analysis, and are also associated with cognitive and experiential properties of the real world. Scale is important when graphically representing a spatialization, as it affects the amount of detail that can be shown. Latent semantic indexing in conjunction with two different ordination techniques is employed to construct a semantic Reuters news wire space. Intramax, a hierarchical clustering algorithm, is applied to delineate semantic regions in the Reuters database based on a functional distance measure. This topological information helps to identify the appropriate levels of granularity at which the information space can be visually explored. Amplification of ordination techniques with the Intramax procedure is a useful strategy for creating scale-dependent information spaces that facilitate the exploration of abstract, complex data archives.
Developing higher order thinking in medical education through reflective learning and research

Reflection in education is not a new concept for as Meiklejohn (1882) enthused, ‘learning is a social act. ’ Dewey (1933), a key twentieth century instigator of the concept of reflection, expanded upon the ideas of earlier educators including Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Solomon, and Buddha (Houston, 1988). The preferred reflective model of Perioperative Critical Care pathway students at the University of Bedfordshire has been Reflection-for-Learning. This student-centred model of reflection was developed for their use to meet student identified needs.
Size fair and homologous tree genetic programming crossovers

Size fair and homologous crossover genetic operators for tree based genetic programming are described and tested. Both produce considerably reduced increases in program size and no detrimental effect on GP performance. GP search spaces are partitioned by the ridge in the number of program v. their size and depth. A ramped uniform random initialisation is described which straddles the ridge. With subtree crossover trees increase about one level per generation leading to sub-quadratic bloat in length.
Curve Watermarking Technique for Fingerprinting Digital Maps

Curves are one of the major components of digital maps. In order to fingerprint digital maps, this paper addresses an efficient watermarking technique for curves. We choose the embedding domain based on the curvature of sample points and alter the coordinates of selected sample points for watermark embedding. The watermarked curve is reconstructed using Bezier curve segments. The use of Bezier model ensures not only large embedding capacity and high detection response but also small embedding distortion.
Facial Emotion Feature Extraction Based Eigenface for 3D Video

Recent psychological research has shown that facial expressions are the most expressive way in which humans display emotion. Facial expressions are widely used in the behavioral interpretation of emotions, cognitive science, and social interactions. Therefore, automated and real-time facial expression recognition would be useful in many applications, such as human computer interfaces, virtual reality, video-conferencing, customer satisfaction studies, etc. This paper presents a proposed technique for facial expression extraction, which based on the Appearance Features Technique - Principle Component Analysis (PCA), which depending on extract features (largest Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors). Experimental results show the quick technique for feature extraction of 3D video frames, which takes 5.1 seconds in the process of feature extraction.
Entity Centric Opinion Mining from Blogs

With the growth of web 2.0, people are using it as a medium to express their opinion and thoughts. With the explosion of blogs, journal like user-generated content on the web, companies, celebrities and politicians are concerned about mining and analyzing the discussions about them or their products. In this paper, we present a method to perform opinion mining and summarize opinions at entity level for English blogs. We first identify various objects (named entities) which are talked about by the blogger, then we identify the modifiers which modify the orientation towards these objects. Finally, we generate object centric opinionated summary from blogs. We perform experiments like named entity identification, entity-modifier relationship extraction and modifier orientation estimation. Experiments and Results presented in this paper are cross verified with the judgment of human annotators.
Evaluation of Techniques to Detect Significant Network Performance Problems using End-to-End Active Network Measurements

