Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The immune system preferentially clears Theiler's virus from the gray matter of the central nervous system

Infection of susceptible strains of mice with Daniel's (DA) strains of Theiler's murine encephalomyelitis virus (DAV) results in virus persistence in the central nervous system (CNS) white matter and chronic demyelination similar to that observed in multiple sclerosis. We investigated whether persistence is due to the immune system more efficiently clearing DAV from gray than from white matter of the CNS. Severe combined immunodeficient (SCID) and immunocompetent C.B-17 mice were infected with DAV to determine the kinetics, temporal distribution, and tropism of the virus in CNS. In early disease (6 h to 7 days postinfection), DAV replicated with similar kinetics in the brains and spinal cords of SCID and immunocompetent mice and in gray and white matter. DAV RNA was localized within 48 h in CNS cells of all phenotypes, including neurons, oligodendrocytes, astrocytes, and macrophages/microglia. In late disease (13 to 17 days postinfection), SCID mice became moribund and permitted higher DAV replication in both gray and white matter. In contrast, immunocompetent mice cleared virus from the gray matter but showed replication in the white matter of their brains and spinal cords. Reconstitution of SCID mice with nonimmune splenocytes or anti-DAV antibodies after establishment of infection demonstrated that both cellular and humoral immune responses decreased virus from the gray matter; however, the cellular responses were more effective. SCID mice reconstituted with splenocytes depleted of CD4+ or CD8+ T lymphocytes cleared virus from the gray matter but allowed replication in the white matter. These studies demonstrate that both neurons and glia are infected early following DAV infection but that virus persistence in the white matter is due to preferential clearance of virus from the gray matter by the immune system.
Designing User-Character Dialog in Interactive Narratives: An Exploratory Experiment

Through interaction with the virtual environment and virtual characters, users are able to influence the storyline of many games. The design choice for the style of interactivity can thereby have a crucial influence on the user's experience. However, only a few approaches evaluate different interaction modalities for one system to investigate the impact of design choice on the users' experience. In this paper, we present an experimental approach in which we first reflect on design alternatives concerning a specific element of interactive narratives-user-character dialog-and then investigate user responses to different design options (round-based dialog versus continuous dialog). Results of an experimental evaluation study show that users tend to prefer continuous interaction in a soap-opera-like game environment using typed text input to communicate with virtual characters that act and react using speech output, although the recognition rate of user utterances of the continuous version was slightly worse compared to the round-based version.
Weighted aggregation in the domain of crowd-based road condition monitoring

This paper focuses on crowd-based road condition monitoring using smart devices, such as smartphones and evaluates different strategies for aggregating multiple measurements (arithmetic mean and weighted means using R2 and RMSE) for predicting the longitudinal road roughness. The results confirm that aggregating predictions from single drives leads to a higher model performance. This has been expected and confirms the intuition. The overall R2 could be increased from 0.69 to 0.75 on average and the NRMSE could be decreased from 9% to 8% on average. However, contrary to the intuition, the results show that weighted aggregations of single predictions should be avoided, which is consistent with previous findings in other domains, such as financial forecasting.
High range resolution medical acoustic vascular imaging with frequency domain interferometry

For high range resolution acoustic vascular imaging we apply frequency domain interferometry and Capon method to a few frames of in-phase and quadrature (IQ) data acquired by a commercial ultrasonographic device. To suit the adaptive beamforming algorithm to medical acoustic imaging we employ three techniques; frequency averaging, whitening, and pseudo-double RF data conversion. The proposed method detected two couples of boundaries 0.26 and 0.19 mm apart using a single frame and two frames of IQ data, respectively, where each couple of boundaries is indistinguishable from a single boundary utilizing B-mode images. Further this algorithm could depict a swine femoral artery with higher range resolution than conventional B-mode imaging. These results indicate the potential of the proposed method for the range resolution improvement in ultrasonography, originating the progress in detection of vessel stenosis.
VLT spectroscopy of galaxies lensed by the AC 114 cluster: - Implications for the mass model and the study of low-luminosity galaxies at high-redshift

