Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Content Based Image Retrieval based on Color, Texture and Shape features using Image and its complement

Color, texture and shape information have been the primitive image descriptors in content based image retrieval systems. This paper presents a novel framework for combining all the three i.e. color, texture and shape information, and achieve higher retrieval efficiency using image and its complement. The image and its complement are partitioned into non-overlapping tiles of equal size. The features drawn from conditional co-occurrence histograms between the image tiles and corresponding complement tiles, in RGB color space, serve as local descriptors of color and texture. This local information is captured for two resolutions and two grid layouts that provide different details of the same image. An integrated matching scheme, based on most similar highest priority (MSHP) principle and the adjacency matrix of a bipartite graph formed using the tiles of query and target image, is provided for matching the images. Shape information is captured in terms of edge images computed using Gradient Vector Flow fields. Invariant moments are then used to record the shape features. The combination of the color and texture features between image and its complement in conjunction with the shape features provide a robust feature set for image retrieval. The experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the method.
On the Closed-Form Performance Analysis of Maximal Ratio Combining in Shadowed-Rician Fading LMS Channels

In this paper, the maximal ratio combining (MRC) scheme in Shadowed-Rician (SR) fading land mobile satellite (LMS) channels is studied. The MRC scheme for SR fading LMS channels has been studied in existing literature; however, most of the existing analytical results are in the form of infinite power series, which are not in closed-form. In this paper, we derive approximate closed-form expressions of the probability density function and cumulative distribution function of the received signal-to-noise ratio of the MRC based receiver in SR fading LMS channels. Then we provide approximate closed-form expressions of the bit error rate (BER), outage probability, and capacity of the considered scheme. One of the derived closed-form BER expressions is found useful for obtaining the analytical diversity order and coding gain of the considered MRC scheme.
Exploring Different Perspectives on Limitations and Promises of Service-Learning as an Innovative Pedagogy: Review of Literature

In the last two decades service-learning has become very popular as an innovative educational approach all over the world. Studies have reported that as an innovative and distinct instructional method it benefits both students and communities alike. However, despite of this, its effectiveness as an educational practice is still debated. This paper investigates into this gap in the current service-learning literature. The paper has two aims. First, to answer the questions that how service-learning is a distinct innovative pedagogy and why its effectiveness is still questioned. Second, to explore the challenges that it faces and opportunities it provides. The review reveals that although service-learning is different from traditional methods, its position as effective method is still opposed by many quarters. A small number of researchers consider it as a time-consuming and expensive practice. However, the larger group holds the view that service-learning is effective and reciprocal method. On the basis of this review, this paper concludes that as an innovative pedagogy, service-learning achieves two aims: community receives service and students get learning. This characteristic makes it a distinctly unique educative method. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015. v6n4s1p311
Can the Direct Cardiac Effects of the Electric Pulses Generated by the TASER X26 Cause Immediate or Delayed Sudden Cardiac Arrest in Normal Adults?

There is only a small amount of experimental data about whether the TASER X26, a nonlethal weapon that delivers a series of brief electrical pulses to cause involuntary muscular contraction to temporarily incapacitate an individual, can initiate ventricular fibrillation to cause sudden cardiac arrest either immediately or sometime after its use. Therefore, this paper uses the fundamental law of electrostimulation and experimental data from the literature to estimate the likelihood of such events. Because of the short duration of the TASER pulses, the large duration of the cardiac cell membrane time constant, the small fraction of current from electrodes on the body surface that passes through the heart, and the resultant high pacing threshold from the body surface, the fundamental law of electrostimulation predicts that the TASER pulses will not stimulate an ectopic beat in the large majority of normal adults. Since the immediate initiation of ventricular fibrillation in a normal heart requires a very premature stimulated ectopic beat and the threshold for such premature beats is higher than less premature beats, it is unlikely that TASER pulses can immediately initiate ventricular fibrillation in such individuals through the direct effect of the electric field generated through the heart by the TASER. In the absence of preexisting heart disease, the delayed development of ventricular fibrillation requires the electrical stimuli to cause electroporation or myocardial necrosis. However, the electrical thresholds for electroporation and necrosis are many times higher than that required to stimulate an ectopic beat. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that the TASER X26 can cause ventricular fibrillation minutes to hours after its use through direct cardiac effects of the electric field generated by the TASER.
Comprehension of online consumer-generated product review: a construal level perspective

