Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Specificity of Facial Expressions

Resume La seule etude analytique des expressions de la figure dans des situations emotives est, parait-il, celle de Landis (1924) laquelle conclut qu'il n'existe aucune expression de la figure caracteristique d'une situation quelconque ou du rapport d'un sujet. L'examen du critiere statistique de Landis montre qu'il est faux. On fait un analyse correlative des donnees de Landis pour montrer si les muscles de la figure dans l'experience (1) ont agi entierement au hasard, (2) ont montre des deviations au hasard d'une seule forme de reaction de la figure, (3) ont montre nombre de formes differentes. Les resultats indiquent que la troisieme alternative est l'interpretation correcte. On examine de plus les donnees pour decouvrir les situations qui produisent des reponses semblables et celles qui produisent des reponses dissemblables, et les groupes musculaires qui montrent le plus de selection dans leurs reponses. La specificite de l'expression de la figure a certaines qualites de situation est indiquee par le.
[Application of run length matrix to magnetic resonance imaging diagnosis of Alzheimer-type dementia].

To examine the possibility of diagnosing Alzheimer-type dementia, we studied this condition using the run length matrix, on head MR images of 29 Alzheimer-type dementia patients (8 men, 21 women, 78.7 +/- 6.7 years) and healthy elderly controls (10 men, 19 women, 72.3 +/- 8.7 years) . The results showed that differences in GLN (gray level nonuniformity) and RLN (run length nonuniformity) were statistically significant. Furthermore, discriminant analysis based on GLN and RLN showed a rate of sensitivity of 69.0%, specificity 86.2%, and correct classification 77.6%. Although this rate of correct classification is inferior to the planimetric and volumetric methods, run length matrix is only one method of texture analysis. The results of this study indicate the possibility of MR imaging-based diagnosis of Alzheimer-type dementia with texture analysis including a run length matrix.
Absolute Stability of Wavetrains Can Explain Spatiotemporal Dynamics in Reaction-Diffusion Systems of Lambda-Omega Type

A chemical mechanical polishing apparatus includes a rotating plate on which a substrate is received, and a polishing pad which moves across the substrate as it rotates on the plate to polish the substrate. The load of the pad against the substrate, and the rotary speed of the plate, may be varied to control the rate of material removed by the pad.
Edgeflow-driven Variational Image Segmentation: Theory and Performance Evaluation

We introduce robust variational segmentation techniques that are driven by an Edgeflow vector field. Variational image segmentation has been widely used during the past ten years. While there is a rich theory of these techniques in the literature, a detailed performance analysis on real natural images is needed to compare the various methods proposed. In this context, this paper makes the following contributions: (a) designing curve evolution and anisotropic diffusion methods that use Edgeflow vector fields to obtain good quality segmentation results over a large and diverse class of images, and (b) a detailed experimental evaluation of these segmentation methods. Our experiments show that Edgeflowbased anisotropic diffusion outperforms other competing methods by a significant margin.
The digital MP or how I learned to stop worrying and love MP

Abstract It is hard to imagine life on Parliament Hill in Canada without the ubiquitous Blackberry. The device has become so common place that we no longer bat an eye when we hear its rhythmic buzzing or find its frenzied operators tapping away on its minuscule keyboard. It's just one of new technologies that have caught the attention of the modern ‘digital’ MP. Today, almost every MP has a website and we've seen increasing interest in experimentation with blogs, online consultations, e-petitions and various social networking sites. They have brought myriad changes and challenges to the functions of MPs and their relationships with constituents. This paper details how various information and communication technologies, or ICTs, are being used by MPs in Canada. It questions whether they are being used to enhance citizen engagement, for professionalization, or both. Ultimately, it is concluded that there are more opportunities for consultation, but few, such as Canadian MP Garth Turner, are embracing the potential for greater participation.
Interactive Problem Solving Support in the Adaptive Educational Hypermedia System MATHEMA