We present the first results of a spectroscopic survey of faint lensed galaxie s in the core of the galaxy cluster AC114 (z=0.312) obtained from observations w ith the FORS1 spectrograph mounted on the VLT-Antu. The galaxies were chose n in areas close to the high-z critical lines predicted by the gravitational lens model of Natarajan et al (NKSE, 1998) for this cluster, according to both lensing and photometric redshift criteria. All the target galaxies are found to correspond to background galaxies with redshifts values in the [0.7, 3.5] interval. Our spectroscopic observations confirm the predicted lensing redshifts for 3 of the multiple-image galaxies, and together with predictions of the NKSE model led to the discovery of a new 5-image configuration at redshift z=3.347. A revised NKSE model, compatible with the redshift of this new multiple-image system, was generated and employed to calculate the gravitational amplifications of all the observed galaxies. The galaxies corresponding to the multiple-image systems are found to be intrinsically fainter, between 0.5 and 1.5 magnitudes, than the limiting magnitudes of existing blank field studies. When all the observed background galaxies are considered, the resulting intrinsic absolute magnitudes range from M_B~-22 to -19. Therefore, a large gain in sensitivity towards low luminosity high-z objects can actually be obtained, in agreement with theoretical expectations. This method can be used advantageously to probe the high redshift Universe and, in particular, its application to an ensemble of massive cluster cores could constraint the faint end of luminosity function of high redshift galaxies.
Lambda Calculus , Conservative Extension And Structural Induction MS-CIS-89-64 LOGIC & COMPUTATION 16

The issue of whether embedding algebraic theories in higher-order theories such as the simply typed and polymorphic lambda calculi is of interest in programming language design. The establishment of such a conservative extension result permits modularity in the verification of the correctness of datatype and function implementations. In earlier work [Breazu-Tannen & Meyer 1987a], [Breazu-Tannen & Meyer 1987b] and [Breazu-Tannen 1988], conservative extension results have been obtained for algebraic theories. However, in modelling inductive datatypes, the principle of structural induction needs to be admitted in the inference system, and the question of whether conservative extension holds in the presence of the principle of structural induction needs to be addressed. In this paper we look at the question of whether inductive algebraic theories are conservatively extended when embedded in the simply typed lambda calculus. Comments University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science Technical Report No. MSCIS-89-64. This technical report is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn. edu/cis_reports/856 Lambda Calculus, Conservative Extension And Structural Induction MS-CIS-89-64 LOGIC & COMPUTATION 16 Val-Breazu-Tannen Ramesh Subrahmanyam Department of Computer and Information Science School of Engineering and Applied Science University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6389
A wireless contact point sensor for tracked robots

Mobile robots offer significant potentials for inspection and surveillance of damage sites after building collapses in the course of a natural or manmade catastrophe. They can be operated semi-autonomously or remote controlled which decreases the danger of the first responders at place. Nevertheless the mentioned scenarios are mostly hard-to-reach and hazardous environments. Therefore mobile robots for the use in such areas have to possess outstanding locomotion and mobility capabilities. Those can be theoretically provided by snake-like robots which have a slender, segmented and modular structure. Furthermore the trafficability and terrainability can be improved by the use of tracks as propulsive elements. Though the use of tracks is best suited for unstructured terrain their design is challenging. This is especially due to the aspect of sensor integration for the detection of physical system-environment-interaction which is necessary for a better terrain adaptation. The paper at hand introduces and describes a new wireless contact sensor for contact point detection for the mobile robot MOEBHIU2S. It focuses on the design, the post integration into the tracks, the signal routing by using RFID technology and first results measured on a test rig.
Characteristic Approximation for Resources on Computational Grids

This paper proposes a statistical method to approximate the distributions of computational and communicational abilities of resources on computational grids. The well-known gamma and normal distributions are employed to approximate the distribution of computational ability and communicational ability for those computational resources. The result of the preliminary experiment shows that this study can lead to a better approximation of computational and communicational abilities in the real world. Our method is useful for the grid simulation tool because it provides the computational and communicational abilities with realistic characteristics for a grid resource model.
Genotypes and Mouse Virulence of Toxoplasma gondii Isolates from Animals and Humans in China

Background Recent population structure studies of T. gondii revealed that a few major clonal lineages predominated in different geographical regions. T. gondii in South America is genetically and biologically divergent, whereas this parasite is remarkably clonal in North America and Europe with a few major lineages including Types I, II and III. Information on genotypes and mouse virulence of T. gondii isolates from China is scarce and insufficient to investigate its population structure, evolution, and transmission. Methodology/Principal Findings Genotyping of 23 T. gondii isolates from different hosts using 10 markers for PCR-restriction fragment length polymorphism analyses (SAG1, SAG2, SAG3, BTUB, GRA6, c22-8, c29-2, L358, PK1 and Apico) revealed five genotypes; among them three genotypes were atypical and two were archetypal. Fifteen strains belong to the Chinese 1 lineage, which has been previously reported as a widespread lineage from swine, cats, and humans in China. Two human isolates fall into the type I and II lineages and the remaining isolates belong to two new atypical genotypes (ToxoDB#204 and #205) which has never been reported in China. Our results show that these genotypes of T. gondii isolates are intermediately or highly virulent in mice except for the strain TgCtwh6, which maintained parasitemia in mice for 35 days post infection although it possesses the uniform genotype of Chinese 1. Additionally, phylogenetic network analyses of all isolates of genotype Chinese 1 are identical, and there is no variation based on the sequence data generated for four introns (EF1, HP2, UPRT1 and UPRT7) and two dense granule proteins (GRA6 and GRA7). Conclusion/Significance A limited genetic diversity was found and genotype Chinese 1 (ToxoDB#9) is dominantly circulating in mainland China. The results will provide a useful profile for deep insight to the population structure, epidemiology and biological characteristics of T. gondii in China.
Importance sampling simulations of phase-type queues

