Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of Sleep Deprivation on Phase Synchronization as Assessed by Wavelet Phase Coherence Analysis of Prefrontal Tissue Oxyhemoglobin Signals

Purpose To reveal the physiological mechanism of the decline in cognitive function after sleep deprivation, a within-subject study was performed to assess sleep deprivation effects on phase synchronization, as revealed by wavelet phase coherence (WPCO) analysis of prefrontal tissue oxyhemoglobin signals. Materials and Methods Twenty subjects (10 male and 10 female, 25.5 ± 3.5 years old) were recruited to participate in two tests: one without sleep deprivation (group A) and the other with 24 h of sleep deprivation (group B). Before the test, each subject underwent a subjective evaluation using visual analog scales. A cognitive task was performed by judging three random numbers. Continuous recordings of the near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) signals were obtained from both the left and right prefrontal lobes during rest, task, and post-task periods. The WPCO of cerebral Delta [HbO2] signals were analyzed for these three periods for both groups A and B. Results Six frequency intervals were defined: I: 0.6–2 Hz (cardiac activity), II: 0.145–0.6 Hz (respiratory activity), III: 0.052–0.145 Hz (myogenic activity), IV: 0.021–0.052 Hz (neurogenic activity), V: 0.0095–0.021 Hz (nitric oxide related endothelial activity) and VI: 0.005–0.0095 Hz (non-nitric oxide related endothelial activity). WPCO in intervals III (F = 5.955, p = 0.02) and V (F = 4.7, p = 0.037) was significantly lower in group B than in group A at rest. During the task period, WPCO in intervals III (F = 5.175, p = 0.029) and IV (F = 4.585, p = 0.039) was significantly lower in group B compared with group A. In the post-task recovery period, the WPCO in interval III (F = 6.125, p = 0.02) was significantly lower in group B compared with group A. Reaction time was significantly prolonged, and the accuracy rate and F1 score both declined after sleep deprivation. Conclusions The decline in WPCO after sleep deprivation indicates reduced phase synchronization between left and right prefrontal oxyhemoglobin oscillations, which may contribute to the diminished cognitive function.
Interaction Support for Visual Comparison Inspired by Natural Behavior

Visual comparison is an intrinsic part of interactive data exploration and analysis. The literature provides a large body of existing solutions that help users accomplish comparison tasks. These solutions are mostly of visual nature and custom-made for specific data. We ask the question if a more general support is possible by focusing on the interaction aspect of comparison tasks. As an answer to this question, we propose a novel interaction concept that is inspired by real-world behavior of people comparing information printed on paper. In line with real-world interaction, our approach supports users (1) in interactively specifying pieces of graphical information to be compared, (2) in flexibly arranging these pieces on the screen, and (3) in performing the actual comparison of side-by-side and overlapping arrangements of the graphical information. Complementary visual cues and add-ons further assist users in carrying out comparison tasks. Our concept and the integrated interaction techniques are generally applicable and can be coupled with different visualization techniques. We implemented an interactive prototype and conducted a qualitative user study to assess the concept's usefulness in the context of three different visualization techniques. The obtained feedback indicates that our interaction techniques mimic the natural behavior quite well, can be learned quickly, and are easy to apply to visual comparison tasks.
Cytotoxicity and Secretion of Gamma Interferon Are Carried Out by Distinct CD8 T Cells during Mycobacterium tuberculosis Infection

ABSTRACT The host immune response is generally sufficient to contain Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection. It does not, however, efficiently prevent subsequent infection with M. tuberculosis or provide sterilizing immunity. While the understanding of the immune response generated against this pathogen is incomplete, improvements have been achieved due to advances in immunological tools. In this study, we analyzed the multifunctional nature of primary and memory CD8 T-cell responses generated during murine M. tuberculosis infection. We generated a recombinant M. tuberculosis strain expressing ovalbumin (OVA) epitopes in order to expand the peptides for the detection of CD8 T cells during M. tuberculosis infection and enable us to use OVA-specific reagents. Our results indicate that the majority of M. tuberculosis-specific CD8 T cells are limited to either cytotoxicity or the secretion of gamma interferon (IFN-γ), with cytotoxicity being far more prevalent than IFN-γ secretion. Memory CD8 T cells responded earlier and reached higher levels in the lungs than naïve CD8 T cells, as was expected. They were, however, less cytotoxic and secreted less IFN-γ than newly primed CD8 T cells, suggesting that one factor contributing to bacterial persistence and lack of sterilizing immunity may be the low quality of memory cells that are generated.
Pauli paramagnetism of an ideal Fermi gas Citation

Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. We show how to use trapped ultracold atoms to measure the magnetic susceptibility of a two-component Fermi gas. The method is illustrated for a noninteracting gas of 6 Li, using the tunability of interactions around a wide Feshbach resonance. The susceptibility versus effective magnetic field is directly obtained from the inhomogeneous density profile of the trapped atomic cloud. The wings of the cloud realize the high-field limit where the polarization approaches 100%, which is not accessible for an electron gas.
Robot In a Room: Toward Perfect Object Recognition in Closed Environments

While general object recognition is still far from being solved, this paper proposes a way for a robot to recognize every object at an almost human-level accuracy. Our key observation is that many robots will stay in a relatively closed environment (e.g. a house or an office). By constraining a robot to stay in a limited territory, we can ensure that the robot has seen most objects before and the speed of introducing a new object is slow. Furthermore, we can build a 3D map of the environment to reliably subtract the background to make recognition easier. We propose extremely robust algorithms to obtain a 3D map and enable humans to collectively annotate objects. During testing time, our algorithm can recognize all objects very reliably, and query humans from crowd sourcing platform if confidence is low or new objects are identified. This paper explains design decisions in building such a system, and constructs a benchmark for extensive evaluation. Experiments suggest that making robot vision appear to be working from an end user's perspective is a reachable goal today, as long as the robot stays in a closed environment. By formulating this task, we hope to lay the foundation of a new direction in vision for robotics. Code and data will be available upon acceptance.
Are we teaching trauma?

Covering violence is an expected part of the daily job for many journalists in the United States; however, are college and university programs fully preparing students for what they may experience? This study surveyed accredited journalism schools in the United States. Of the 41 respondent schools, only one offered a course specifically aimed at teaching journalists how to protect themselves from psychological trauma and how best to interact with victims of trauma. Results show that although schools believe the topic of trauma is important and worth teaching to future journalists, the approach to the topic is mostly reactive and inconsistent. Implications for the future of journalism education are discussed.
Surface perception of planar abstractions

Various algorithms have been proposed to create planar abstractions of 3D models, but there has been no systematic effort to evaluate the effectiveness of such abstractions in terms of perception of the abstracted surfaces. In this work, we perform a large crowd-sourced study involving approximately 70k samples to evaluate how well users can orient gauges on planar abstractions of commonly occurring models. We test four styles of planar abstractions against ground truth surface representations, and analyze the data to discover a wide variety of correlations between task error and measurements relating to surface-specific properties such as curvature, local thickness and medial axis distance, and abstraction-specific properties. We use these discovered correlations to create linear models to predict error in surface understanding at a given point, for both surface representations and planar abstractions. Our predictive models reveal the geometric causes most responsible for error, and we demonstrate their potential use to build upon existing planar abstraction techniques in order to improve perception of the abstracted surface.
Low-complexity text extraction in Korean signboards for mobile applications

Text extraction is a very important step in text understanding. Natural scene images bring new challenges to correctly extract interested text regions. In the paper, an efficient and low-complexity text extraction method is used to extract Korean text from signboards of shops. By combining the edge-based approach and some knowledge of the Korean text specified in our application, our method successfully extracts text and can be used in the mobile devices which have low capability.
Helicopter guidance for vision-based tracking and landing on a moving ground target

The purpose of this paper is to present a proper guidance law for an UAV tracking and landing on a moving target with aid of on-board vision sensor. The image processing procedure extracts the target from the captured video and estimate the position and velocity of the target. With this information on image plane, we could calculate its position with relation to inertia frame. Using this geolocation information of the moving target and known UAV state information, we suggest dual-velocity guidance as a proper guidance law for approaching while tracking a moving target. The novel guidance gives velocity commands as a summation of the target velocity and the resultant line-of-sight guidance law proportional to the relative distance up to the target. Apart from above, a simple height commanding logic based on relative velocity has also been suggested. Suggested guidance law showed robustness and competent computational speed in the simulation for vision-based moving ground target tracking and landing for UAVs.
Implementing a 48 h EWTD-compliant rota for junior doctors in the UK does not compromise patients’ safety: assessor-blind pilot comparison