This paper describes the interactive problem solving support offered by our adaptive educational hypermedia system called MATHEMA. The general goal of the MATHEMA is the support of senior high school students or the beginners of higher education, through an interactive and constructivist environment, in learning physics (electromagnetism) individually and/or collaboratively, and to overcome their possible misconceptions and learning difficulties. Initially, a review of related work about the implemented AEHS/ITS and the didactic design principles of the MATHEMA are presented. Through the interactive problem solving, the system supports the students in solving electromagnetism problems, individually and/or collaboratively, by following an activity that is based on the experimentation with simulations, explorations, guided discovery, and collaboration didactic approaches. An experimental study with senior high school students showed that they improve their performances when following this activity. A questionnaire that we gave to the students to express their opinion about our system helped us to improve the quality of the courses.
An Adaptive Fast Factorized Back-Projection Algorithm With Integrated Target Detection Technique for High-Resolution and High-Squint Spotlight SAR Imagery

This paper deals with the problem of fast focusing the spotlight synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data in high-resolution and high-squint mode, which has shown its potential capacity in various military SAR applications. Fast factorized backprojection (FFBP) is considered as an ideal methodology for high-resolution and high-squint SAR imagery. However, FFBP performs pixel-by-pixel interpolation, yielding heavy computational burden and limiting its real-time processing. In this paper, target detection technique, which is used as a discrimination tool to retain the target pixels and reject the clutter and noise pixels, is integrated into the subaperture imaging chain during FFBP implementation, aiming to speed up the overall image formation time. Due to the characteristic of spotlight acquisition, an adaptive processing scheme is developed for multiple subaperture images detection. With the integrated target detection technique, only the target pixels need to be interpolated and accumulated coherently. Without loss of focusing performance, the number of interpolations is dramatically reduced. The proposed fast imaging algorithm is named as adaptive FFBP (AFFBP), and it has distinctive superiority for sparse scene reconstruction, such as the maritime target imaging. AFFBP has been successfully applied to two simulated scenes with high and low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), and two real measured datasets with squint angle high up to $50^{\circ }$ and $70^{\circ }$ , respectively. All these experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency improvement of the proposed AFFBP algorithm.
SOCIAL SUPPORT AND TECHNOLOGICAL CONNECTEDNESS AS PROTECTIVE FACTORS IN BEREAVEMENT

Bereavement is associated with heightened risk of mental and physical health impairments as well as social isolation. The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of social support and technological connectedness on major depressive disorder (MDD), complicated grief (CG), posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and quality of life. Participants were 293 community-based bereaved individuals (mean age = 61.5 years) who completed a baseline interview and a follow-up interview at an average of 5.9 and 10.6 months postloss. At baseline, subjects reported using the Internet (58.7%), e-mail (49.5%), and/or cellular phones (49.2%). Overall social support was protective against MDD, PTSD, and CG and associated with better quality of life. Internet and e-mail use at baseline and follow-up were associated with increased energy levels at follow-up, after control for confounding influences (e.g., chronic physical conditions, history of psychiatric disorders). Though not conclusive, our results suggest potential protection against psychiatric illness secondary to bereavement (MDD, PTSD, CG) and enhanced quality of life afforded by Internet and e-mail use.
Legitimizing Hope: An Exploration of Effective Mentoring for Dominican American Male College Students

The purpose of this study was to explore the informal mentoring relationships of 15 male, Hispanic (Dominican American), first-generation college students, to determine how their mentoring experiences influenced their academic progress, standing, and retention. In-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with 15 undergraduates from a comprehensive, public urban university. The mentors proved to be valuable social capital for these statistically at-risk students by providing them with insider academic information, legitimizing their academic and professional goals, and transforming their immigration experiences into academic inspiration. Suggestions for effective mentoring for immigrant/ethnic minority college students are presented.
Effects of Computer/Internet Game Play on Depression and Life Satisfaction among the Elderly: Mediating Effects of Perceived Self-Control

