Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Role-Playing Games, Fandom and Participatory Culture : A New Paradigm of Cultural Production

The epitome ofhuman cultural production up until the closing years ofthe 20th cen加q was the book. Indeed, as a piece of technology the book has become so natural to us that we barely notice that it is technology. Yet we now stand on the verge of a new age in which the entire paradigm on which our literary culture is based is challenged by technological and social developments. This paper explores both practical and theoretical aspects of these challenges, arguing that they can be better understood by looking for precedents: forerunners that developed during the 20th centu巧1 in the behavior of “ fans. " Finally, role-playing games are introduced 出 an example of the participatory culture which drives much of the new paradigm.
New Point Compression Algorithms for Binary Curves

This paper presents two new algorithms for point compression for elliptic curves defined over F2m, m odd. The first algorithm works for curves with Tr(a) = 1 and offers computational advantages over previous methods. The second algorithm is based on the λ representation of an elliptic point. The proposed algorithms require m bits to compress an elliptic point and can be used for all random binary curves recommended by NIST.
Prédiction d'une atteinte cognitive dans la sclérose en plaques : à qui se fier ?

La sclerose en plaques (SEP) est une pathologie inflammatoire et neurodegenerative. Les troubles cognitifs touchent 40 a 60% des patients et retentissent sur leur quotidien. Il est impossible en routine, de proposer un bilan neuropsychologique systematique a tout patient. Il est donc interessant de cibler les patients pour lesquels il serait indique, en disposant d’outils rapides de depistage. L’objectif est de determiner la valeur predictive de differentes methodes quant a la presence de troubles cognitifs : plainte cognitive du patient, de l'entourage, impression du clinicien, depistage par Computerized Speed Cognitive Test (CSCT). Une etude observationnelle a ete menee aupres des patients atteints de SEP au CHU de Grenoble. Ils ont rempli un Questionnaire de Plainte Cognitive, ainsi qu’un membre de leur entourage. La passation du CSCT etait systematique. Une evaluation plus complete par la BCcogSEP (batterie d’evaluation en francais), a ete utilisee comme test de reference. La performance diagnostique d’une atteinte cognitive de ces differents outils etait evaluee par rapport a la BCcogSEP. Les resultats montrent que le CSCT est un test sensible utilisable en routine, dans le depistage des troubles cognitifs chez les patients SEP. En revanche, la plainte du patient n’est pas correlee a la presence de troubles cognitifs. L’appreciation d’une atteinte cognitive par l'entourage ou par le neurologue, sont aussi souvent prises en defaut. Il est donc important de depister une atteinte cognitive dans la SEP par la passation systematique du CSCT, pour orienter ainsi les patients deficitaires vers un bilan neuropsychologique plus exhaustif, et adapter leur prise en charge.
Long-term Efficacy and Tolerability of Perospirone for Young Help-seeking People at Clinical High Risk: a Preliminary Open Trial

Objective Interest in the "at-risk mental state" (ARMS) for psychosis has increased because early intervention is expected to delay or prevent the onset of schizophrenia. However, the optimum intervention strategy remains controversial, especially with regard to antipsychotics. Although administration of antipsychotic medications is often associated with adverse effects and raises ethical considerations, recent studies have shown that some novel antipsychotics are safer and more tolerable for young people than conventional antipsychotics. We investigated whether administration of perospirone, a combined serotonin (5-HT)/dopamine antagonist and 5-HT1A receptor agonist, could alleviate prodromal symptoms and be well tolerated by clinical high risk patients. Methods The participants were outpatients seeking help. The Structured Interview for Prodromal Symptoms was performed in patients identified as being at clinical high risk. The Scale of Prodromal Symptoms (SOPS) was also completed and changes of subjective experience were assessed with the Subjective Well-being under Neuroleptics, short version. The incidence of akathisia was recorded by using the Barnes Akathisia Scale. Subjects were monitored for 26 weeks after starting medication. Results SOPS scores improved significantly after 26 weeks of perospirone therapy, while BAS scores did not show deterioration. No serious adverse events occurred during the study. Conclusion This trial suggests that perospirone therapy provides a clinical benefit for clinical high risk subjects without causing serious adverse events. Although further placebo-controlled studies are needed for confirmation, perospirone might be one of optimum treatments for individuals at imminent risk of psychosis.
Development of Microstrip Patch Antenna Sensing System for Salinity and Sugar Detection in Water

