Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Signal changes in standing magnetic resonance imaging of osseous injury at the origin of the suspensory ligament in four Thoroughbred racehorses under tiludronic acid treatment

ABSTRACT Problems associated with the proximal metacarpal region, such as an osseous injury associated with tearing of Sharpey’s fibers or an avulsion fracture of the origin of the suspensory ligament (OISL), are important causes of lameness in racehorses. In the present study, four Thoroughbred racehorses (age range, 2–4 years) were diagnosed as having forelimb OISL and assessed over time by using standing magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI). At the first sMRI examination, all horses had 3 characteristic findings, including low signal intensity within the trabecular bone of the third metacarpus on T1-weighted images, intermediate-to-high signal intensity surrounded by a hypointense rim on T2*-weighted images, and high signal intensity on fat-suppressed images. Following the sMRI examination, all horses received 50 mg of tiludronic acid by intravenous regional limb perfusion once weekly for 3 weeks. Attenuation of the high signal intensity on T2*-weighted and fat-suppressed images was observed on follow-up sMRI in 3 horses. Following rest and rehabilitation, these 3 horses successfully returned to racing. In contrast, the other horse that did not show attenuation of the high signal intensity failed to return to racing. To our knowledge, this is the first report of OISL in Thoroughbred racehorses assessed over time by sMRI under tiludronic acid treatment. Our findings support the use of sMRI for examining lameness originating from the proximal metacarpal region to refine the timing of returning to exercise based on follow-up examinations during the recuperation period.
High Speed Visual Servoing with Ultrasonic Motors

Visual servoing refers to the closed-loop position control of the robot end-effector (Hutchinson et al., 1996) using visual feedback and should be distinguished from vision-based expert systems (Corke and Good, 1996). In this work, we focus our interest on high performance visual servoing. Our goal is to maximize the bandwidth of the visual loop. This means usually, considering the average dynamics of robots, that the use of a high speed camera is necessary. To achieve this goal, the model of the visual loop must be known with a good accuracy. This includes the dynamics of the robot and the dynamics of the vision system. The main objective of this work is to propose a new dynamic model for the vision sensor. The proposed model is validated by experiments. Ultrasonic motors are used in the experiments since they exhibit a very short response time and can be modeled by a simple transfer function, thus simplifying the decoupling between vision and actuation.
DISTRIBUTION , ABUNDANCE AND PROPERTIES OF RESTRICTION ENZYMES ON GENOMIC DNA OF GRANULE-BOUND STARCH SYNTHASE I AND II IN CASSAVA ( MANIHOT ESCULENTA CRANTZ )

There is high demand for modified starch globally for both food and industrial uses because of its ability to withstand processing conditions such as extreme temperature, diverse pH, high shear stress and freeze-thaw variations. The study described the distribution, abundance and properties of restriction enzymes on genomic DNA of granule-bound starch synthase (GBSS) I and II with a view to manipulate the genes for production of modified starch in cassava. Thirty-one sites of 16 restriction enzymes were evenly distributed on 721 base-pair granule-bound starch synthase I (GBSS I) genomic DNA. *Corresponding Author (Received: March, 2013; Accepted: May, 2013) About 63% of the restriction enzymes on GBSS I produced overhang DNA end, 88% were methylation sensitive and 69% utilized lambda DNA as substrate. 0 Most of the enzymes (94%) have optimum incubation temperature of 37 C while 95% of the enzymes recognized palindromic sequences. Similarly, 1690 base-pair long genomic DNA of GBSS II had 20 restriction sites cut by 16 restriction enzymes. About 67% of the restriction enzymes on GBSS II produced overhang DNA end, 88% were methylated sensitive, 93% use lambda substrate as substrate and all the enzymes has optimum 0 incubation temperature of 37 C. About 88% of the enzymes recognized palindromic sequences. Restriction enzymes were evenly distributed on GBSS I and II and EcoRI is the cheapest enzyme on both DNAs. The study concluded that cassava GBSS I and GBSS II genomic DNAs contain sites for suitable and abundant restriction enzymes with desirable properties for manipulation of the genes for production of modified starch.
Audit Pricing, Start-Up Cost and Opinion Shopping

