Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Is the large size of the pinna of the ear of the European hare (Lepus europaeus) due to its role in thermoregulation or in anterior capital shock absorption?

Large pinnae are characteristic of the Leporids, and the pinna is known to have a thermoregulatory role. Another role has been hypothesized for the pinna of Lepus spp. , as a part of a suspensory system for the greater portion of the head, absorbing shock that might otherwise interfere with vision during high‐speed locomotion. We compared the lengths of the pinnae of adult European hares Lepus europaeus from the source population in the cooler climate of England with those of the introduced population in the warmer climate of Australia, and we compared the lengths of the pinnae of hares that had grown in cooler weather with those that had grown in warmer weather. There were no significant differences between each of the comparisons, indicating that the size of the pinna is not determined by thermoregulatory requirements at rest. We compared the growth in length of the pinnae and the legs with growth in body mass, and growth in the mass of the pinnae with the masses of the head and the eyeballs, and found support for the suspension hypothesis. We suggest that the rapid growth of the pinna is because visual acuity is a function of absolute eye size, not relative eye size, yet juvenile hares are subject to the same predator pressure as adult hares, and equally need to maximize visual acuity while running at high speeds in dim light. We believe that the large size of the pinna is determined by its role in anterior capital suspension, not in thermoregulation. J. Morphol. , 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Multiple-microphone robust speech recognition using decoder-based channel selection

In this paper, we focus on speech recognition using multiple microphones with varying quality. The quality of one channel may be much better than other channels and even the output of standard microphone array techniques such as the delay-and-sum beamformer. Therefore, it is important to find a good indicator to select a channel for recognition. This paper introduces Decoder-Based Channel Selection (DBCS) that gives a criterion to evaluate the quality of each channel by comparing the speech recognition hypotheses made from compensated and uncompensated feature vectors. We evaluate the performance of DBCS using speech data recorded by a PDA-like mockup. DBCS with Delta-Cepstrum Normalization for single channel compensation provides significant improvement compared to the delay-and-sum beamformer. In addition, the concept of DBCS is extended to the delayand-sum beamformer outputs of various subset of microphones. This extension gives some additional improvement of the speech recognition accuracy.
Relation between serum testosterone, serum estradiol, sex hormone-binding globulin, and geometrical measures of adult male proximal femur strength.

CONTEXT Although previous studies have indicated associations between circulating testosterone (T) or estradiol (E2) concentrations and bone mineral density, the relationship between gonadal steroids and skeletal geometry is not well defined. OBJECTIVE Our objective was to uncover the relation between circulating T or E2 and proximal femur geometry in a diverse sample of men. DESIGN We used data on 808 men enrolled in the Boston Area Community Health/Bone Study. Serum concentrations of total and calculated free T and E2 were obtained via early-morning blood sampling. The geometry of the proximal femur at three sites (the narrow neck, intertrochanter, and shaft) was obtained using the Hip Structural Analysis technology. Analyses adjusted for subjects' age, height, total body lean mass and fat mass, and level of physical activity were performed. SETTING In-home interviews accompanied by subject visits to the General Clinical Research Center at Boston University School of Medicine were performed. STUDY PARTICIPANTS A randomly selected cohort of men living in Boston, MA (ages 30-79 yr) was included in the study. INTERVENTIONS These were not applicable. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Bone mineral density and bone outer diameter, cross-sectional area (measuring bone material), and section modulus (an index of bending strength) were calculated. RESULTS In age-adjusted models, E2 was positively associated with hip strength parameters, whereas T was not. Adjustment for age and other parameters resulted in substantial reductions in, but not complete elimination of, associations between E2 and hip strength parameters. CONCLUSION Circulating E2 is strongly associated with proximal femur strength, an association that is partially mediated by body composition.
THE NATURE AND NURTURE OF TWINS

I enjoyed reading this book. John Fry, the well-known general practitioner from the South of England has assembled over fifty general practitioners, almost half of them from various parts of the Englishspeaking world. He has asked them to look at a score of dilemmas a family doctor will certainly meet in his clinical or administrative work. For each of the dilemmas, one or more of the authors address the various issues involved, usually substantiating their arguments with references from work in that particular field. When the case has been made for and against, the chapter ends with a commentary. This is a short and usually balanced critique from Dr Fry and his two closest collaborators, Dr Wes Fabb from Australia and Professor John Geyman from the United States, both of whom are well known in the postgraduate and undergraduate fields respectively. Being often taught on 'extreme' cases as a student, the general practitioner then practices in relative isolation with patients who do not exhibit disorders in their classical forms and, in any case, are individuals with their own views, part of a family and community. More than others he has to work in the grey areas of uncertainty and make decisions as well as help patients make decisions for their own good. This book attempts to encompass the precise technical assessment as well as the personal hunch and shows that divergent views are tenable on a variety of topics.
Social Affordances : Understanding Technology Mediated Social Networks at Work