Background: There are currently no field data about the effect of implementing European Working Time Directive (EWTD)-compliant rotas in a medical setting. Surveys of doctors’ subjective opinions on shift work have not provided reliable objective data with which to evaluate its efficacy. Aim: We therefore studied the effects on patient's safety and doctors’ work-sleep patterns of implementing an EWTD-compliant 48 h work week in a single-blind intervention study carried out over a 12-week period at the University Hospitals Coventry & Warwickshire NHS Trust. We hypothesized that medical error rates would be reduced following the new rota. Methods: Nineteen junior doctors, nine studied while working an intervention schedule of <48 h per week and 10 studied while working traditional weeks of <56 h scheduled hours in medical wards. Work hours and sleep duration were recorded daily. Rate of medical errors (per 1000 patient-days), identified using an established active surveillance methodology, were compared for the Intervention and Traditional wards. Two senior physicians blinded to rota independently rated all suspected errors. Results: Average scheduled work hours were significantly lower on the intervention schedule [43.2 (SD 7.7) (range 26.0–60.0) vs. 52.4 (11.2) (30.0–77.0) h/week; P < 0.001], and there was a non-significant trend for increased total sleep time per day [7.26 (0.36) vs. 6.75 (0.40) h; P = 0.095]. During a total of 4782 patient-days involving 481 admissions, 32.7% fewer total medical errors occurred during the intervention than during the traditional rota (27.6 vs. 41.0 per 1000 patient-days, P = 0.006), including 82.6% fewer intercepted potential adverse events (1.2 vs. 6.9 per 1000 patient-days, P = 0.002) and 31.4% fewer non-intercepted potential adverse events (16.6 vs. 24.2 per 1000 patient-days, P = 0.067). Doctors reported worse educational opportunities on the intervention rota. Conclusions: Whilst concerns remain regarding reduced educational opportunities, our study supports the hypothesis that a 48 h work week coupled with targeted efforts to improve sleep hygiene improves patient safety.
ePlace-3D: Electrostatics based Placement for 3D-ICs

We propose a flat, analytic, mixed-size placement algorithm ePlace-3D for three-dimension integrated circuits (3D-ICs) using nonlinear optimization. Our contributions are (1) electrostatics based 3D density function with globally uniform smoothness (2) 3D numerical solution with improved spectral formulation (3) 3D nonlinear pre-conditioner for convergence acceleration (4) interleaved 2D-3D placement for efficiency enhancement. Our placer outperforms the leading work mPL6-3D and NTUplace3-3D with 6.44% and 37.15% shorter wirelength, 9.11% and 10.27% fewer 3D vertical interconnects (VI) on average of IBM-PLACE circuits. Validation on the large-scale modern mixed-size (MMS) 3D circuits shows high performance and scalability.
Physical modeling of communication systems in information theory

It is common in information theoretic channel models to rely on the average squared Euclidean norm of the channel input as being proportional to transmit power. Likewise, it is common to assume noise that is additive, Gaussian, and white. It is a legitimate question to ask, whether such a modeling approach has enough degrees of freedom to capture the physical constraints that are imposed on implementations of a communication system. In this paper, we show that in many, though not all, situations it is indeed possible to obtain a complete physical model, while nevertheless sticking with average squared Euclidean norm as power, and white Gaussian noise. Our systematic approach works in two steps. First, all channel inputs and outputs are replaced by ports, which are de.ned by two conjugated variables (like voltage and current). By this multi-port modeling approach, we can obtain a complete physical model. Secondly, we introduce linear transformations between the inputs and outputs of the information theoretic channel model on the one hand, and the physical inputs and physical outputs of the communication system, on the other. This approach gives us enough degrees of freedom to obtain a complete information theoretic model, which correctly reflects the physical constraints that are imposed upon the communication system by its environment. We apply the proposed approach to a multi-antenna communication system, and show that it is indeed possible that the channel capacity of multi-antenna systems can grow super-linearly with the number of antennas for large signal to noise ratios.
Methadone Induction in Primary Care for Opioid Dependence: A Pragmatic Randomized Trial (ANRS Methaville)

Objective Methadone coverage is poor in many countries due in part to methadone induction being possible only in specialized care (SC). This multicenter pragmatic trial compared the effectiveness of methadone treatment between two induction models: primary care (PC) and SC. Methods In this study, registered at ClinicalTrials.Gov (NCT00657397), opioid-dependent individuals not on methadone treatment for at least one month or receiving buprenorphine but needing to switch were randomly assigned to start methadone in PC (N = 155) or in SC (N = 66) in 10 sites in France. Visits were scheduled at months M0, M3, M6 and M12. The primary outcome was self-reported abstinence from street-opioids at 12 months (M12) (with an underlying 15% non-inferiority hypothesis for PC). Secondary outcomes were abstinence during follow-up, engagement in treatment (i.e. completing the induction period), retention and satisfaction with the explanations provided by the physician. Primary analysis used intention to treat (ITT). Mixed models and the log-rank test were used to assess the arm effect (PC vs. SC) on the course of abstinence and retention, respectively. Results In the ITT analysis (n = 155 in PC, 66 in SC), which compared the proportions of street-opioid abstinent participants, 85/155 (55%) and 22/66 (33%) of the participants were classified as street-opioid abstinent at M12 in PC and SC, respectively. This ITT analysis showed the non-inferiority of PC (21.5 [7.7; 35.3]). Engagement in treatment and satisfaction with the explanations provided by the physician were significantly higher in PC than SC. Retention in methadone and abstinence during follow-up were comparable in both arms (p = 0.47, p = 0.39, respectively). Conclusions Under appropriate conditions, methadone induction in primary care is feasible and acceptable to both physicians and patients. It is as effective as induction in specialized care in reducing street-opioid use and ensuring engagement and retention in treatment for opioid dependence. Trial registration Number Eudract 2008-001338-28; ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT00657397; International Standard Randomized Controlled Trial Number Register ISRCTN31125511
Personalized Retrieval from Material Color Databases for 3D Polygonal Models

