Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pedestrian detection in infrared images

This paper describes an approach for pedestrian detection in infrared images. The developed system has been implemented on an experimental vehicle equipped with an infrared camera and preliminarily tested in different situations. It is based on the localization of warm symmetrical objects with specific size and aspect ratio; since also road infrastructures and other road participants may have such characteristics, a set of matched filters was added in order to reduce false detections. A final validation process, based on the human shape's morphological characteristics, is used to build the list of pedestrian appearing in the scene. No temporal correlation, nor motion cues are used in this first part of the project.
The Role of Working Memory Capacity in Auditory Distraction

Previous research indicates that aircraft noise and meaningful background speech are particularly detrimental to school adolescents’ ability to remember what they read, but until now the effects from aircraft noise and speech have never been compared directly in an experiment. Furthermore, individual differences in susceptibility to these effects are not well understood. The present investigation addressed these two issues. Adolescents attending upper secondary school were recruited as participants and the data collection was made in their ordinary classrooms. The results from two experiments revealed that speech is more detrimental to prose memory than is aircraft noise, and individual differences in working memory capacity contributes more to individual differences in susceptibility to the effects of aircraft noise on prose memory than to the effects of speech. Some applied implications of those findings to noise abatement interventions are suggested.
Complete mitochondrial genome of the jellyfish, Chrysaora quinquecirrha (Cnidaria, Scyphozoa)

Abstract We sequenced 16,775 bp of the linear mitochondrial DNA of the jellyfish Chrysaora quinquecirrha and characterized them. C. quinquecirrha has 13 protein-coding genes (PCGs), 16S rRNA and 12S rRNA with 3 tRNAs (tRNA-Leu, tRNA-Ser(TGA), tRNA-Met) as shown in Aurelia sp. nov. Both have another two PCGs such as helicase and orf363 with telomeres at both ends. The PCGs of C. quinquecirrha shows anti-G bias on 2nd and 3rd positions of PCGs as well as anti-C bias on 1st and 3rd positions of PCGs.
Reducing Latency Through Page-aware Management of Web Objects by Content Delivery Networks

As popular web sites turn to content delivery networks (CDNs) for full-site delivery, there is an opportunity to improve the end-user experience by optimizing the delivery of entire web pages, rather than just individual objects. In particular, this paper explores page-structure-aware strategies for placing objects in CDN cache hierarchies. The key idea is that the objects in a web page that have the largest impact on page latency should be served out of the closest or fastest caches in the hierarchy. We present schemes for identifying these objects and develop mechanisms to ensure that they are served with higher priority by the CDN, while balancing traditional CDN concerns such as optimizing the delivery of popular objects and minimizing bandwidth costs. To establish a baseline for evaluating improvements in page latencies, we collect and analyze publicly visible HTTP headers that reveal the distribution of objects among the various levels of a major CDN's cache hierarchy. Through extensive experiments on 83 real-world web pages, we show that latency reductions of over 100 ms can be obtained for 30% of the popular pages, with even larger reductions for the less popular pages. Using anonymized server logs provided by the CDN, we show the feasibility of reducing capacity and staleness misses of critical objects by 60% with minimal increase in overall miss rates, and bandwidth overheads of under 0.02%.
Spatial heterogeneity enhances and modulates excitability in a mathematical model of the myometrium

The muscular layer of the uterus (myometrium) undergoes profound changes in global excitability prior to parturition. Here, a mathematical model of the myocyte network is developed to investigate the hypothesis that spatial heterogeneity is essential to the transition from local to global excitation which the myometrium undergoes just prior to birth. Each myometrial smooth muscle cell is represented by an element with FitzHugh–Nagumo dynamics. The cells are coupled through resistors that represent gap junctions. Spatial heterogeneity is introduced by means of stochastic variation in coupling strengths, with parameters derived from physiological data. Numerical simulations indicate that even modest increases in the heterogeneity of the system can amplify the ability of locally applied stimuli to elicit global excitation. Moreover, in networks driven by a pacemaker cell, global oscillations of excitation are impeded in fully connected and strongly coupled networks. The ability of a locally stimulated cell or pacemaker cell to excite the network is shown to be strongly dependent on the local spatial correlation structure of the couplings. In summary, spatial heterogeneity is a key factor in enhancing and modulating global excitability.
Evolutionary genetics of the proline permease gene (putP) and the control region of the proline utilization operon in populations of Salmonella and Escherichia coli