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) technology includes messaging systems, such as e-mail, and conferencing technologies designed to facilitate group work. CMC adoption fails when it interferes with subtle and complex social dynamics of groups. Yet empirical studies of CMC use which explicitly associate social behavior with design features are largely absent from the literature. So too are conceptual tools for detecting and describing such behavior. This research addresses this absence by closely examining how CMC design supports social interaction among distributed work groups and thus stimulates or suppress adoption.
NOTES ON INTEGER BIN-PACKING FOR TECHNOLOGY MAPPING ON TREES

INTEGER-BIN-PACKING: Given a list L of n items of integer size/weight, and a integer bin-capacity K, pack the items into a minimum number of bins. The decision version of this problem is NP-Complete [4]. The well-known heuristic \ rstt-decreasing" (FFD) is known to approximate the minimumbin-packing within a factor of 11 9 [4]. The FFD algorithm simply sorts the elements in decreasing order, and applies a greedy algorithm: the current item is placed in the rst bin in which it ts. If K is a constant, the problem is polynomial time by exhaustive search. For a technology mapping application[2, 3], Francis [2] recently showed that FFD provides the optimum bin-packing strategy when K = 5 or 6, and furthermore when K = 5 the FFD packing has the property that its largest hole is maximum among all other optimum packings. We can generalize this result if we view the packing problem as a matching problem; i.e. we construct a graph G whose nodes are the items of L, and items x and y share an edge if the sum of their values is no larger than the bin-capacity (i.e. w(x)+w(y) K). If G arises from some set of items in this way we say G is a pairing graph. If the bin-capacity is such that no more than two items can ever t in one bin (excluding items of size 1, which we dispose of shortly), we claim that the FFD bin-packing is guaranteed to have both the minimumnumber of bins, and the largest hole property mentioned above; i.e. it induces a maximummatching with the largest hole property. The optimality with respect to size is alluded to by exercise 10.16 of [5]; however, the hole size property is interesting and necessary for the application, and is not mentioned. First we want to exclude instances with items of size 1 from consideration; we will call these items trivial items: Lemma 0.1. If instance (L;K) of INT-BINPACK provides a counter-example to the optimality (in terms of number of bins) of the FFD algorithm when there are trivial items (weight 1) in L, then the instance (L0;K) where L0 is L with all trivial items removed also provides a counter-example to the optimality of FFD. Proof. FFD adds 1's only after all other elements have been placed, and hence introduces a new bin only if all other bins are entirely full. Thus it cannot make an optimum packing non-optimum by adding trivial items. We henceforth assume that there are no trivial items in L. Note that 1's could still have an e ect on the hole property, but we will defer this issue.
Analysis of Maximum Likelihood and Mahalanobis Distance for Identifying Cheating Anchor Nodes

Malicious anchor nodes will constantly hinder genuine and appropriate localization. Discovering the malicious or vulnerable anchor node is an essential problem in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In wireless sensor networks, anchor nodes are the nodes that know its current location. Neighboring nodes or non-anchor nodes calculate its location (or its location reference) with the help of anchor nodes. Ingenuous localization is not possible in the presence of a cheating anchor node or a cheating node. Nowadays, its a challenging task to identify the cheating anchor node or cheating node in a network. Even after finding out the location of the cheating anchor node, there is no assurance, that the identified node is legitimate or not. This paper aims to localize the cheating anchor nodes using trilateration algorithm and later associate it with maximum likelihood expectation technique (MLE), and Mahalanobis distance to obtain maximum accuracy in identifying malicious or cheating anchor nodes during localization. We were able to attain a considerable reduction in the error achieved during localization. For implementation purpose we simulated our scheme using ns-3 network simulator.
Power consumption model using green policies in Heterogeneous Networks

Although the LTE systems provides high data-rate, low latency and spectrum flexibility, the coverage holes due to the cell edge and high interference areas are still an open issue. The Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) can be a possible solution to this problems. The HetNet paradigms overlaps low power base stations (BSs) with different transmitted powers within a macro cellular coverage. However, the dense deployment of BSs increases the power consumption of the network and, as a consequence, decreases the system performance due to the high inter-cell interference. In this paper, we propose a power control scheme based on green policies in order to enhance the power saving over Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) in Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems. In particular, the aim of the proposed framework is to increase the energy efficiency of the system, without decreasing the network throughput. An extensive simulation campaign has been conducted through the usage of the Network Simulator 3 (NS-3). The obtained results show that the proposed green power control reduces the power consumption and enhances the energy efficiency of the system without decreases the throughput of both the BSs and users (UEs).
Distributing data for secure database services

