Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mumps virus reinfection is not a rare event confirmed by reverse transcription loop‐mediated isothermal amplification

Clinically apparent mumps reinfection is considered extremely rare, but several cases have been suspected of reinfection in an out‐patient clinic. In this study, virological examination, virus isolation, the reverse transcription loop‐mediated isothermal amplification (RT‐LAMP), and IgG and IgM EIA antibodies, were examined in order to identify mumps reinfection. Patients were divided into three categories; the reinfection group comprised 29 patients with a history of natural infection, the vaccine‐failure group consisted of 37 patients with an immunization history, and two patients had histories of both immunization and mumps infection. Another 25 patients were enrolled as a primary infection group. Mumps virus was isolated in 5 (17%) and the genome was detected in 12 (41%) of 29 in the reinfection group. Reinfection was confirmed in 21/28, demonstrating high avidity of IgG EIA. Mumps virus was isolated in 15 (41%) and there was a higher positivity of genome amplification in 25 (68%) of 37 patients in the vaccine‐failure group. Among these, 23 were confirmed as secondary vaccine failure by high avidity IgG EIA serology. In the primary infection group, the isolation rate and genome detection rate was higher in 16 (64%) and in 18 (72%) of 25 patients, respectively. There was no significant difference in virus load among the three groups but high mumps virus load was suspected in the IgM EIA‐positive group based on the shorter amplification time on RT‐LAMP. Mumps virus reinfection was confirmed by RT‐LAMP and an IgG avidity test and was not a rare event. J. Med. Virol. 80:517–523, 2008. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Visual‐Vestibular and Visuovisual Cortical Interaction

Abstract: PET and fMRI studies have revealed that excitation of the vestibular system by caloric or galvanic stimulation not only activates the parietoinsular vestibular cortex but also bilaterally deactivates the occipital visual cortex. Likewise, visual motion stimulation not only activates the visual cortex but also deactivates the parietoinsular vestibular cortex. These findings are functionally consistent with the hypothesis of an inhibitory reciprocal visual‐vestibular interaction for spatial orientation and motion perception. Transcallosal visuovisual interaction between the two hemispheres was found by using half‐field visual motion stimulation: activation of motion‐sensitive areas hMT/V5 and deactivations of the primary visual cortex contralateral to the stimulated hemisphere. The functional significance of these inter‐ and intra‐sensory interactions could be that they (A) allow a shift of the sensorial weight between two incongruent sensory inputs and (B) ensure a correspondence of the two hemispheres during evaluation of contradictory motion stimulation of the right and left hemifields. In terms of mathematical modeling, these findings may reflect the concepts of a sensory conflict mechanism or a mismatch between expected and actual sensory input.
Social fabrics of the mind

Introduction. Chance, A Systems Synthesis of Mentality. Emory, Social Geometry & Cohesion in Three Primate Species. Pitcairn, Social Attention and Social Awareness. Power, The Cohesive Foragers: Human and Chimpanzee. de Waal, The Reconciled Hierarchy. Itani, The Origin of Human Equality. Price, Alternative Channels for Negotiating the Definitions of Social Relationships. Gardner, Psychiatric Syndromes as Infrastructure for Intraspecific Communication. Scott-Lewis, The Therapeutic Use of an Ethogram in a Drug Addiction Unit: Social Referent Allegiances. Montagner et al, Social Interactions of Young Children with Peers and their Modification in Relation to Environmental Factors. Barner-Barry, The Structure of Politically Relevant Behaviours in Pre-School Peer Groups. Masters, Nice Guys DON'T Finish Last: Aggressive & Appeasement Gestures in Media Images of Politicians. Kemper, The Two Dimensions of Sociality. Wedgewood-Oppenheim, Organizational Culture and the Agonic, Hedonic Bimodality. Glossary. Indices.
Using Locality-Enhanced Distributed Memory Cache to Accelerate Applications on High Performance Computers

Nowadays high performance computers (HPC) are used to solve increasingly complex problems and process larger amounts of data. The growing computational requirements of applications can be met by utilizing more compute nodes. However, the average I/O performance a compute node can utilize is reduced with increased number of nodes. The performance gap between computation and I/O has long been a primary issue impacting application performance. Distributed memory cache has been proposed to narrow the performance gap by caching data in the memory of multiple compute nodes. However, former approaches didn't fully optimize the performance of accessing locally cached data. We design and implement a locality-enhanced distributed memory cache (LeCache) to address such problem. LeCache separates the location of metadata and data, with which it enables data to be preferentially cached in local memory. The proposed metadata caching strategy further minimizes the overhead of querying metadata remotely. We conduct extensive evaluation with IOR and BTIO in Tianhe-1A. The results show that LeCache has significant performance advantage under various kinds of workloads.
Speaking and Listening with the Eyes: Gaze Signaling during Dyadic Interactions