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of computer/internet game play on depression and life satisfaction via perceived self-control among older adults in Korea. Data were collected from a survey of 237 community-dwelling older adults (age65) who reported internet users. A path analysis was used to examine the causal relationship among the main constructs. Results showed that the computer/internet game play had positive effects on perceived self-control. Perceived self-control was found to decrease depression and improve life satisfaction among older adults. Additional analysis indicated that the computer/internet game play in older adults did not directly affect mental health (depression and life satisfaction) but indirectly affected it via perceived self-control. Furthermore, perceived self-control had greater effects on depression than on life satisfaction. These findings have crucial implications in that perceived sense of self-control needs to be seriously considered when we develop mental health games for older adults.
Cryptosporidium parvum DNA Replication in Cell-Free Culture

Abstract The lack of robust methods for culturing Cryptosporidium parasites remains a major challenge and is hampering efforts to screen for anti-cryptosporidial drugs. In existing culture methods, monolayers of mammalian epithelial cells are inoculated with oocysts. The system supports an initial phase of asexual proliferation of the parasite. For reasons that are not clear, development rapidly declines within 2–3 days. The unexpected report of Cryptosporidium parvum culture in the absence of host cells, and the failure of others to reproduce the method, prompted us to apply quantitative PCR to measure changes in C. parvum DNA levels in cell-free cultures, and parasite-specific antibodies to identify different life cycle stages. Based on this approach, which has not been applied previously to analyze C. parvum growth in cell-free culture, we found that the concentration of C. parvum DNA increased by about 5-fold over 5 days of culture. Immuno-labeling of cultured organisms revealed morphologically distinct stages, only some of which reacted with Cryptosporidium-specific monoclonal antibodies. These observations are indicative of a modest proliferation of C. parvum in cell-free culture.
Census: Location-Aware Membership Management for Large-Scale Distributed Systems

We present Census, a platform for building large-scale distributed applications. Census provides a membership service and a multicast mechanism. The membership service provides every node with a consistent view of the system membership, which may be global or partitioned into location-based regions. Census distributes membership updates with low overhead, propagates changes promptly, and is resilient to both crashes and Byzantine failures. We believe that Census is the first system to provide a consistent membership abstraction at very large scale, greatly simplifying the design of applications built atop large deployments such as multi-site data centers. Census builds on a novel multicast mechanism that is closely integrated with the membership service. It organizes nodes into a reliable overlay composed of multiple distribution trees, using network coordinates to minimize latency. Unlike other multicast systems, it avoids the cost of using distributed algorithms to construct and maintain trees. Instead, each node independently produces the same trees from the consistent membership view. Census uses this multicast mechanism to distribute membership updates, along with application-provided messages. We evaluate the platform under simulation and on a real-world deployment on PlanetLab. We find that it imposes minimal bandwidth overhead, is able to react quickly to node failures and changes in the system membership, and can scale to substantial size.
The Cost-effectiveness of Intensive Postdischarge Care: A Randomized Trial

This study tested the hypothesis that increasing the intensity of outpatient care for patients discharged from the hospital could lower their subsequent inpatient and total health-care costs. At discharge, 1,001 patients were stratified by risk of readmission (low, medium, or high) and randomly assigned to the intervention or control group. Discharge information (summaries, medications, and postdischarge needs) was provided to outpatient nurses who monitored intervention patients closely and attempted to resolve their problems. Intervention patients also received appointment reminders, and missed visits were promptly rescheduled. The cost of the intervention was $5.20 per patient per month. High-risk patients in the intervention group had significantly higher outpatient costs ($131/month vs. $107/month; P=0.02), but lower inpatient costs ($535/month vs. $800/month; P=0.02) than high-risk patients in the control group. Reduced inpatient costs in the high-risk intervention group were attributed to shorter, less intensive hospital stays. In conclusion, increasing ambulatory care resources after hospital discharge for high-risk patients may reduce health-care costs associated with readmission to the hospital.
Stress in Health and Disease