The advent of database services has resulted in privacy concerns on the part of the client storing data with third party database service providers. Previous approaches to enabling such a service have been based on data encryption, causing a large overhead in query processing. A distributed architecture for secure database services is proposed as a solution to this problem where data is stored at multiple servers. The distributed architecture provides both privacy as well as fault tolerance to the client. In this paper we provide algorithms for (1) distributing data: our results include hardness of approximation results and hence a heuristic greedy algorithm for the distribution problem (2) partitioning the query at the client to queries for the servers is done by a bottom up state based algorithm. Finally the results at the servers are integrated to obtain the answer at the client. We provide an experimental validation and performance study of our algorithms.
Interferences in red blood cell counting in urinalysis using evacuated tubes

Evacuated tube systems are increasingly used in the routine practice of sample collection because they confer a high degree of safety and improve several steps of the preanalytical phase (1). Although major emphasis and research is currently being placed on the use of these systems for collecting venous blood samples, similar methods are now available for collecting urine specimens. Basically, these tubes are filled using a straw device from cups with integrated transfer devices built into their lid. Although other preanalytical aspects of urinalysis have been previously investigated (2), no information is available on the influence of these devices on automated flow cytometry analysis of urine parameters (3, 4), especially of red blood cells (RBCs). First-void, midstream urine morning samples were collected into a beaker with an integrated transfer device from 100 consecutive randomly selected outpatients referred to the clinical chemistry laboratories of Parma (ns50) and Magenta (ns50). The urine was appropriately mixed in the beaker and sequentially transferred into two consecutive urine evacuated tubes without stabiliser (Parma: Vacuette Greiner Bio-One GmbH, Bad Haller Kremsmunster, Austria; Magenta: Vacutest Kima, Padua, Italy). The former tube was filled by direct aspiration in accordance with the exact defined vacuum, while the latter tube was filled using the same volume as the first sample, but opening the lid of the beaker, removing the stopper of the evacuated tube and pouring the urine from the beaker into the tube. RBC analysis was subsequently performed on all samples using the UF-100 flow cytometer (Sysmex, Milano, Italy) within 2 h from collection. Differences in measurement were evaluated using Student’s
Quantized Precoding Techniques for Spatially Correlated Channels without Correlation Feedback

This thesis deals with the quantized precoding techniques for spatially correlated MISO (multiple-input single-output) channels. The transformed codebook, which has been proposed recently for correlated channel, has problem of loosing diversity despite using additional feedback for channel correlation matrix. In this thesis, an efficient algorithm to estimate the correlation matrix without additional feedback and also prevent diversity loss is proposed. In the proposed algorithm, the estimation can be done using the codeword selection patterns. In order to estimate and get SNR gain simultaneously, the proposed algorithm uses both transformed codebook and specific forms of IID (independent identically distributed) codebook for estimation, which also prevents diversity loss.
Panhematin provides a therapeutic benefit in experimental pancreatitis

Background and aim Acute pancreatitis (AP) can result in pancreatic necrosis and inflammation, with subsequent multi-organ failure. AP is associated with increased neutrophil recruitment and a rise in pro-inflammatory cytokines such as TNFα. Pretreatment with haemin, results in recruitment of haem-oxygenase-1 (HO-1)+ macrophages and protects against experimental pancreatitis. It is not clear whether modulation of HO-1 after onset of disease has a protective role. In this study, we tested the utility of Panhematin, a water-soluble haemin formulation, in activating and inducing pancreatic HO-1, and as a therapeutic agent in treating mouse acute pancreatitis. Methods We defined the distribution of radiolabelled haemin, then used in vivo HO-1–luciferase bioluminescence imaging and the CO-release assay to test Panhematin-induced upregulation of HO-1 transcription and activity, respectively. Using two well-defined AP murine models, we tested the therapeutic benefit of Panhematin, and quantified cytokine release using a luminex assay. Results Intravenously administered Panhematin induces rapid recruitment of HO-1+ cells to the pancreas within 2 h and de novo splenic HO-1 transcription by 12 h. Despite high baseline spleen HO-1 activity, the pancreas is particularly responsive to Panhematin-mediated HO-1 induction. Panhematin-treated mice, at various time points after AP induction had significant reduction in mortality, pancreatic injury, together with upregulation of HO-1 and downregulation of pro-inflammatory cytokines and CXCL1, a potent neutrophil chemoattractant. Conclusions Despite AP-associated mortality and morbidity, no effective treatment other than supportive care exists. We demonstrate that Panhematin leads to: (i) rapid induction and activation of pancreatic HO-1 with recruitment of HO-1+ cells to the pancreas, (ii) amelioration of AP even when given late during the course of disease, and (iii) a decrease in leucocyte infiltration and pro-inflammatory cytokines including CXCL1. The utility of Panhematin at modest doses as a therapeutic in experimental pancreatitis, coupled with its current use and safety in humans, raises the potential of its applicability to human pancreatitis.
Spitz makes a better assumption for the signal PEF