This study explores how consumers, who differ in their psychological distance toward the purchasing event (i.e., temporal distance) or toward product review writers (i.e., social distance), comprehend concrete or abstract reviews. Two experiments were conducted. The first experiment examined how a consumer’s perception of temporal distance, near future or distant future, would affect his/her comprehension of product reviews of varying abstractness. Results reveal that consumers of near temporal distance perceive concrete reviews to be more helpful. These consumers express a higher recall ability compared to counterparts of distant temporal distance. However, consumers of near temporal distance perceive abstract reviews to be less helpful and express a lower recall ability compared to those of distant temporal distance. The second experiment investigated how social distance, i.e., whether the review is written by someone who is perceived to be socially close to the reader would influence his/her comprehension of product reviews of varying abstractness. Results indicate that, with the provision of concrete reviews, consumers perceive non-significant difference of the review helpfulness under near and distant social distance and exhibit comparable recall ability. With the provision of abstract reviews, however, consumers of a near social distance recognize the reviews as helpful and recall the product better than did those of a distant social distance. This study presents a theoretically-driven and empiricallyvalidated proposition to improve the presentation of product reviews to aid consumer review comprehension.
On the Evaluation of Highly Oscillatory Integrals by Analytic Continuation

We consider the integration of one-dimensional highly oscillatory functions. Based on analytic continuation, rapidly converging quadrature rules are derived for a general class of oscillatory integrals with an analytic integrand. The accuracy of the quadrature increases both for the case of a fixed number of points and increasing frequency, and for the case of an increasing number of points and fixed frequency. These results are then used to obtain quadrature rules for more general oscillatory integrals, i.e., for functions that exhibit some smoothness but that are not analytic. The approach described in this paper is related to the steepest descent method, but it does not employ asymptotic expansions. It can be used for small or moderate frequencies as well as for very high frequencies. The approach is compared with the oscillatory integration techniques recently developed by Iserles and Norsett.
GENETIC VARIATION AND REPRODUCTIVE ISOLATION IN PARTULA

It is true that "we know virtually nothing about the genetic changes that occur in species formation" (Lewontin, 1974: 159). Following studies by Hubby and Throckmorton (1965, 1968), surveys of allozyme variation have revealed some of the genetic differences between closely related species (Selander and Johnson, 1973; Avise, 1974). Populations at the border between full reproductive isolation and free gene exchange are particularly interesting in this context, but few such populations have been compared electrophoretically. Studies have been made of the subspecies of Mus musculus (Selander et al., 1969; Hunt and Selander, 1973), the semispecies of Drosophila paulistorum (Richmond, 1972a,b), the subspecies of D. willistoni and D. equinoxialis (Ayala et al., 1974), and a geographic isolate of D. pseudoobscura (Prakash, 1972; Ayala and Dobzhansky, 1974). Most of these studies suggest that there is usually about 20 percent divergence in allelic frequencies during the development of reproductive isolation. Land snails of the genus Partula include several examples of partially reproductively isolated taxa. On the island of Moorea in
Video Image Segmentation and Object Detection using Markov Random Field Model and EM Algorithm Prof

With many application in various domains, object detection and tracking has received a great deal of attention over the decades in the field of image analysis and computer vision. It has been studied by scientists from different areas of psychophysical sciences and those from different areas of computer science. However, developing a computer algorithm to do the same thing is one of the toughest tasks in computer vision. Research over the past several years enables similar such as foreground detection, detecting connecting regions, extracting object features. Correspondence-based object matching, detecting left and removed objects. This research paper gives a review of different object detection techniques which are available as of today. The focus is on the segmentation techniques by investigating the use of image frames. The motion based, spatiotemporal, temporal are under segmentation techniques. We incorporate the EM algorithm with these segmentation techniques for better performance of detecting and tracking of an object in this research paper.
Strategic Silence as a Tool of Political Communication: A Reflection on Third Term Saga and Etteh Gate in Nigerian Politics

Politics is said to be a game of intrigues and part of that is the use of silence as a means of communication. This may sound strange as communication itself connotes the art of expression. However in politics, a political actor may chose to remain silent as a means of passing a message across to the public in a trouble situation when he is expected to make a comment. In this paper, effort was made to examine how silence has been used by public office holders in Nigeria at different times as a reaction to issues of public interest concerning them. The paper observed that whereas this strategy worked well in some instances such as in President Shehu Shagari preventing war between Nigeria and Cameroon, it failed woefully in respect of the late General Sanni Abacha as well as Patricia Etteh, first female Speaker, House of Representatives in Nigeria while it provided an escape route for Olusegun Obasanjo in his subtle attempt at perpetuating himself in power. The paper, therefore, recommended that politicians should be cautious in the use of strategic silence as a means of political communication in view of the nature of politics which calls for self- expression in the use of persuasion, clarification and conviction to win public support and sympathy. Maintaining silence when one is most expected to speak out could easily be misunderstood as a sign of incompetence, intransigence or outright arrogance by the public. LWATI: A Journal of Contemporary Research , 8(1), 272-285, 2011
The role of cognitive effort in framing effects.