The purpose of this paper is to predict the association between the effect of start-up cost and audit opinion shopping on the pricing strategies of medium-sized audit firms. Using a sample of 753 local –office-year observations between 2006 and 2011, we find evidence of a positive association between higher audit pricing of new private client and audit opinion shopping. We also find that start-up cost is a good predictor of higher initial fees charged by auditors for private clients. While earnings risk management (ERM) and financial performance risk (FPR) are significant factors in audit pricing, litigation risk (LR) however failed to evolve as a direct significant predictor. Although this study focused on the effects of start-up costs and opinion reporting, it fails to differentiate between firm cost allocation and apportionment. The model can be used to assist audit firms not only to develop pricing strategies that fully reflect the effective cost allocation, but also to be receptive to the implications of opinion reporting on service pricing.
Evaluation of 21 st-Century Risks of Smallpox Vaccination and Policy Options

The United States stopped vaccinating against smallpox in 1972 because the risks were judged to outweigh the benefits. The possibility of a terrorist attack using smallpox has led to renewed interest in a vaccination program. Smallpox vaccination carries considerable risks, which may be of greater concern today than in the late 1960s because of the increased prevalence of immunosuppression and atopy in the population. This paper reviews the clinical presentations of major adverse events after vaccination and the rates of occurrence of these events observed in the 1960s. The normal dynamics of the spread of smallpox is slow, and usually only persons who have had close personal contact with an overtly ill patient are affected. There are several preattack vaccination policy options, but immunization of medical workers, especially those who might have close contact with infected patients, is sufficient in the absence of a known threat of a bioterrorist attack or the identification of a smallpox-infected person.
Model for cascading failures in congested Internet

Cascading failures often occur in congested networks such as the Internet. A cascading failure can be described as a three-phase process: generation, diffusion, and dissipation of the congestion. In this account, we present a function that represents the extent of congestion on a given node. This approach is different from existing functions based on betweenness centrality. By introducing the concept of ‘delay time’, we designate an intergradation between permanent removal and nonremoval. We also construct an evaluation function of network efficiency, based on congestion, which measures the damage caused by cascading failures. Finally, we investigate the effects of network structure and size, delay time, processing ability and packet generation speed on congestion propagation. Also, we uncover the relationship between the cascade dynamics and some properties of the network such as structure and size.
From Clozapine to Cognitive Remediation

Objective: Although a minority of persons with schizophrenia (SCZ) commits violent acts, SCZ remains a risk factor for violence. Here, we present a broad overview of evidence-based treatments for violence in SCZ, including biological and psychosocial interventions. Method: We conducted MEDLINE and PsychINFO literature searches to retrieve articles relating to treatments for violent, hostile, or aggressive behaviours in SCZ. Results: Clozapine shows the strongest evidence for treating the acute violence of SCZ. Other atypical antipsychotics also possess antiaggressive effects, although the evidence is not as robust as that for clozapine. Psychosocial treatments can be useful adjuncts to pharmacotherapy once patients’ positive symptoms have stabilized. Cognitive behavioural therapy for psychosis and cognitive remediation are 2 psychosocial interventions that have demonstrated positive outcomes for violence in SCZ. Most psychosocial studies that examined violence as an outcome were conducted in forensic psychiatric settings. Conclusions: Effective treatments exist for persons with SCZ who pose a risk for violent and aggressive behaviour, although the overall evidence base remains relatively weak. More randomized controlled trials of programs showing evidence for reduction of violence in SCZ are required. Further research should delineate which patients could benefit from multimodal treatment and where and when such treatments are optimally delivered.
Transcending static deployment of circuits : dynamic run-time systems and mobile hardware processes for FPGAs

The usefulness of reconfigurable hardware has been shown in research and commercial applications. Unquestionably, this has and will lead to, unique avenues of thought within computer science being explored. The interest by researchers in some specific areas has led to manufacturers developing devices which were enhanced in their ability to dynamically be configured within a run-time context. These improvements are on-going and rapid progress is being made, producing high density, system-on-a-chip capable devices, with fast run-time reconfiguration. The advancements in this technology have particularly led to a convergence between software and hardware domains, in the sense that algorithms can be implemented in either; the choice being dependent only in terms of efficiency within the medium itself. Older methods for development with these devices have become rapidly dated and inflexible. Very few suitable tools exist, for example, which are capable of fully utilising the inherent capabilities of such hardware. The approach taken here allows the division between hardware and software to be diminished. Component designs, which may be hardware description language (HDL) based or synthesised algorithms, become easily manipulated and interacted with through a run-time engine, that can deploy elements at will to local or distributed devices. Such entities are essentially hybrid in nature, possessing both hardware and software functionality. These processes are sufficiently self-supporting, to be capable of being used outside of the run-time system within a normal Java development environment. This work explores how hardware entities can become as dynamic as memory based algorithms within conventional von Neumann based systems, providing the means for extending the software programming paradigm into such areas. It analyses the possibilities of applying object-oriented and occam/Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) based concurrency philosophies to these highly mobile, hardware processes.
SERVICE RECOMMENDATION VIA EXPLOITING GLOBAL AND LOCAL TRUST METRICS