Microstrip patch antenna is a flat shape, light weight and low cost antenna that used to receive and transmit electromagnetic wave. This paper describes the design and development of a microstrip patch antenna for salinity and sugar detection. The microstrip antenna was designed and fabricated using Computer Simulation Technology (CST) Microwave Studio and Taconic TLY-5 substrate, respectively. This sensor is operate in the Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) radio band, i.e. 2.45GHz. Dimension and shape of the patch antenna as well as location of feed point is analyzed. There are three types of microstrip patch antennas are developed in this work, i.e. rectangular, circular and square patch microstrip antennas. These microstrip patch antennas were used to measure the salt and sugar content in water. In addition, reflection coefficient and Q-factor were discussed too in this paper. Different amount of salt or sugar that present in water will exhibit different dielectric properties, and in turn change its reflection coefficient and Qfactor. Index Term— microstrip patch antenna; sugar; salinity; reflection coefficient; dielectric properties; Q-factor.
2015 Ieee International Conference on Big Data (big Data) a Scalable Parallel Xquery Processor

—The wide use of XML for document management and data exchange has created the need to query large repositories of XML data. To efficiently query such large data and take advantage of parallelism, we have implemented Apache VXQuery, an open-source scalable XQuery processor. The system builds upon two other open-source frameworks: Hyracks, a parallel execution engine, and Algebricks, a language agnostic compiler toolbox. Apache VXQuery extends these frameworks and provides an implementation of the XQuery specifics (data model, data-model dependent functions and optimizations, and a parser). We describe the architecture of Apache VXQuery, its integration with Hyracks and Algebricks, and the XQuery optimization rules applied to the query plan to improve path expression efficiency and to enable query parallelism. An experimental evaluation using a real 500GB dataset with various selection, aggregation and join XML queries shows that Apache VXQuery performs well both in terms of scale-up and speed-up. Our experiments show that it is about 3.5x faster than Saxon (an open-source and commercial XQuery processor) on a 4-core, single node implementation, and around 2.5x faster than Apache MRQL (a MapReduce-based parallel query processor) on an eight (4-core) node cluster. I. INTRODUCTION The widespread acceptance of XML as a standard for document management and data exchange has enabled the creation of large repositories of XML data. To efficiently query such large data collections, a scalable implementation of XQuery is needed that can take advantage of parallelism. While there are various native open-source XQuery processors (Saxon [1], Galax [2], etc.) they have been optimized for single-node processing and do not support scaling to many nodes. To create a scalable XQuery processor, one could: 1) add scalability to an existing XQuery processor, 2) start from scratch, or 3) extend an existing scalable query framework to support XQuery. Unfortunately, existing XQuery processors would require extensive rewriting of their core architecture features to add parallelism. Similarly, building an XQuery processor from scratch would involve the same complex scalable programming (some unrelated to the XML data model). The last option, extending an existing scalable framework to support XQuery, seems advantageous since it combines the benefits of proven parallel technology with a shorter time to implementation. Among the several scalable frameworks available, one could use a relational parallel database engine and take
Energy balance and its components : implications for body weight regulation 1 – 3

National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, NIH, Bethesda, MD; Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Baton Rouge, LA; Institute for Clinical and Translational Research, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI; Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, MO; Nutritional Sciences, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI; and Institute of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, United Kingdom
Body contouring by non‐invasive transdermal focused ultrasound

The risks of currently available invasive procedures in body contouring motivate a need for safer, non‐invasive technologies for improving the appearance of body silhouette. A new device has been developed that uses focused therapeutic ultrasound to reduce adipose tissue non‐invasively. The aim of this study was to assess the efficacy and safety of a novel non‐invasive focused ultrasound system (UltraShape Ltd, Tel Aviv, Israel) in reducing localized fat deposits to improve body contours.
Stereovision-based road boundary detection for intelligent vehicles in challenging scenarios

Road detection is a crucial problem for intelligent vehicles and mobile robots. Most of the methods proposed nowadays only achieve reliable results in relatively well-arranged environments. In this paper, we proposed a stereovision-based road boundary detection method by combining homography estimation and MRF-based belief propagation to cope with challenging scenarios such as unstructured roads with unhomogeneous surfaces. In the method, each pixel in the reference image is firstly labeled as “road” or “non-road” by minimizing a well defined energy function that accounts for the planar road region. Subsequently, both of the road boundaries are generated using Catmull-Rom splines based on RANdom SAmple Consensus (RANSAC) algorithm with varying road structure models to help the intelligent vehicle understand the structure as well as safe range of current road. In the suggested framework, both intensity and geometry information of road scenarios are used to contain all the regions belonging to the planar road plane, and the left and right road boundaries are generated separately using a robust fitting algorithm to handle different road structures. Therefore, more accurate as well as robust detection of the road can be expected. Experimental results on a wide variety of typical but challenging scenarios have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Incentive learning and the motivational control of instrumental performance by thirst