More than 40 years have elapsed since the concept of the general adaptation syndrome (GAS) was introduced by Selye in a letter to the editor of Nature . It has since been widely studied, leading to nearly 100,000 publications in the medical and lay press. The essence of the idea is that a wide variety of nonspecific stimuli provoke a relatively stereotyped pattern of response marked by increased adrenal cortical secretion or even adrenal cortical hypertrophy. Selye regards a "stressor" to be any stimulus capable of leading to "general adaptation. " The phenomenon of adaptation has become of major importance to neurologists in understanding some of the relationships between the hypothalamus, other parts of the nervous system, and the adrenal cortex, both in terms of normal function and the pathogenesis of a wide variety of diseases. Selye intended this volume to be an encyclopedia dealing with many aspects of stress ranging from
Orchestrating Strategy Use: Toward a Model of the Skilled Second Language Listener

This article reports on an investigation of listening strategy applications by grade 7 students learning French (N = 36). I examine the types of strategies used and the differences in strategy use by more skilled and less skilled listeners as revealed while these students listened to authentic texts in French. Think-aloud data were coded and analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Significant differences were found in the use of the category of metacognitive strategies as well as in individual strategies for comprehension monitoring, questioning for elaboration, and translation. These differences were reinforced by a qualitative analysis of representative protocols. The article concludes with a discussion of both an emerging model of the skilled listener and a pedagogic program for developing listening skills.
The geometry friends game AI competition

This paper describes a new game AI competition that engages participants in the creation of agents for a cooperative platform puzzle game. The agents face the challenge of acting in a dynamic environment, with friction and gravity, as they coordinate actions to solve cooperative puzzles. Hence, agents need to devise cooperative plans to solve the puzzles in the most efficient way and to coordinate their actions to perform joint actions in real-time. The core of the competition is the cooperative track that requires the development of two distinct agents, but we also include a single player track for participants that want to craft the basic skills of the agent without the complexity of cooperation. In particular, to cope with understanding the topology of a level in order to define a plan for solving the puzzle or to define mechanisms to act well in the physics-based game environment. We present the results of the 2014 competition held at IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence in Games, in Dortmund, and discuss some future directions of research.
Blind image extraction from nonlinear mixtures using MLP-based ICA

This paper presents a novel method called PNLICA for image extraction from nonlinear mixtures of mutually independent images. Post nonlinear mixtures (PNL) is used for modelling the mixing process. A modified multilayer perceptron (MLP) is combined with a higher order statistics linear independent component analysis (ICA) model to sequentially extract the hidden images one-by-one from the PNL mixtures. A kurtosis-based unsupervised learning algorithm is used to adapt the model. Through computer simulation, it is observed that the proposed model is capable of effectively separating the source images from only the knowledge of nonlinear mixture of sources.
Visual Illusions: An Interesting Tool to Investigate Developmental Dyslexia and Autism Spectrum Disorder

A visual illusion refers to a percept that is different in some aspect from the physical stimulus. Illusions are a powerful non-invasive tool for understanding the neurobiology of vision, telling us, indirectly, how the brain processes visual stimuli. There are some neurodevelopmental disorders characterized by visual deficits. Surprisingly, just a few studies investigated illusory perception in clinical populations. Our aim is to review the literature supporting a possible role for visual illusions in helping us understand the visual deficits in developmental dyslexia and autism spectrum disorder. Future studies could develop new tools – based on visual illusions – to identify an early risk for neurodevelopmental disorders.
A phase I clinical trial of the notch inhibitor MK-0752 in patients with T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia/lymphoma (T-ALL) and other leukemias.