Recommending users with trustworthy services is a fundamental need in service-oriented environments. Various reputation-based methods have been proposed to address the issue of service trust evaluation. They typically yield a unique and global trust score for each service by aggregating the ratings on it awarded by the user community. However, this global trust score could be inconsistent with an individual’s personal opinion on the service, especially when the service is highly controversial. To attack this issue, local trust metrics have been developed, aiming to measure trust on a service more personally and accurately. However, local trust metrics, which employ trust propagation in trust networks, may fail when the judging user has no trust chains to reach the target service. By exploiting both global and local trust metrics, this paper proposes a hybrid trust measure for trustworthy service recommendation. We firstly present a global trust metric and a local trust metric different from conventional ones, and then develop a reasonable strategy for combining them to predict a user’s trust on a service. Evaluations show that our proposed method significantly outperforms the other three methods in service-oriented environments with social networks.
CNN-based Human Body Orientation Estimation for Robotic Attendant

Estimating the state of a person, such as walking and talking with others, is an important function of attendant robot for generating appropriate behaviors. This paper describes an image-based human body orientation estimation using a convolutional neural network. By training the network with a massive SURREAL dataset, the network exhibits a high accuracy while keeping the calculation cost low enough for real-time applications. The evaluation has been done using our precisely annotated dataset.
Being a Teacher: Developing Self-efficacy and Teacher Identity through Self-reflective Techniques in Teacher Education Programs

In this study, the researcher intends to develop the self-efficacy and teachers personal and professional identities through various self reflective techniques used by the teachers. To conduct this study the main objective of the study was, to find out the effect of self-reflective techniques on self-efficacy, personal and professional identities of teachers. To achieve study objective various research questions were developed. This study was purely experimental and qualitative in nature. The population of the study was all the prospective teachers of Punjab province those were enrolled in various universities in different teacher education programs. The researcher selected the sample from the Government College University Faisalabad (GCUF). All the students enrolled in teacher education programs, who use to go for teaching practice, were selected as sample of the study. Just before the students went to teaching practice in schools, there was one week workshop conducted for experimental group by giving them lectures relevant to concepts of reflection, reflection in teaching, usage of reflective techniques in teaching, etc. At the same time, there was no similar opportunity given to students of control group officially. The pre and post tests were conducted to investigate effect of reflection on professional development of prospective teachers. The data collection was based on two phases. In first phase pre and post tests data were collected through questionnaires and the data for second phase was collected through interviews based on Gibbs (1988) model of reflection. The pre and post tests questionnaires were comprised of various questions about self-efficacy, personal and professional identities of teachers. Teacher’s personal identity scale (Cheek & Briggs, 2013), Professional Identity Scale (Hoi Yan Cheung, 2008), and Teachers’ Self-efficacy Scale (Bandura, 1997) were used together as one questionnaire. After collection of posttest data, teachers participated in treatment group were interviewed about usage of self-reflective techniques during teaching practice. The validity and reliability of tools were also done through respective techniques. The analysis of data was done with the descriptive statistics and paired sample t-test. The results of analysis showed that there was significant effect of reflective techniques on development level of self-efficacy, personal and professional identities of teachers. Teachers who were part of treatment group strongly considered, usage of self-reflective techniques is having close relation to develop not only their identities and self-efficacy but also played crucial role to activate teachers to rethink about different aspects of their teaching methodologies to teach students effectively. Keywords: teacher self-efficacy, professional identity of teacher, personal identity of teacher, reflection in teaching, self-reflective techniques in teaching, teacher education
Unsupervised learning of an Atlas from unlabeled point-sets