The role of incentive learning in instrumental performance following a shift in the degree of water deprivation was analyzed in three experiments. In Experiments 1A and IB, rats trained to perform an instrumental action reinforced with either sucrose or maltodextrin solutions when in a high-deprivation state were subsequently shifted to a low-deprivation state and tested in extinction. This within-state shift in water deprivation reduced instrumental performance only when the animals had been exposed to the reinforcer in the low-deprivation state prior to instrumental training. In Experiment 2, a concurrent training procedure was used to assess whether the change in the value of the reinforcer brought about by preexposurewas mediated by the contingency between the instrumental action and the reinforcer. Preexposure to the reinforcer under the low-deprivation state produced a selective reduction of the performance of the action upon which it was contingent during training when testing was conducted in extinction following a shift from the high- to the low-deprivation state. These experiments provide evidence that animals have to learn about the incentive value of a reinforcer in a particular motivational state through exposure to the reinforcer in that state.
Prevencija pretilosti u dječjoj dobi Preventing obesity in children

1Zavod za hitnu medicinu Dubrovačko-neretvanske županije, Dr. Ante Šercera 4b, 20000 Dubrovnik, Hrvatska 1Department of Emergency Medicine Dubrovnik-Neretva County, Dr. Ante Šercera 4b, 20000 Dubrovnik, Croatia 2Opća bolnica Dubrovnik, Dr. R. Mišetića 2, 20 000 Dubrovnik, Hrvatska 2General Hospital Dubrovnik, Dr. R. Mišetića 2, 20 000 Dubrovnik, Croatia 3Stručni studij sestrinstva, Sveučilište u Dubrovniku, Branitelja Dubrovnika 29, 20 000 Dubrovnik, Hrvatska 3Professional Nursing Studies, University of Dubrovnik, Branitelja Dubrovnika 29, 20 000 Dubrovnik, Croatia 4 Zavod za vaskularnu kirurgiju, Klinički bolnički Centar “Sestre milosrdnice”, Vinogradska 29, 10000 Zagreb, Hrvatska 4 Department of Vascular Surgery, University Clinical Center “Sestre milosrdnice”, Vinogradska 29, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia
Changes in Midbrain Pain Receptor Expression, Gait and Behavioral Sensitivity in a Rat Model of Radiculopathy

Intervertebral disc herniation may contribute to inflammatory processes that associate with radicular pain and motor deficits. Molecular changes at the affected dorsal root ganglion (DRG), spinal cord, and even midbrain, have been documented in rat models of radiculopathy or nerve injury. The objective of this study was to evaluate gait and the expression of key pain receptors in the midbrain in a rodent model of radiculopathy. Radiculopathy was induced by harvesting tail nucleus pulposus (NP) and placing upon the right L5 DRG in rats (NP-treated, n=12). Tail NP was discarded in sham-operated animals (n=12). Mechanical allodynia, weight-bearing, and gait were evaluated in all animals over time. At 1 and 4 weeks after surgery, astrocyte and microglial activation was tested in DRG sections. Midbrain sections were similarly evaluated for immunoreactivity to serotonin (5HT2B), mu-opioid (µ-OR), and metabotropic glutamate (mGluR4 and 5) receptor antibodies. NP-treated animals placed less weight on the affected limb 1 week after surgery and experienced mechanical hypersensitivity over the duration of the study. Astroctye activation was observed at DRGs only at 4 weeks after surgery. Findings for pain receptors in the midbrain of NP-treated rats included an increased expression of 5HT2B at 1, but not 4 weeks; increased expression of µ-OR and mGluR5 at 1 and 4 weeks (periaqueductal gray region only); and no changes in expression of mGluR4 at any point in this study. These observations provide support for the hypothesis that the midbrain responds to DRG injury with a transient change in receptors regulating pain responses.
Stochastic analysis of some Expedited Forwarding networks

We consider stochastic guarantees for networks with aggregate scheduling, in particular, Expedited Forwarding (EF). Our approach is based on the assumption that a node can be abstracted by a service curve, and the input flows are regulated individually at the network ingress. Both of these assumptions are in line with EF. For a service curve node, we derive bounds on the complementary distributions of the steady-state backlog and backlog as seen by packet arrivals. We also give a bound on the long-run loss ratio for a service curve node where the buffer size is too small to guarantee loss-free operation. For a packet scale rate guarantee node, we use the delay from the backlog bound to obtain a probabilistic bound on the delay. Our analysis is exact under the given assumptions. Our results should help us to understand the performance of networks with aggregate scheduling, and provide the basis for dimensioning such networks.
Charcot‐Marie‐Tooth disease type 1A: clinicopathological correlations in 24 patients