Importance sampling is a variance reduction technique that is particularly well suited for simulating rare events and, more specifically, estimating rare event probabilities. Properly applied, it often results in tremendous efficiency improvements compared to direct simulation schemes, but it can also yield unbounded variance increase. Its efficiency and robustness critically rely on a suitable change of the underlying probability measure, which is highly model-dependent. In recent years, significant progress greatly broadened the classes of models successfully accessible by importance sampling, but several model classes still require further investigation. We consider importance sampling simulations of finite capacity queues where interarrival and service times are Erlang distributed. A change of measure is proposed and experimentally studied. Numerical results for loss rates due to buffer overflows indicate that the change of measure provides accurate estimates and appears promising for adaptation to other models involving phase-type distributions.
Ecological Validity and Deception Detection Research Design

ABSTRACT The concept of ecological validity is explicated and applied to deception detection research. The ecology of the deception lab typically involves researchers randomly assigning and instructing senders to lie or tell the truth. In lab-based lie detection tasks, receivers are prompted to make explicit truth-lie judgments in real time where truths and lies are equally probable, and where evidence and persuasion-based lie detection methods are precluded. Outside the lab, deceivers self-select, engage deception as a problem-solving activity, and have greater linguistic freedom to deceive in ways other than telling outright falsehoods. Receivers outside the lab face truth-lies base-rates other than 50–50, they are not prompted to consider the possibility of deception by a researcher, decisions about honesty often need not be immediate, and a wider variety of discovery methods are available. The implications of these differences are discussed in contexts of everyday conversation, criminal investigation, high stakes media lies, and security screenings.
Analysis of robust Soliton distribution for LT code

As the first practical fountain code, LT code is still important as a component of the Raptor code and used in various applications. Usually, robust Soliton distribution (RSD) is used as the degree distribution for LT code. The robustness of RSD is based on the parameters, c and δ, which can be adjusted to obtain better performance of LT codes with different length. In this paper, we anaylze the impact of the distribution parameters on the mean degree and investigate the impact on the decoding performance of LT code through simulation.
The statistics of gravitational lenses in a clumpy Universe

We evaluate the effect of small-scale inhomogeneities on large-scale observations within the statistics of gravitationally lensed quasars. To this end, we consider a cosmological model whose large-scale properties (dynamics, matter distribution) are the same as in Friedmann- Lemaˆ itre models, but whose matter distribution is locally inhomogeneous. We use the well- known Dyer-Roder distances to allow a simple analytical expression of the optical depth τ , and pay particular attention to the different roles played by the different notions of distance (filled beam angular diameter distance and Dyer-Roder distances) when calculating this quantity, following the 1986 prescription of Ehlers & Schneider for a coherent formalism. We find that the expected number of gravitationally lensed quasars is a decreasing function of the clumpiness parameter α. Ke yw ords: gravitational lensing - cosmological parameters - cosmology: observations.
Prevalence of albuminuria and renal insufficiency and associated clinical factors in type 2 diabetes: the Japan Diabetes Clinical Data Management study (JDDM15).