Cognitive scientists have long been interested in the role that eye gaze plays in social interactions. Previous research suggests that gaze acts as a signaling mechanism and can be used to control turn-taking behaviour. However, early research on this topic employed methods of analysis that aggregated gaze information across an entire trial (or trials), which masks any temporal dynamics that may exist in social interactions. More recently, attempts have been made to understand the temporal characteristics of social gaze but little research has been conducted in a natural setting with two interacting participants. The present study combines a temporally sensitive analysis technique with modern eye tracking technology to 1) validate the overall results from earlier aggregated analyses and 2) provide insight into the specific moment-to-moment temporal characteristics of turn-taking behaviour in a natural setting. Dyads played two social guessing games (20 Questions and Heads Up) while their eyes were tracked. Our general results are in line with past aggregated data, and using cross-correlational analysis on the specific gaze and speech signals of both participants we found that 1) speakers end their turn with direct gaze at the listener and 2) the listener in turn begins to speak with averted gaze. Convergent with theoretical models of social interaction, our data suggest that eye gaze can be used to signal both the end and the beginning of a speaking turn during a social interaction. The present study offers insight into the temporal dynamics of live dyadic interactions and also provides a new method of analysis for eye gaze data when temporal relationships are of interest.
An-Based Method for the Design of 1-D Zero Phase FIR Digital Filters

Finite impulse response (FIR) filters obtained with the classicalL2 method have performance that is very sensitive to the form of the ideal response selected for the transition region. It is known that design requirements do not constraint in any way the ideal response inside this region. Most existing techniques utilize this flexibility. By selecting various classes of functions to describe the undefined part of the ideal response they develop methods that improve the performance of theL2 based filters. In this paper we propose a means for selecting the unknown part of the ideal response optimally. Specifically by using a well-known property of the Fourier approximation theory we introduce a suitable quality measure. The proposed measure is a functional of the ideal response and depends on its actual form inside the transition region. Using variational techniques we succeed in minimizing the introduced criterion with respect to the ideal response and thus obtain its corresponding optimum form. The complete solution to the problem can be obtained by solving a simple system of linear equations suggesting a reduced complexity for the proposed method. An extensive number of design examples show the definite superiority of our method over most existing non min-max design techniques, while the method compares very favorably with min–max optimum methods. Finally we prove that the approximation error function of our filter has the right number of alternating extrema, required by the L1 criterion, in the passband and stopband. This results in a significant convergence speed up, if our optimum solution is used as an initialization scheme, of the Remez exchange algorithm.
Bursting dynamics due to a homoclinic cascade in Taylor–Couette flow

Transitions between regular oscillations and bursting oscillations that involve a bifurcational process which culminates in the creation of a relative periodic orbit of infinite period and infinite length are investigated both experimentally and numerically in a short-aspect-ratio Taylor–Couette flow. This bifurcational process is novel in that it is the accumulation point of a period-adding cascade at which the mid-height reflection symmetry is broken. It is very rich and complex, involving very-low-frequency states arising via homoclinic and heteroclinic dynamics, providing the required patching between states with very different dynamics in neighbouring regions of parameter space. The use of nonlinear dynamical systems theory together with symmetry considerations has been crucial in interpreting the laboratory experimental data as well as the results from the direct numerical simulations. The phenomenon corresponds to dynamics well beyond the first few bifurcations from the basic state and so is beyond the reach of traditional hydrodynamic stability analysis, but it is not fully developed turbulence where a statistical or asymptotic approach could be employed. It is a transitional phenomenon, where the phase dynamics of the large-scale structures (jets of angular momentum emanating from the boundary layer on the rotating inner cylinder) becomes complicated. Yet the complicated phase dynamics remains accessible to an analysis of its space–time characteristics and a comprehensive mechanical characterization emerges. The excellent agreement between the experiments and the numerical simulations demonstrates the robustness of this complex bifurcation phenomenon in a physically realized system with its inherent imperfections and noise. Movies are available with the online version of the paper.
Green Computing - A Case for Data Caching and Flash Disks?

Green computing or energy saving when processing information is primarily considered a task of processor development. However, this position paper advocates that a holistic approach is necessary to reduce power consumption to a minimum. We discuss the potential of integrating NAND flash memory into DB-based architectures and its support by adjusted DBMS algorithms governing IO processing. The goal is to drastically improve energy efficiency while comparable performance as is disk-based systems is maintained.
Linking endogenous and exogenous popularity processes in social media