There has been considerable demand for the development of virtual spaces. When virtual spaces such as virtual cities or virtual offices are created, the material colors of 3D models in these spaces greatly influence the appearance, so designers of virtual spaces must use proper material colors. Material colors of 3D models can be specified with ambient color, diffuse color, specular color, emissive color, shininess and transparency. These values can be changed interactively by using a graphical user interface based on material editors, and the user can see the effects of those changes. Once the desired material colors have been created, users are required to store them into a personalized material color database. Since users often use subjective terms to describe material colors, it would be useful if the user could retrieve material colors by using subjective terms such as ‘romantic’ and ‘warm. ’ Since commercially available material color databases contain huge amounts of data, manually described subjective terms for each color are not possible, therefore, computerized indexing techniques are needed. We have analyzed the correlation between subjective term and databases of material colors by using statistical methods so that retrieval can meet each user’s preference model. The statistical methods include principal component analysis and multiple regression analysis. We have developed a subjective terms indexing technique to retrieve material colors from a database for 3D models by using the results of these statistical analyses. The technique enables users to retrieve the subjective terms of material colors reflecting users’ personal preferences. We have also developed visualization tools to determine how users are using subjective terms to describe material colors.
High-level Petri Nets -concepts, Deenitions and Graphical Notation Editor's Foreword

Previous drafts of this standard have been discussed in WG11 meetings during 1995 and 1996, and the Working Draft was circulated to SC7 member bodies in February 1997. This draft incorporates comments from the WG11 meeting in Walnut Creek in June 1997 which considered member body comments and those of Petri net experts in the wider community. This document is being circulated as a rst CD to SC7 member bodies for comment and vote. The next meeting of WG11 will be in London, 3-7 November 1997. Although the deadline for the ballot will be after this meeting, it would be valuable to obtain comments from member bodies before the meeting if at all possible. It would therefore be appreciated if comments could be forwarded to the editor by 20 October 1997.
A comparison of the onset time of complete blockade of the sciatic nerve in the application of ropivacaine and its equal volumes mixture with lidocaine: a double-blind randomized study

Background The purpose of the current study is to create a new mixture of local anesthetics-one with a short time of block development and short action term (5 ml of 1% lidocaine solution) and another with a longer time of anesthesia development and a long analgetic effect (5 ml of 0.75% ropivacaine)-for use during surgical operations on extremities. The primary end point was the development of the complete sensory block of the sciatic nerve. Methods Sixty blocks of sciatic nerve were used in a double-blind randomized research, under ultrasonic guidance, using an electric stimulator with the peripheral nerves. Sixty patients were divided into 3 equal groups. In the first group, a sciatic nerve block was performed with 5 ml of 0.75% ropivacaine solution (37.5 mg); in the second group, 10 ml of 0.75% ropivacaine solution (75 mg) was used and, in the third group, a mixture of 5 ml of 0.75% ropivacaine (as above) and 5 ml of 1% lidocaine solution (50 mg) was used. The assessment of the time required for developing sensory and motor blocks was carried out from the beginning of local anesthetic solution injection in the fascial sheath of the sciatic nerve. Results Demographic data of patients were identical in the three sample groups. The time required for achieving a complete motor and sensory block was reduced due to the mix of the 1% lidocaine solution with the 0.75% ropivacaine solution. The time required for achieving a complete sensory block in groups treated with 5 and 10 ml ropivacaine was 45 (40-48) and 30 (28-30) min, respectively, in contrast with 12 (10-13) min when the mixture of anesthetics was applied (P < 0.01). There was no difference in analgesic duration in the postoperative period among groups at P > 0.05. Conclusions The mixture of 5 ml of 1% lidocaine with 5 ml of 0.75% ropivacaine leads to a reduction in the time required for the development of complete sensory and motor blocks of the sciatic nerve, without reducing postoperative analgesia time.