BACKGROUND Microalbuminuria is widely accepted as the first clinical sign of diabetic nephropathy. However, normoalbuminuric type 2 diabetic patients who have renal insufficiency (RI), i.e. low estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) <60 mL/min/1.73 m(2), exist. We explored the prevalence of such patients and associated clinical factors. METHODS We investigated the distribution of patients when stratified by albuminuria stages and chronic kidney disease (CKD) stages in a large-scale population of Japanese type 2 diabetic patients (N = 3297), and the common and independent factors for albuminuria and low eGFR. RESULTS The proportion of subjects with low eGFR was 15.3% (506/3297), which was 11.4% among those with normoalbuminuria (NA) (262/2298), 14.9% among those with microalbuminuria (105/705) and 47.3% among those with macroalbuminuria (139/294). There were 262 patients with NA and low eGFR, and 63.4% of them had neither diabetic retinopathy nor neuropathy. They were older and included a higher proportion of women and patients with hypertension, hyperlipidaemia and cardiovascular disease (CVD), and fewer smokers compared with those with NA and preserved eGFR. Multiple logistic regression analysis revealed that factors commonly associated with RI and albuminuria were hypertension, CVD and proliferative retinopathy. Factors independently associated with RI were age, duration of diabetes, A1C (negative), hyperlipidaemia, smoking (negative) and macroalbuminuria, whereas those associated with albuminuria were male sex, BMI, A1C, simple retinopathy and RI. CONCLUSIONS A significant proportion of type 2 diabetic patients have normoalbuminuric RI. Renal disease in type 2 diabetes could be heterogeneous, implying the possibility of involvement of renal atherosclerosis and lipid toxicity.
EEG error-related potentials detection with a Bayesian filter

Several studies describe evoked EEG potentials elicited when a subject is aware of an erroneous decision either taken by him or by an external interface. This paper try to detect Error-related potentials (ErrP) elicited when a human user want to monitors an external system upon which he has no control whatsoever. To this end we use a Bayesian filter to classify erroneous or correct events. On average over three subjects, the proposed probabilistic classifier achieves single-trial classification of 85% for correct trials and 71% for erroneous trials.
Glutathione in Parkinson's disease: A link between oxidative stress and mitochondrial damage?

Several links exist between the two mechanisms of neuronal degeneration (i.e., oxygen radical production and mitochondrial damage) proposed to have a role in Parkinson's disease. Indeed, mitochondria are critical targets for the toxic injury induced by oxygen radicals, and experimental evidence suggests that mitochondrial damage may cause an increased generation of oxygen radicals. A potentially important link between these two mechanisms of neurodegen‐eration is glutathione. Because of the scavenging activity of glutathione against accumulation of oxygen radicals, its decrease in the brains of parkinsonian patients has been interpreted as a sign of oxidative stress; however, this change may also result from or lead to mitochondrial damage. It is conceivable therefore that regardless of whether oxidative stress or mitochondrial damage represents the initial insult, these toxic mechanisms may both contribute to neuronal degeneration via changes in glutathione levels.
Asymptotic giant branch stars in the Phoenix dwarf galaxy

JHK s near-infrared photometry of stars in the Phoenix dwarf galaxy is presented and discussed. Combining these data with the optical photometry of Massey et al. allows a rather clean separation of field stars from Phoenix members. The discovery of a Mira variable (P = 425 d), which is almost certainly a carbon star, leads to an estimate of the distance modulus of 23.10 ± 0.18 that is consistent with other estimates and indicates the existence of a significant population of age ∼2 Gyr. The two carbon stars of Da Costa have M bol = -3.8 and are consistent with belonging to a population of similar age; some other possible members of such a population are identified. A Da Costa non-carbon star is ΔK s ∼ 0.3 mag brighter than these two carbon stars. It may be an asymptotic giant branch star of the dominant old population. The nature of other stars lying close to it in the K s , (J-K s ) diagram needs studying.
Galois groups of tamely ramified $ p$-extensions

Very little is known regarding the Galois group of the maximal p-extension unramified outside a finite set of primes S of a number field in the case that the primes above p are not in S. We describe methods to compute this group when it is finite and conjectural properties of it when it is infinite.
Implementation of Keyword search considering user's preference in Encrypted Data in Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing is very popular and used in the every field let it be for usage of software or as a platform or as an infrastructure. Cloud computing is now an important thing around which the technologies revolve. Cloud computing has made everything available in just a click away format. Heavy data is stored using storage as a service or a huge amount of data resides on cloud for the various transactions to be done. When such a huge dependence is done on cloud computing it’s obvious for the data to be stored in encrypted format. But when the data is stored in encrypted format, then the option of doing search on plaintext data is not possible. Therefore search on encrypted data is must. On addition, if the user is able to give his own preference then the search will be more efficient. Thus in this paper we will tell how the keyword search considering user’s preference is implemented. Whenever an owner stores a file in cloud an index for that is automatically generated and the file is encrypted and stored in the cloud. When a user wants to search from the data stored in the cloud in encrypted format, he can give the list of keywords along with his preferences, i.e. which keyword has higher or lower prefence.Corresponding to that preference the application retrieves the file from cloud and in the ranking order as of the preference.in our implementation all the files are stored in owncloud[13] General Terms Information Retrieval, Cloud computing.