Virtually complete sequences (1,467 bp) of the proline permease gene (putP) and complete sequences (416 to 422 bp) of the control region of the proline utilization operon were determined for 16 strains of Salmonella, representing all eight subspecies, and 13 strains of Escherichia coli recovered from natural populations. Strains of Salmonella and E. coli differed, on average, at 16.3% of putP nucleotide sites and 17.5% of control region sites; the average difference between strains was much larger for Salmonella strains (4.6% of putP sites and 3.4% of control region sites) than for E. coli (2.4 and 0.9%, respectively). There was no difference in the distribution of polymorphic amino acid positions between the membrane-spanning and loop regions of the permease molecule, and rates of synonymous nucleotide substitution were virtually the same for the two domains. Statistical analysis yielded evidence of three probable cases of intragenic recombination, including the acquisition of a large segment of putP by strains of Salmonella subspecies VII from an unidentified source, the exchange of a 21-bp segment between two strains of E. coli, and the acquisition by one strain of E. coli of a cluster of 14 unique polymorphic control region sites from an unknown donor. An evolutionary tree for the putP and control region sequences was generally concordant with a tree for the gapA gene and a tree based on multilocus enzyme electrophoresis, thus providing evidence that for neither gene nor for enzyme genes in general has recombination occurred at rates sufficiently high or over regions sufficiently large to completely obscure phylogenetic relationships dependent on mutational divergence. It is suggested that the recombination rate varies among genes in relation to functional type, being highest for genes encoding cell surface and other proteins for which there is an adaptive advantage in structural diversity.
Variations in Star Excursion Balance Test Performance Between High School and Collegiate Football Players

Abstract McCann, RS, Kosik, KB, Beard, MQ, Terada, M, Pietrosimone, BG, and Gribble, PA. Variations in Star Excursion Balance Test performance between high school and collegiate football players. J Strength Cond Res 29(10): 2765–2770, 2015—The Star Excursion Balance Test (SEBT) is a reliable inexpensive tool used to assess dynamic postural control deficits and efficacy in the prediction of musculoskeletal injuries, but with little previous consideration for performance differences across age and skill levels. The purpose of this study was to examine differences in SEBT scores between high school and collegiate football players. Three-hundred eighteen high school football players and 180 National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I collegiate football players volunteered to participate. Star Excursion Balance Test scores were obtained bilaterally for anterior (ANT), posterolateral (PL), and posteromedial (PM) directions, and for an overall composite (COMP) score. The mean of 3 trials from each leg was normalized to stance leg length and presented as a percentage score. Bilaterally averaged scores were compared between high school and collegiate football players using separate independent t-tests. A multiple linear backward regression determined the amount of variance in SEBT scores explained by age, mass, and height. Compared with collegiate athletes, high school athletes had lower PL (72.8 ± 11.4% vs. 77.1 ± 10.2%; p < 0.001), PM (83.5 ± 10.2% vs. 86.7 ± 10.7%; p = 0.001), and COMP (75.4 ± 8.5% vs. 78.0 ± 7.4%; p = 0.001) scores. Anterior scores did not differ between high school (69.9 ± 7.9%) and collegiate (70.3 ± 7.1%) athletes (p = 0.545). Age, mass, and height were not meaningful contributors to ANT (R 2 = 0.089; p < 0.001), PL (R 2 = 0.032; p < 0.001), PM (R 2 = 0.030; p = 0.002), and COMP (R 2 = 0.048; p < 0.001) variances. Disparity between high school and collegiate athletes should be considered when using the SEBT to identify risk of or deficits related to lower extremity injury in football players.
Towards visualisation of sound-scapes through dimensionality reduction