End-to-end fault and performance problems detection in wide area production networks is becoming increasingly hard as the complexity of the paths, the diversity of the performance, and dependency on the network increase. Several monitoring infrastructures are built to monitor different network metrics and collect monitoring information from thousands of hosts around the globe. Typically there are hundreds to thousands of time-series plots of network metrics which need to be looked at to identify network performance problems or anomalous variations in the traffic. Furthermore, most commercial products rely on a comparison with user configured static thresholds and often require access to SNMP-MIB information, to which a typical end-user does not usually have access. In our paper we propose new techniques to detect network performance problems proactively in close to real-time and we do not rely on static thresholds and SNMP-MIB information. We describe and compare the use of several different algorithms that we have implemented to detect persistent network problems using anomalous variations analysis in real end-to-end Internet performance measurements. We also provide methods and/or guidance for how to set the user settable parameters. The measurements are based on active probes running on 40 production network paths with bottlenecks varying from 0.5 Mbits/s to 1000 Mbit/s. For well behaved data (no missed measurements and no very large outliers) with small seasonal changes most algorithms identify similar events. We compare the algorithms' robustness with respect to false positives and missed events especially when there are large seasonal effects in the data. Our proposed techniques cover a wide variety of network paths and traffic patterns. We also discuss the applicability of the algorithms in terms of their intuitiveness, their speed of execution as implemented, and areas of applicability. Our encouraging results compare and evaluate the accuracy of our detection techniques when applied to step down/up, diurnal changes and congestion effects
Image super-resolution by parameter multisurface fitting

In this paper, we propose a novel super-resolution algorithm by using parameter multi-surface fitting. In order to utilize the spatial information in a more effective way, we use the unknown high-resolution pixels as a parameter of fitted surface in the multi-surface fitting equations. We form one surface at each low-resolution pixel in the neighborhood of each high-resolution pixel. The surface is formed based on the information from both the known LR pixels and unknown HR pixel which is used as a parameter. The final result is obtained by fusing the sampling values from these surfaces in the maximum a posteriori fashion. The proposed method can reduce the fitting errors of the surfaces and assign different weights to the sampling values. Experimental results show the superiority of the proposed method comparing to the state-of-arts.
A BEHAVIORAL MODEL OF THE PERFORMANCES FOR EMERGING FINANCIAL MARKETS IN THE CONTEXT OF ACTUAL GLOBAL CRISIS

The interest is to model the value loss suffered by assets in the global crisis by considering both the cross section and the time variation. The volatility of assets is given by the variations at risk premium levels. The generalized model is inspired from the common framework for stock, bonds, exchange rates (Cocharane, 1999, Gabaix, 2008) and is equipped with two kinds of shocks, one real for the capital market and one nominal, for the money market
Mobile Application Security for Video Streaming Authentication and Data Integrity Combining Digital Signature and Watermarking Techniques

Satellite link presents peculiar characteristics like no packet reordering and low bit error rate. In this paper we leverage these characteristics combined with watermarking techniques to propose a novel authentication algorithm for multicast video streaming. This algorithm combines a single digital signature with a hash chain pre-computed on the transmitter side; the hash chain is embedded in the video stream by means of a watermarking technique. Our proposal shows several interesting features: authentication is enforced, as well as integrity of the received multicast stream; received blocks can be authenticated on the fly; no storage is required on the receiver side, except for the amount of memory needed to store a single hash; overhead computations required on the receiver sum up to single hash per block, while a digital signature verification is amortized over the whole received stream. Finally, note that the bandwidth overhead introduced is negligible, since the applied watermarking technique introduces virtually no modifications (at least, not recognizable by humans) on the original video stream pictures.
Reducing disk power consumption in portable media players

A video player may prefetch video frames into buffer to allow disk to go into standby mode, which involves complete spindown of the spindle motor. Frequent spindowns, however, affect disk longevity, so it is essential to limit the number of times that disk enters standby mode. We present the design and implementation of a data prefetching scheme that minimizes disk power consumption for a limited number of disk spindowns. We first present a data prefetching model that fully utilizes the available buffer space and analyze how power consumption is affected by the bit-rates of the frames in the buffer. We then formulate the problem that determines when the disk should enter standby mode and provide an optimal solution using dynamic programming. We implemented our algorithm in MPlayer running on the Linux 2.6. Experimental results show that it reduces disk energy consumption by up to 59%1.