Framing effects are a common bias in people making risky decisions. The account for this bias is found in the loss aversion derived from Prospect Theory. Most often in the decision making literature this is the effortful processes that are claimed to reduce framing effects in risky choice tasks i.e. investing of mental effort should de-bias the decision makers. However, in goal framing studies, effortful mental processes may produce those effects. In our experiment participants were primed with either effortful or effortless modes of processing before a classical Asian Disease scenario. As hypothesised, framing effects were obtained only through effortful processing. This suggests the effortful and reflective nature of framing effects.
Generation of Th17 cells in response to intranasal infection requires TGF-β1 from dendritic cells and IL-6 from CD301b+ dendritic cells

Significance Naïve helper T cells can differentiate into several specialized subtypes that help other cells kill microbes. The processes that determine how the different T-cell subtypes form in the body are not understood. Here we identify a population of dendritic cells that is responsible for the formation of one helper T-cell type during nasal infection. These results extend knowledge about T-cell specification and could be applied to improve vaccines for nasal pathogens. Intranasal (i.n.) infections preferentially generate Th17 cells. We explored the basis for this anatomic preference by tracking polyclonal CD4+ T cells specific for an MHC class II-bound peptide from the mucosal pathogen Streptococcus pyogenes. S. pyogenes MHC class II-bound peptide-specific CD4+ T cells were first activated in the cervical lymph nodes following i.n. inoculation and then differentiated into Th17 cells. S. pyogenes-induced Th17 formation depended on TGF-β1 from dendritic cells and IL-6 from a CD301b+ dendritic cell subset located in the cervical lymph nodes but not the spleen. Thus, the tendency of i.n. infection to induce Th17 cells is related to cytokine production by specialized dendritic cells that drain this site.
Antiretroviral treatment of primary HIV infection to reduce onward transmission

Purpose of reviewThis review will discuss the role of antiretroviral therapy to treat primary HIV infection (PHI) as a strategy to prevent onward viral transmission. Recent findingsNovel technology has greatly enhanced the appreciation of the characteristics of recently transmitted HIV-1 variants. Recent primate data demonstrate marked enhanced infectiousness of viral variants isolated from acutely infected macaques compared with viruses isolated from animals in the chronic phase of disease. These data are supported by phylogenetic analyses of recently transmitted cases in humans, implying that individuals with PHI may contribute disproportionately to onward transmission at a population level. SummaryIn the absence of randomized clinical trial data supporting individual benefit of antiretroviral therapy, targeting and treating individuals with PHI as a public health intervention strategy represent a paradigm shift from current treatment strategies based around proven individual benefit alone. However, there is increasing evidence that PHI contributes disproportionately to viral transmission at a population level and failure to incorporate the potential role PHI plays, particularly in focused epidemics, maybe a naïve omission of many of the current mathematical models evaluating the impact of universal test and treat on population-level HIV incidence.
Towards Zero-Overhead Adaptive Indexing in Hadoop

Several research works have focused on supporting index access in MapReduce systems. These works have allowed users to significantly speed up selective MapReduce jobs by orders of magnitude. However, all these proposals require users to create indexes upfront, which might be a difficult task in certain applications (such as in scientific and social applications) where workloads are evolving or hard to predict. To overcome this problem, we propose LIAH (Lazy Indexing and Adaptivity in Hadoop), a parallel, adaptive approach for indexing at minimal costs for MapReduce systems. The main idea of LIAH is to automatically and incrementally adapt to users' workloads by creating clustered indexes on HDFS data blocks as a byproduct of executing MapReduce jobs. Besides distributing indexing efforts over multiple computing nodes, LIAH also parallelises indexing with both map tasks computation and disk I/O. All this without any additional data copy in main memory and with minimal synchronisation. The beauty of LIAH is that it piggybacks index creation on map tasks, which read relevant data from disk to main memory anyways. Hence, LIAH does not introduce any additional read I/O-costs and exploit free CPU cycles. As a result and in contrast to existing adaptive indexing works, LIAH has a very low (or invisible) indexing overhead, usually for the very first job. Still, LIAH can quickly converge to a complete index, i.e. all HDFS data blocks are indexed. Especially, LIAH can trade early job runtime improvements with fast complete index convergence. We compare LIAH with HAIL, a state-of-the-art indexing technique, as well as with standard Hadoop with respect to indexing overhead and workload performance.
Polymorphisms in the Interleukin 10 Gene Promoter are Associated with Susceptibility to Aggressive Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma

Interleukin-10 (IL-10) is mainly an anti-inflammatory cytokine produced by a number of cells including normal and neoplastic B cells. It has been implicated in autoimmunity, transplantation tolerance and tumourigenesis. Polymorphisms in the IL-10 gene promoter genetically determine inter-individual differences in IL-10 production. The aim of this study was to determine whether polymorphisms in the IL-10 gene promoter play a role in predisposing an individual to lymphoma. We analysed the frequencies of three single base substitutions in the IL-10 promoter in patients with aggressive lymphoma (B-cell DLCL n =46, other aggressive histologies n =17 ), Hodgkin's disease (n =44) or low/intermediate grade lymphoma (n =46), compared to healthy controls. The frequency of the low-IL-10 producing AA allele (at position m 1082) was significantly higher in patients with aggressive lymphoma compared to controls (p =0.0344, Odds ratio 1.974, 95% C.I 1.066-3.655). Similarly, the frequency of the low IL-10 producing ATA or the intermediate-IL-10- producing ACC haplotype was significantly higher in patients with aggressive disease compared to controls (p =0.0255, Odds ratio 1.647, 95% C.I 1.077-2.518). No association was found between IL-10 genotypes and Hodgkin's disease or less aggressive forms of lymphoma. Thus, polymorphisms in the IL-10 gene promoter which are associated with a low IL-10 producing phenotype may influence susceptibility to aggressive forms of lymphoma or may contribute to the pathogenesis of this disease.
Rapid microtubule-independent dynamics of Cdc20 at kinetochores and centrosomes in mammalian cells

Cdc20 is a substrate adaptor and activator of the anaphase-promoting complex/cyclosome (APC/C), the E3 ubiquitin ligase whose activity is required for anaphase onset and exit from mitosis. A green fluorescent protein derivative, Cdc20–GFP, bound to centrosomes throughout the cell cycle and to kinetochores from late prophase to late telophase. We mapped distinct domains of Cdc20 that are required for association with kinetochores and centrosomes. FRAP measurements revealed extremely rapid dynamics at the kinetochores (t 1/2 = 5.1 s) and spindle poles (t 1/2 = 4.7 s). This rapid turnover is independent of microtubules. Rapid transit of Cdc20 through kinetochores may ensure that spindle checkpoint signaling at unattached/relaxed kinetochores can continuously inhibit APC/CCdc20 targeting of anaphase inhibitors (securins) throughout the cell until all the chromosomes are properly attached to the mitotic spindle.
Unimodular gravity and general relativity from graviton self-interactions

It is commonly accepted that general relativity is the only solution to the consistency problem that appears when trying to build a theory of interacting gravitons (massless spin-2 particles). Padmanabhan’s 2008 thought-provoking analysis raised some concerns that are having resonance in the community. In this paper we present the self-coupling problem in detail and explicitly solve the infinite-iterations scheme associated with it for the simplest theory of a graviton field, which corresponds to an irreducible spin-2 representation of the Poincare group. We make explicit the nonuniqueness problem by finding an entire family of solutions to the self-coupling problem. Then we show that the only resulting theory which implements a deformation of the original gauge symmetry happens to have essentially the structure of unimodular gravity. This makes plausible the possibility of a natural solution to the first cosmological constant problem in theories of emergent gravity. Later on, we change for the sake of completeness the starting free-field theory to Fierz-Pauli theory, an equivalent theory but with a larger gauge symmetry. We indicate how to carry out the infinite summation procedure in a similar way. Overall, we conclude that as long as one requires the (deformed) preservation of internal gauge invariance, one naturally recovers the structure of unimodular gravity or general relativity but in a version that explicitly shows the underlying Minkowski spacetime, in the spirit of Rosen’s flat-background bimetric theory.
A tool for teaching cohesion

The paper introduces a two-tier writing support tool that helps students at school in writing more coherent essays. At one tier, students enter their essays and submit it for further process. At the other tier, the tutor receives the segmented format of their essays. The software prepares an environment to tutors for annotating students' essays in terms of a specific kind of annotation. Based-on the annotation the software produces a tree-shape graph representative of discourse structure of essays and sends it to the respective student. By observing many trees of this kind, we hope students understand the concept of discourse and write more coherent essays as a result. In the software, a novel Discourse Structure Builder Engine that has been recently proposed by researchers constructs the Discourse Tree based on a set of optimized discourse cue rules. In this paper it has been also shown why the software effectively reaches its aim, having looked at known theories in the concept of writing.