Abstract We examined nerve biopsies from 24 patients with Charcot‐Marie‐Tooth disease type 1A (CMT1A) and proven 17p11.2‐12 duplication. There were seven males and 17 females with a mean age of 27.85 ± 18.95 years at the time of nerve biopsy. A family history consistent with dominant inheritance was present in 17 patients. Clinical features were classical in 16 patients and were atypical in the other eight: one had calf hypertrophy; two had Roussy–Levy syndrome; one had had a subacute inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy 11 years earlier and presented a relapse on the form of a chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy; one had carpal tunnel syndrome; one had a recent painful neuropathy in both legs; and two had chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy. Onion bulb formations (OMFs) were present in every case and most of them were characteristic, whereas burnt‐out or cluster‐associated OMFs were less common. Depletion of myelinated fibers was severe in 20 cases (169–2927/mm2) and varied from 5187 to 3725/mm2 in three children (4–9 years old). In addition, features of macrophage‐associated demyelination were observed in the last four atypical cases. Known for more than 20 years, inflammatory demyelination superimposed in the course of CMT1A has been reported in a few cases in the past few years, mainly concerning asymptomatic or atypical patients. Such an association deserves to be better known because corticotherapy improves weakness in most of these patients.
Adaptive Speech Dereverberation Using Constrained Sparse Multichannel Linear Prediction

In this letter, we present an adaptive speech dereverberation method based on constrained sparse multichannel linear prediction (MCLP), minimizing the mixed $\ell _{2,p}$ norm of the desired component. In order to prevent overestimation of the undesired reverberant component, possibly leading to severe distortions of the output, we propose to use a statistical model for late reverberation to limit the power of the MCLP-based estimate. The resulting constrained optimization problem is solved by using the alternating direction method of multipliers, resulting in two variants of the dereverberation algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed constraint increases the robustness with respect to parameter selection and improves the usability for dynamic scenarios in comparison to the unconstrained method.
Cultivation of Virulent Treponema pallidum in Tissue Culture

In a series of seven experiments, the virulent Nichols strain of Treponema pallidum was shown to attach and replicate on the surface of tissue culture cells of cottontail rabbit epithelium (Sf1Ep) growing in conventional monolayer cultures under an atmosphere of 1.5% oxygen. Five days after inoculation of 106T. pallidum, the number of treponemes had increased to between 8 × 106 and 2.59 × 107. The viability of harvested organisms ranged from 86 to 97%. The number of T. pallidum continued to increase, generally reaching a plateau between days 9 and 12 of incubation, with increases ranging up to 100-fold and averaging 49-fold. There appeared to be a ceiling of multiplication of about 2 × 108 irrespective of the inoculum, which ranged from 106 to 108T. pallidum. Concurrent deoxyribonucleic acid assays were performed on the cultures containing T. pallidum to obtain further evidence of replication. Significant increases in treponemal deoxyribonucleic acid were observed when the inocula ranged from 106 to 107, with the greatest increases, as might be expected, being in the former group. There was also excellent correlation in the amount of deoxyribonucleic acid per treponeme; the averages for the 106, 2.5 × 106, and 107 groups were 3.46 × 10−14, 3.28 × 10−14, and 2.79 × 10−14 g per treponeme, respectively (3.14 ± 0.72 × 10−14 g per treponeme). In each experiment, organisms were harvested from the group inoculated with 106T. pallidum after 7 days of incubation to test for virulence. In all instances, the organisms were virulent; erythematous, indurated, treponeme-containing lesions were produced from an average of six to seven organisms. Scanning electron microscopy revealed that during the course of replication many microcolonies of treponemes formed on the surface of the cells.
Health implications of work-related stress in women and men

Muscular pains, stress, fatigue, and headaches are the most common work-related health problems in the European Union, and psychosocial stress is assumed to play an important role in these disorders. This paper is describing some modern work conditions contributing to stress, major bodily responses to stress and potential health consequences in women and men. It is concluded that demands for constant activity, competition, and personal responsibilities are increasiing. The borders between work and other parts of life are becoming blurred and time for rest and recovery is deminishing, which contributes to allostatic load. In modern societies, the lack of recuperation seems to be more important for health problems than the intensity of stress and physical demands at work. Many women find the combined load from paid and unpaid work responsibilities to be too high. To encourage and help both women and men to find a reasonable work-life balance, economic and political societal measures seem necessary.
Analyzing Large Collections of Email

One of the first applications of the Internet was the electronic mailing (e-mail). Along with the evolution of the Internet, e-mail has evolved into a powerful and popular technology. Messages, electronically documents, pictures and even movies can be send between users of computer systems at different places all over the world within seconds. Electronic mail is a fast, a cheap and a comfortable communication method. But with the exponential increase of the Internet users and the corresponding increasing e-mail traffic, new problems arise. Examples are Spam mails or computer viruses hidden in email attachments. Therefore the analysis of email and email traffic becomes more and more important. In this paper we discuss visualization methods for analyzing large amounts of e-mails to detect interesting patterns or to identify Spam e-mails.