6585 Background: Functional screening of T-ALL cell lines for sensitivity to NOTCH inhibitors has led to the discovery of frequent NOTCH1 gain-of-function mutations in the majority of human T-ALL. Gamma secretase catalyzes the cleavage of the Notch receptor within the transmembrane domain thereby releasing the Notch intracellular domain, which translocates to the nucleus to activate transcription of target genes. Gamma secretase inhibitors can induce G0/G1 arrest, decrease cell viability, and cause apoptosis of T-ALL cell lines carrying Notch activating mutations. MK-0752 is a potent gamma secretase inhibitor in clinical development (IC50 ∼50 nM). METHODS Patients with relapsed T-ALL and other leukemias were enrolled using an accelerated dose escalation scheme with 1 patient/dose level until ≥ grade 2 toxicity, followed by 3-6 patients/level. MK-0752 was administered by once-daily oral dosing in 28 day cycles. DLT was grade 3 or 4 non-hematologic toxicity during cycle 1. Plasma pharmacokinetic (PK) profiles and Abeta40 peptide levels were measured. RESULTS Six adult and two pediatric patients with leukemia (seven with T-ALL and one with AML) received MK-0752 dosed at 150, 225, and 300 mg/m2. Treatment duration ranged from 2 days to 56 days before patients discontinued for disease progression or drug-related toxicity. Dose-limiting toxicity (DLT) was Grade 3/4 diarrhea at 300 mg/m2. Four of the seven T-ALL patients had Notch activating mutations. One patient with T-ALL and a Notch activating mutation treated with 150 mg/m2 (300 mg) daily achieved a 45% reduction in a mediastinal mass at the end of 28 days as best response, but subsequently progressed by 56 days. Mean PK parameters at 150, 225, and 300 mg/m2 on Day 1 were AUC0-24hr = 723, 754, 1592 μM·hr, Cmax = 55, 40, 121 μM, C24hr = 18, 28, 59 μM, and tmax = 1, 8, 9 hr. Measurements of gamma secretase inhibition showed a 24-69% decrease in plasma Abeta40 peptide levels on Day 14 compared to predose. CONCLUSIONS MK-0752 was well-tolerated in a limited number of patients below 300 mg/m2, and further enrollment is underway to establish the MTD. Plasma concentrations of MK-0752 at all doses were sufficient to inhibit gamma secretase. Leukemia samples will be assessed for Notch inhibition. [Table: see text].
Cognitive impairment in multiple sclerosis

Cognitive impairment is common among persons with multiple sclerosis (MS), but some patients are able to withstand considerable disease burden (e.g. white matter lesions, cerebral atrophy) without cognitive impairment (cognitive inefficiency, memory decline). What protects these patients from cognitive impairment? We review the literature on cognitive reserve in MS, which shows that heritable (larger maximal lifetime brain growth) and environmental (greater intellectual enrichment) factors attenuate the negative effect of disease burden on cognitive status. That is, persons with larger maximal lifetime brain growth, greater vocabulary knowledge, and/or greater early life participation in cognitive leisure activities (e.g. reading, hobbies) are better able to cope with MS disease without cognitive impairment. We review evidence that benefits of intellectual enrichment on cognitive status may stem from more efficient patterns of brain function. We discuss clinical implications and highlight important unanswered questions for future research on reserve against cognitive impairment in MS.
Function of Phase-Distortion for glottal model estimation

In voice analysis, the parameters estimation of a glottal model, an analytic description of the deterministic component of the glottal source, is a challenging question to assess voice quality in clinical use or to model voice production for speech transformation and synthesis using a priori constraints. In this paper, we first describe the Function of Phase-Distortion (FPD) which allows to characterize the shape of the periodic pulses of the glottal source independently of other features of the glottal source. Then, using the FPD, we describe two methods to estimate a shape parameter of the Liljencrants-Fant glottal model. By comparison with state of the art methods using Electro-Glotto-Graphic signals, we show that the one of these method outperform the compared methods.
Efficient Rule Discovery in a Geo-spatial Decision Support System

This paper describes the application of data mining techniques in a Geo-spatial Decision Support System, which focuses on drought risk management. Association rule discovery is one of the widely used approaches in data mining. This paper highlights the rule discovery algorithms that we have developed and used for discovering useful patterns in ocean parameters and climatic indices to monitor drought.