One of the key challenges in deformable shape modeling is the problem of estimating a meaningful average or mean shape from a set of unlabeled shapes. We present a new joint clustering and matching algorithm that is capable of computing such a mean shape from multiple shape samples which are represented by unlabeled point-sets. An iterative bootstrap process is used wherein multiple shape sample point-sets are nonrigidly deformed to the emerging mean shape, with subsequent estimation of the mean shape based on these nonrigid alignments. The process is entirely symmetric with no bias toward any of the original shape sample point-sets. We believe that this method can be especially useful for creating atlases of various shapes present in medical images. We have applied the method to create mean shapes from nine hand-segmented 2D corpus callosum data sets and 10 hippocampal 3D point-sets.
Income Distribution Dynamics of Urban Residents : The Case of China ( 1995 – 2004 )

Using a 1995–2004 panel data of Chinese urban residents, we investigate the dynamics of income distribution in cities. According to Kernel estimates of the relative income distribution of Chinese cities, we find that: (1) the national across-city distribution of per capita GDP exhibits an apparent unique-peak distribution in 1995 and an “emerging multiple-peak” one in 2004; (2) for prefecture-level cities, income distribution has evolved to an “apparent multiple-peak” distribution from a unique-peak one; (3) the income distribution of county-level cities maintains a unique-peak curve; (4) most of the income dynamics of urban residents originates from prefecture-and-higher-level cities. We sample three representative provinces and study the urban income dynamics respectively. The analysis suggests that within a single province, urban income distribution evolves from unique-peak to twin-peak curve; while among provinces, income convergence is evident for urban residents. In addition, we measure the incidence of poverty in cities based on our income dynamics analysis, and find that the ratios of people living below absolute poverty line have been decreasing at cities of all levels.
Group versus individual performance on tasks requiring ideational proficiency

In the experiments reviewed in this article the subjects are asked to produce ideas that are relevant to a given task request (e.g., possible consequences of a hypothetical event). After describing the specific task material and the performance measures used in the relevant research studies, some analytic background is given by outlining the cognitive resources required in this kind of experimental task and by listing the various factors that may come into play when subjects perform in groups (with discussion) instead of individually. We then review the studies comparing individual and group performance. In all ot these experiments the subjects were asked to work according to the rules of brainstorming, which prescribe that participants refrain from evaluating their ideas. This procedure purportedly results in superior group, relative to individual, performance. Ho. ~ever, the empirical evidence clearly indicates that subjects brainstorming in small groups produce fewer ideas than the same number of subjects brainstorming individually. Less clear evidence is available on measures of quality, uniqueness and variety. The discussion considers factors that may be responsible for this inferiority of groups. The role of social inhibition receives particular attention also in terms of suggestions for research. ··A.pa/:i"h·om the group-individual comparison we review the existing research concerning factors that may influence group performance on idea-generation tasks.
Parenting children with intellectual disabilities in Malawi: the impact that reaches beyond coping?

BACKGROUND Rates of disability are high in resource poor settings with 85% of children with disabilities living in these settings. Long-term caregiving for disabled children is associated with fatigue, financial difficulties, parenting distress and other psychological issues. While such parents of children have repeatedly highlighted their feelings of discrimination, stigma and exclusion, leading to mental health issues, there is little research from the developing world addressing these issues. RESEARCH OBJECTIVES This study aims to explore psychological experiences of parents caring for children with intellectual disabilities; understand their mechanisms of coping and their psychosocial needs in Malawi. METHODOLOGY This study used a qualitative phenomenological design. We purposively sampled parents who had children diagnosed with intellectual disability from two clinics in two cities in Malawi. Between January 2015 and March 2015, we conducted 10 focus group discussions and four in-depth interviews. All ethical study procedures were carefully followed. All interviews were tape-recorded, transcribed and translated from vernacular to English. Thematic approach of data analysis was adopted to understand the data. FINDINGS Caring for intellectually disabled children comes with a number of challenges. Parents have limited access to services for their children let alone for their own psychological issues; they experience stigma and discrimination, have mental health issues resulting from the caring role, have suicidal ideas and in some cases have even been coerced by neighbours to kill their disabled child. To manage these issues, most parents cope through their spirituality. DISCUSSION AND RECOMMENDATION Apart from suicide and filicide, the findings of this study are similar to those performed in other countries. It is recommended that parents' psychological issues be managed concurrently when providing services for their children. There is also a need to develop psychosocial training interventions to address the needs of the parents of these children.