Explaining and predicting the popularity of online multimedia content is an important problem for the practice of information dissemination and consumption. Recent work advances our understanding of popularity, but one important gap remains: to precisely quantify the relationship between the popularity of an online item and the external promotions it receives. This work supplies the missing link between exogenous inputs from public social media platforms (Twitter) and endogenous responses within video content platforms (Youtube). This is done via a novel mathematical model, the Hawkes intensity process, which is able to explain the complex popularity history of each video according to its content, network, and sensitivity to promotion. This model supplies a prototypical description of videos, called an endo-exo map, which allows us to explain the popularity as the joint effects of two intrinsic measures and the amount of discussions from the outside world. This model also allows us to forecast the effects of future promotions more accurately than approaches based on popularity history alone, and to identify videos that have a high potential to become viral, or those for which promotions will have hardly any effect.
The changing judicial patterns in Central Europe

By the fall of Communism, also the past of Central and Eastern Europe is mostly hold eradicated, albeit it cannot but steadily survive in sublated mentality. On the field of l aw, this is expressed by the continuity of text-centrism in approach to law, with the law’s application following the law’s letters in a quasi-mechanical way. Consequently, what used to be legal nihilism in the Socialist regime has turned into the law’s textual fetishism in the meantime. This is equal to saying that facing the dilemma of weighing between apparently contradictory ideals within the same Rule of Law, justice has in fact been sacrificed to the certainty in/of the law in the practical working of the judiciary. Especially, constitutional adjudication mostly works for the extension of individual rights while the state as the individuals’ community is usually blocked in responding challenges in an operative manner. Situation in Poland, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Baltic Republics, as well as Croatia is surveyed through .
The Relationship between Acceleromyographic Train-of-four Fade and Single Twitch Depression

Background During offset of nondepolarizing neuromuscular block, a train-of-four (TOF) fade ratio of 0.70 or greater is considered to reliably indicate the return of single twitch height (T1) to its control value. Studies using mechanomyography or electromyography confirm this observation. The authors’ impressions when using the acceleromyograph as a neuromuscular monitor did not support these results. Therefore, the authors studied the relation between T1 and the TOF ratio (when measured by acceleromyography) during recovery from neuromuscular block. Methods Sixteen adult patients were studied. Anesthesia was induced with intravenous opioid plus 2.0–2.5 mg/kg propofol. Laryngeal mask placement or tracheal intubation was accomplished without the use of muscle relaxants. Anesthesia was maintained with nitrous oxide, desflurane (2.0–3.0%, end- tidal), and fentanyl. The response of the thumb to ulnar nerve stimulation was recorded with the TOF-Guard® acceleromyograph (Organon Teknika BV, Boxtel, The Netherlands). TOFs were administered every 15 s. After final calibration, 0.15 mg/kg mivacurium was administered. No further relaxants were administered. T1 and the TOF ratio were then recorded until the TOF ratio had returned to its initial value (± 5%). Results At a TOF ratio of 0.70 (during recovery of neuromuscular function), T1 averaged only 69 ± 8% of control. At a TOF ratio of 0.90, T1 averaged 86 ± 5% of control. To achieve 90% recovery of T1, a TOF ratio of 0.93 ± 0.08 was required. Conclusion Assumptions regarding the relation between T1 and the TOF ratio derived from studies using mechanomyography and electromyography do not necessarily apply to observations obtained using acceleromyography.
Super-resolution of Magnetic Resonance Images using deep Convolutional Neural Networks

This research focuses on developing a Super-resolution magnetic resonance (MR) Image restoration method using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). The main aim is to train an end to end mapping that takes low-resolution image as input and returns a high-resolution output. Low overhead and a state of the art reconstruction makes the model perform efficiently.
SUSY and Goliath

We investigate the ``giant gravitons'' of McGreevy, Susskind and Toumbas [1]. We demonstrate that these are BPS configurations which preserve precisely the same supersymmetries as a ``point-like'' graviton. We also show that there exist ``dual'' giant gravitons consisting of spherical branes expanding into the AdS component of the spacetime. Finally, we discuss the realization of the stringy exclusion principle within this expanded framework.
A remote laboratory experiment for 4‐quadrant control of a DC motor

This study presents development of the system architecture to perform laboratory experiments over the Internet for electrical engineering education. Design and implementation of four‐quadrant speed control experiment for a direct current (DC) motor is given in the article as a sample remote experimental study. The system designed consists of four main parts as a client, a server, a data acquisition unit and an experimental set with a control unit. MATLAB web server (MWS) is used to send and receive data or graphics over the Internet. While the experiment is being operated, the real experimental set placed in the laboratory can be monitored by the remote user. Evaluation results show that the system designed accelerates the learning period, increases the concentration on the experiment and provides a safe environment for four‐quadrant speed control experiment of a DC motor. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 19: 747–758, 2011
Transient Thermo-Voltages on High-Power Shunt Resistors