Sound-scapes are useful for understanding our surrounding environments in applications such as security, source tracking or understanding human computer interaction. Accurate position or localisation information from sound-scape samples consists of many channels of high dimensional acoustic data. In this paper we demonstrate how to obtain a visual representation of sound-scapes by applying dimensionality reduction techniques to a range of artificially generated sound-scape datasets. Linear and non-linear dimensionality techniques were compared including principle component analysis (PCA), multi-dimensional scaling (MDS), locally linear embedding (LLE) and isometric feature mapping (ISOMAP). Results obtained by applying the dimensionality reduction techniques led to visual representations of affine positions of the sound source on its sound-scape manifold. These displayed clearly the order relationships of angles and intensities of the generated sound-scape samples. In a simple classification task with the artificial sound data, the successful combination of dimensionality reduction and classifier methods are demonstrated.
Enemy of the State: A State-Aware Black-Box Web Vulnerability Scanner

Black-box web vulnerability scanners are a popular choice for finding security vulnerabilities in web applications in an automated fashion. These tools operate in a point-and-shootmanner, testing any web application-- regardless of the server-side language--for common security vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, black-box tools suffer from a number of limitations, particularly when interacting with complex applications that have multiple actions that can change the application's state. If a vulnerability analysis tool does not take into account changes in the web application's state, it might overlook vulnerabilities or completely miss entire portions of the web application. We propose a novel way of inferring the web application's internal state machine from the outside--that is, by navigating through the web application, observing differences in output, and incrementally producing a model representing the web application's state. We utilize the inferred state machine to drive a black-box web application vulnerability scanner. Our scanner traverses a web application's state machine to find and fuzz user-input vectors and discover security flaws. We implemented our technique in a prototype crawler and linked it to the fuzzing component from an open-source web vulnerability scanner. We show that our state-aware black-box web vulnerability scanner is able to not only exercise more code of the web application, but also discover vulnerabilities that other vulnerability scanners miss.
Managing Technical Debt

In 1992, Ward Cunningham published a report at OOPSLA (Object-oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications) in which he proposed the concept of technical debt. He defines it in terms of immature code: "Shipping first-time code is like going into debt. " Technical debt isn’t limited to first-time code, however. There are many ways and reasons (not all bad) to take on technical debt.
Reversion of developmental mode in insects: evolution from long germband to short germband in the polyembrionic wasp Macrocentrus cingulum Brischke

Germband size in insects has played a central role in our understanding of insect patterning mechanisms and their evolution. The polarity of evolutionary change in insect patterning has been viewed so far as the unidirectional shift from the ancestral short germband patterning of basal hemimetabolous insects to the long germband patterning observed in most modern Holometabola. However, some orders of holometabolic insects display both short and long germband development, though the absence of a clear phylogenetic context does not permit definite conclusions on the polarity of change. Derived hymenoptera, that is, bees and wasps, represent a classical textbook example of long germband development. Yet, in some wasps putative short germband development has been described correlating with lifestyle changes, namely with evolution of endoparasitism and polyembryony. To address the potential reversion from long to short germband, we focused on the family Braconidae, which displays ancestral long germband development, and examined the derived polyembryonic braconid Macrocentrus cingulum. Using SEM analysis of M. cingulum embryogenesis coupled with analyses of embryonic patterning markers, we show that this wasp evolved short germband embryogenesis secondarily, in a way that is reminiscent of embryogenesis in the beetle Tribolium castaneum. This work shows that the evolution of germband size in insects is a reversible process that may correlate with other life‐history traits and suggests broader implications on the mechanisms and evolvability of insect development.
Body images and breasted experience: Toward better clinical conversations about mastectomy