In real-world extraction of signal from data we are not given the needed signal predictionerror filter (PEF). Claerbout has taken S, the PEF of the signal, to be that of the data, S ≈ D. Spitz takes it to beS≈ D/N. Where noises are highly predictable in time or space, Spitz gets significantly better results. Theoretica lly, reason is that the essential character of a PEF is contained where it is small.
Computerised Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (cCBT): A possible treatment for mood disorders experienced by people with neurological conditions?

Mood disorders such as depression occur relatively often following the diagnosis of a range of neurological conditions. Recent studies reviewing the prevalence of depression amongst people with a neurological condition have shown that approximately one third report clinically significant levels of depression (Carson, Ringbauer, MacKenzie, Warlow, & Sharpe, 2000; Williams et al., 2003). In particular, people with a diagnosis of a cerebrovascular disorder or a neurological condition with additional cognitive impairments, have been found to be the most likely to report symptoms of depression (Williams et al., 2003). However, despite the evidence that a large proportion of people with neurological conditions experience mood disorders, there are currently limited resources available to treat them.
Evaluation of CCR3 as a basophil activation marker.

OBJECTIVES Recent reports have provided conflicting evidence on the stability of CCR3 expression on the surface of basophils. Hence we wanted to independently evaluate the diagnostic usefulness of CCR3 as a surrogate marker of basophil activation and function. METHODS We examined the correlative relationship between CCR3 expression on the surface of donor basophils and histamine release after donor basophils were treated with agonistic antibodies directed against the high-affinity IgE-Fc receptor and serum samples from 80 individuals displaying symptoms of chronic urticaria (CU). RESULTS We observed that CCR3 was significantly downregulated on donor basophils treated with the agonistic antibody and CU-patient serum that demonstrated positive "histamine-releasing activity" (HRA scores >10). However, CCR3 downregulation was also observed on donor basophils incubated with more than 40% of CU-patient serum samples with HRA scores less than or equal to 10. CONCLUSIONS Overall our data show that CCR3 demonstrates adequate sensitivity (83%) but weak specificity (59%) in its ability to reliably identify histamine-releasing activated basophils.
Exploitation of the phasor approach for closed-form solution of the Van der Pol's oscillator and sinusoidal oscillators with high-order nonlinearity

In this paper the phasor approach is applied to find the solution of the well-known Van der Pol's equation for both quasi-sinusoidal and relaxation oscillation regimes. It allows to find simple closed-form relationships for the output harmonics of a LC oscillator whose behavior is described by the Van der Pol's equation. Furthermore, the validity of the phasor approach is extended to analyze also oscillators with nonlinearity of order higher than three. As an example a LC oscillator with a polynomial nonlinearity of fifth order is considered and closed-form relationships for the output harmonics are found. The analysis developed, both for the Van der Pol's equation and for oscillators with high-order nonlinearity, is verified by means of simulations performed with Spectre.
Computational Investigations on the Performance and Emissions Characteristics of a Single Cylinder Spark Ignition Engine Using Petrol and Methanol as Its Alternative Fuels

This paper presents the thermodynamic evaluation of methanol as an alternative fuel for commercial spark ignition engines. The computational investigations were done in the professional internal combustion engines simulation software named as AVL BOOST. The software is designed on the basis of the fundamental conservation laws of mass, momentum and energy. To compute the thermodynamic results the equations involved are solved using the numerical finite volume method. Thermodynamic models for combustion, heat transfer and frictional power etc available in the software are used for solving the problems related to the engine performance analysis. The modeling for the engine was done with the help of basic elements available in the software using the graphical user interface of the software. For comparison purposes the model was first run in the petrol mode and the results were computed for its performance and the emissions characteristics with rich mixture conditions under variable speed operation. The above procedure was repeated with methanol as a fuel under similar design and operating conditions. The simulated testing and analysis for normal combustion with either of the two fuels was done by computing octane requirement of the engine for each of the two fuels over entire range of speed of the engine. In order to have the computed octane demand below the octane numbers of the commercial petrol and methanol the design parameter like spark timing and the operating parameters like air-fuel ratio and engine speed were finally selected accordingly. The results show that the power and torque developed by the engine in methanol mode is comparable to that produced in the petrol mode. The brake specific methanol consumption was more than the brake specific petrol consumption for the engine under consideration. The methanol fuel produces higher CO and HC emissions than petrol fuel, however the NOx emissions are lower with methanol fuel.