In this paper, a detailed analysis of thermoelectric voltages of low-resistance, high-power shunt resistors and the extraction of model parameters for transient simulations and error correction are described. Due to temperature gradients, thermoelectric voltages (thermo-voltages) appear on different metallic conductors. As the shunt temperature rises with power dissipation, thermo-voltages are unavoidable under realistic conditions. Their influence is typically unknown and leads to measurement errors, decreasing the current measurement accuracy. Two methods for the extraction of thermo-voltages from the voltage drop across a shunt resistor are discussed. The first method enables the acquisition of steady state thermo-voltage for a certain power load, the second can measure the transient behavior after a power step. For this purpose dedicated electronic measurement systems have been developed. For different types of thin- and thick-film power resistors in standard transfer molded packages model parameters for thermoelectric simulations are extracted. For real driving current profiles for electric vehicles, the measurement error introduced by parasitic thermo-voltages can reach up to 0.17%, about 17% of the error being due to the thermal resistance variation.
VISITING DEAD ANCESTORS: SHAMANS AS INTERPRETERS OF RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS

Religious traditions enable ancestors to encourage proper social behavior in their distant descendants. Although traditional myths and rituals can provide basic values, these values must be interpreted in light of the specific circumstances encountered by later generations. In tribal societies the task of interpreting religious traditions falls upon religious leaders known as shamans. Shamans, perhaps universally, are claimed to obtain instructions from dead ancestors on how to deal with social disruptions. This paper argues that a focus on the more exotic aspects of shamanism has kept previous studies from realizing the crucial role of shamans as interpreters of religious traditions.
Hyperamylasemia and pancreatitis following spiral enteroscopy.

BACKGROUND Acute pancreatitis is a significant potential complication with double-balloon enteroscopy. Hyperamylasemia is frequently observed after both double-balloon enteroscopy and single-balloon enteroscopy but often without associated pancreatitis. Whether the same phenomenon occurs with spiral enteroscopy is currently unknown. AIMS To determine the incidence of pancreatitis and hyperamylasemia following spiral enteroscopy. METHODS A prospective cohort study of consecutive patients undergoing proximal spiral enteroscopy was conducted. Serum amylase levels were measured immediately before and following the procedure, combined with observation for clinical signs of pancreatitis. RESULTS A total of 32 patients underwent proximal spiral enteroscopy, with a mean total procedure time of 51 min (range 30 min to 100 min) and mean depth of insertion of 240 cm (range 50 cm to 350 cm). The diagnostic yield was 50%, with 31% of all procedures being therapeutic. While no patients exhibited signs that raised suspicion of pancreatitis, hyperamylasemia was common (20%). Hyperamylasemia was not significantly associated with procedure duration or depth of insertion but was linked to patients with Peutz-Jeghers syndrome and with the use of propofol sedation, suggesting that it may be more common in difficult cases. CONCLUSIONS Postprocedural hyperamylasemia occurred frequently with proximal spiral enteroscopy, while no associated pancreatitis was observed. This finding suggests that hyperamylasemia may not necessarily reflect pancreatic injury nor portend a risk for pancreatitis.
Controversies in assessing risk and deviancy in sex offenders with intellectual disabilities

Abstract While the literature on the assessment, treatment and management of non-intellectual disabled sex offenders is well established, it is only in recent years that researchers and clinicians have focused on sex offenders with intellectual disability (ID). This article focuses on two areas: the assessment of risk and recidivism, and the assessment of sexual deviancy in sex offenders with ID. The first part of this article reviews the literature on the assessment of sexual offence recidivism risk for sex offenders with ID. Static and dynamic risk factors associated with sexual recidivism risk in sex offenders with ID are identified and the use of actuarial risk assessment scales and structured risk assessment systems with this client group are considered. The second part of this article discusses difficulties associated with the assessment of sexual deviancy in sex offenders with ID. An alternative approach to assessing deviancy is considered where deviant behaviour is compared against a four-group continuum of normal to deviant sexual behaviour in terms of developmental and chronological levels. From the literature a number of suggestions are made regarding the assessment of risk and sexual deviancy with this client group.
A user study of off-the-record messaging

Instant messaging is a prevalent form of communication across the Internet, yet most instant messaging services provide little security against eavesdroppers or impersonators. There are a variety of existing systems that aim to solve this problem, but the one that provides the highest level of privacy is Off-the-Record Messaging (OTR), which aims to give instant messaging conversations the level of privacy available in a face-to-face conversation. In the most recent redesign of OTR, as well as increasing the security of the protocol, one of the goals of the designers was to make OTR easier to use, without users needing to understand details of computer security such as keys or fingerprints. To determine if this design goal has been met, we conducted a user study of the OTR plugin for the Pidgin instant messaging client using the think aloud method. As a result of this study we have identified a variety of usability flaws remaining in the design of OTR. These flaws that we have discovered have the ability to cause confusion, make the program unusable, and even decrease the level of security to users of OTR. We discuss how these errors can be repaired, as well as identify an area that requires further research to improve its usability.