Research on mastectomy recommends better preoperative counseling to manage struggles with body image. This article problematizes the popular concept of body image and instead describes body imaging as an embodied and ongoing process that involves a multiplicity of body images. More preoperative information cannot ensure an easy shift to favorable body images because body imaging resists and exceeds the scope of medicine and the patient’s cognitive anticipation. Thus, medical professionals should avoid decontextualizing or medicalizing body image and instead recognize that body image construction is not simply an intellectual reframing but develops in everyday embodied living.
Automatic Identification of Remote Environments

A system that can process sensory information collected during telemanipulation tasks in order to automatically identify properties of the remote environment has many potential applications. These include generating model-based simulations for training operators in critical procedures and improving real-time performance when time delays are large. The research issues involved in developing such an identification system are explored, focusing on properties that can be identified from remote manipulator motion and force data. As a case study, a simple block-stacking task performed with a teleoperated two-fingered planar hand is considered. An algorithm is presented which automatically segments the data collected during the task, given only a general description of the temporal sequence of task events. Using the segmented data, the algorithm then successfully estimates the weight, width, height, and coefficient of friction of the two blocks handled during the task. This case study highlights the broader research issues which must be addressed in automatic property identification.
Development of a Recombinant Protein-Based Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay for Diagnosis of Mycoplasma bovis Infection in Cattle

ABSTRACT Mycoplasma bovis causes a range of diseases in cattle, including mastitis, arthritis, and pneumonia. However, accurate serological diagnosis of infection remains problematic. The studies described here aimed to identify an antigen that might be used to develop a more specific and sensitive diagnostic assay. A 226-kDa immunogenic protein was consistently detected in Western blots by antibodies in sera from calves experimentally infected with M. bovis. This protein was shown to be a membrane protein with lipase activity and was named mycoplasma immunogenic lipase A (MilA). Different regions of MilA were expressed in Escherichia coli as glutathione S-transferase (GST) fusion proteins and recombinant products from the amino-terminal end shown to have strong immunoreactivity with M. bovis-specific bovine sera. The most immunoreactive fusion protein, GST-MilA-ab, was used to develop indirect IgM and IgG enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs). The IgM ELISA detected M. bovis-specific IgM antibody 2 weeks after infection with 97.1% sensitivity and had a specificity of 63.3%, while the IgG ELISA detected M. bovis-specific IgG 3 weeks after infection with 92.86% sensitivity and had a specificity of 98.7%, demonstrating that the IgG ELISA has potential for use as a sensitive and specific assay for detecting infection in cattle.
Monitoring the Diagnostic Process on an Inpatient Neurology Service

The Institute of Medicine report Improving Diagnosis in Health Care called for tools to monitor physicians’ diagnostic process. We addressed this need by developing a tool for clinicians to record and analyze their diagnostic process. The tool was a secure web application in which clinicians used a structured grading system to assess the relative impact of clinical, laboratory, and neuroimaging data for every new diagnosis. Four neurohospitalists used the tool for 6.5 months on a general neurology ward service at a single tertiary-level teaching hospital. Process measures of tool use included number of diagnoses entered, time spent on each data entry, and concordance of diagnoses compared to the medical record. We also aggregated the data across clinicians to examine the average process scores across common inpatient disorders. The 4 clinicians entered 254 new diagnoses that took approximately 3 minutes per patient. In 50 randomly chosen cases, the neurohospitalists’ diagnoses entered into the tool agreed with 92% of diagnoses in the medical record, which was better than the agreement between billing code and medical record diagnoses (74%). The diagnostic process varied across disease categories, showing a spectrum of clinical-dominant (eg, headache), laboratory-dominant (eg, encephalitis), and neuroimaging-dominant (eg, stroke) disorders. This study demonstrated the feasibility of a clinician-driven diagnostic process monitoring system, along with preliminary characterization of the process for common disorders. The tracking of diagnostic process has the potential to promote reflection on clinical practice, deconstruct neurologists’ clinical decision-making, and improve health-care safety.
Calcium hypothesis of aging and dementia

Printing members comprising a mosaic printing head are driven by flexural bending elements which are electrically actuated to produce a desired printed pattern. The bending elements may take the form of piezoelectric strips or diaphragm pieces which are supported by bearings located at nodal oscillation points of the elements. The printing members when actuated protrude from a bore in one end of a printing head housing. The printing head housing is mounted for transverse movement along guide rails.
Study on the Envelope Fusion Proteins of Baculovirus

GP64 homologies, which are found in Group I NPVs, and F proteins (Fa proteins), which are utilized in Group II NPVs, are required for virion entry into the cell. And Group I NPV also encodes homologue of Fa protein, and was named Fb protein. However, Fb protein dose not appear to mediate cell fusion. To further researching these important viral envelope proteins, the expression of GP64 and Fb proteins in Group I NPVs were studied by Real-time quantitative PCR. The results indicated that Fb is not the evolution redundancy gene but an important function gene. In addition, we transfected the fragments of CbNPV Fa and ie-1 into different insect cell lines, and found that CbNPV Fa and ie-1 could not express in BmN and T.ni High Five cells but could express in Sf-9 and Spli cells.
Improved proposal generation method applying bayesian integration

We proposed a Bayesian farmework with the goal to enhance the performance of region proposals generated by Edgeboxes for vehicles. We proposed an innovative objectness measure that combines several geometrical characteristics of proposals into a Bayesian framework. Our method exploits Bayesian to respectively integrate the initial score, aspect ratio and several 3D features related to depth information including the object real size, the distance to road. The accuracy of our approach is significantly improved in comparison to Edgeboxes evaluated on the challenging KITTI benchmark. The final result shows that the combined four features of them can perform better than any others. Our approach can reach 96.24% recall at overlap threshold of 0.5 for only 100 object candidates tested on the easy dataset.
Fucoidan Extract Enhances the Anti-Cancer Activity of Chemotherapeutic Agents in MDA-MB-231 and MCF-7 Breast Cancer Cells

Fucoidan, a fucose-rich polysaccharide isolated from brown alga, is currently under investigation as a new anti-cancer compound. In the present study, fucoidan extract (FE) from Cladosiphon navae-caledoniae Kylin was prepared by enzymatic digestion. We investigated whether a combination of FE with cisplatin, tamoxifen or paclitaxel had the potential to improve the therapeutic efficacy of cancer treatment. These co-treatments significantly induced cell growth inhibition, apoptosis, as well as cell cycle modifications in MDA-MB-231 and MCF-7 cells. FE enhanced apoptosis in cancer cells that responded to treatment with three chemotherapeutic drugs with downregulation of the anti-apoptotic proteins Bcl-xL and Mcl-1. The combination treatments led to an obvious decrease in the phosphorylation of ERK and Akt in MDA-MB-231 cells, but increased the phosphorylation of ERK in MCF-7 cells. In addition, we observed that combination treatments enhanced intracellular ROS levels and reduced glutathione (GSH) levels in breast cancer cells, suggesting that induction of oxidative stress was an important event in the cell death induced by the combination treatments.
Postpartum depression risk factors: A narrative review

Postpartum depression is a debilitating mental disorder with a high prevalence. The aim of this study was review of the related studies. In this narrative review, we report studies that investigated risk factors of postpartum depression by searching the database, Scopus, PubMed, ScienceDirect, Uptodate, Proquest in the period 2000-2015 published articles about the factors associated with postpartum depression were assessed in Farsi and English. The search strategy included a combination of keywords include postpartum depression and risk factors or obstetrical history, social factors, or biological factors. Literature review showed that risk factors for postpartum depression in the area of economic and social factors, obstetrical history, and biological factors, lifestyle and history of mental illness detected. Data from this study can use for designing a screening tools for high-risk pregnant women and for designing a prevention programs.