Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Features Based on Fourier-Bessel Expansion for Application of Speaker Identification System

A compact representation of speech is possible using Bessel functions because of the similarity between voiced speech and the Bessel functions. Both voiced speech and the Bessel functions exhibit quasiperiodicity and decaying amplitude with time. In this paper, we have developed various feature extraction techniques using zero-order Bessel functions as basis functions for the task of closed-set textindependent speaker identification system. The features are tested on TIMIT, CHAINS and IIIT-Hyderabad speech databases. The performance of the proposed feature extraction techniques is compared with the results obtained using MFCC features. A generic Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) classification system is used for speaker modeling. The proposed extraction techniques provide results comparable to the widely used MFCC.
The comprehensive care team: a controlled trial of outpatient palliative medicine consultation.

BACKGROUND Little is known about the use of palliative care for outpatients who continue to pursue treatment of their underlying disease or whether outpatient palliative medicine consultation teams improve clinical outcomes. METHODS We conducted a year-long controlled trial involving 50 intervention patients and 40 control patients in a general medicine outpatient clinic. Primary care physicians referred patients with advanced congestive heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or cancer who had a prognosis ranging from 1 to 5 years. In the intervention group, the primary care physicians received multiple palliative care team consultations, and patients received advance care planning, psychosocial support, and family caregiver training. Clinical and health care utilization outcomes were assessed at 6 and 12 months. RESULTS Groups were similar at baseline. Similar numbers of patients died during the study year (P =.63). After the intervention, intervention group patients had less dyspnea (P =.01) and anxiety (P =.05) and improved sleep quality (P =.05) and spiritual well-being (P =.007), but no change in pain (P =.41), depression (P =.28), quality of life (P =.43), or satisfaction with care (P =.26). Few patients received recommended analgesic or antidepressant medications. Intervention patients had decreased primary care (P =.03) and urgent care visits (P =.04) without an increase in emergency department visits, specialty clinic visits, hospitalizations, or number of days in the hospital. There were no differences in charges (P =.80). CONCLUSIONS Consultation by a palliative medicine team led to improved patient outcomes in dyspnea, anxiety, and spiritual well-being, but failed to improve pain or depression. Palliative care for seriously ill outpatients can be effective, but barriers to implementation must be explored.
MIB design and application for source address validation improvement protocol

In this paper, we present SAVI-MIB, a management information base (MIB) designed to support configuration and monitoring of SAVI protocol which can provide fine granularity source address validation. Objects are defined to meet the detailed management requirement of local networks and accommodate different scenarios. SAVI-MIB is implemented in switches and deployed in some campus networks. Objects of SAVI-MIB are retrieved and used to help find configuration errors in SAVI deployment and profile behavior of end hosts. SAVI-MIB can also be used in parameter optimization, auto configuration, anomaly detection, etc.
Service and Experiment: Towards a Perpetual Sensor Network Testbed without Backchannel

The sensor network testbeds available today rely on a communication channel different from the mote radio - a backchannel - to facilitate mote reprogramming, health monitoring and performance analysis. Such backchannels are either supported as wired communication channels (USB or Ethernet), or via an extra board coupled to the mote under test and thus introduce significant constraint on the testbed setup and on the mote power budget. With Greenlab, we wish to study the performance behavior of outdoor sensor networks where energy is harvested from the environment. We thus cannot rely on a backchannel. In this paper, we present the design of the central mechanisms needed to support Greenlab and their implementation in TinyOS. These mechanisms are based on a dichotomy between a service mode, where each mote is participating in testbed management, and an experimentation mode, where each mote is fully participating in a user-defined experiment. We evaluate performance by analyzing the overhead our approach introduces.
Clinical Aspects and Pathophysiology of Inflammatory Bowel Disease

SUMMARY The chronic inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, are recognized as important causes of gastrointestinal disease in children and adults. In this review we delineate the clinical manifestations and diagnostic features of IBD. In addition, we summarize important recent advances in our understanding of the immune mediators of intestinal inflammation. This information has led to new therapeutic approaches in IBD. Further, we discuss the considerable data that point to the significance of genetic factors in the development of IBD and the genetic loci which have been implicated through genomewide searches. The commensal bacterial flora also appears to be a critical element, particularly in regards to Crohn's disease, although the precise role of the bacteria in the disease manifestations remains unclear. Current investigations promise to yield fresh insights in these areas.
Human evaluation of affective body motions expressed by a small-sized humanoid robot: Comparison between elder people and university students

Body motion expression is one of the useful methods that robots present their emotional states toward users. Since emotions themselves have cultural dependency, however, it is estimated that effects of affective body motions depend on users' demographic factors such as gender and age. In order to clarify this dependence, a psychological experiment was conducted to investigate age differences on evaluation of affective body motions which were implemented into a small-sized humanoid robot. The results showed differences between younger and elder people on identification of emotions, body parts paid attention to, and impression of motion speed and magnitude for the affective body motions of the robot. The paper also discusses about the implications.
Valuation of reliability assessment for power systems in terms of distribution system, A case study

Supplying electrical energy to the load on demand, economically and with acceptable levels of reliability and service quality is the main task of a distribution system. Energy distribution reliability is important in the competition conditions in electricity markets because consumers directly supply energy. Therefore, it is not enough to estimate how reliable the distribution system is at present and to estimate the future reliability change in order to make optimum planning decisions, but also to provide the necessary amount of spinning reserve. The past reliability performance of distribution system can be quantified using a wide range of indices. This study is concerned with evaluating the reliability indices for only part of a network. Even though this study is limited due to unavailability as well as the inaccessibility of full and correct data over a sufficient period for analysis, it can give a clue and motive for further evaluation of the reliability of network.
Mutation analysis of the p53, APC, and p16 genes in the Barrett's oesophagus, dysplasia, and adenocarcinoma.

AIMS: To study the loss of heterozygosity and the presence of mutations at the p53, p16/CDKN2, and APC genes in Barrett's oesophagus, low grade dysplastic oesophageal epithelium, and adenocarcinoma of the oesophagus; to relate the presence of alterations at these genes with the progression from Barrett's oesophagus to adenocarcinoma. METHODS: DNA was extracted from paraffin blocks containing tissue from Barrett's oesophagus (12 samples), low grade dysplasia (15 cases), and adenocarcinoma (14 cases). Loss of heterozygosity (LOH) at the p53, p16, and APC genes was determined by comparing the autoradiographic patterns of several microsatellite markers between the normal tissue and the malignant tissue counterpart. SSCP was used to determine the presence of mutations at p53 (exons 5 to 8), p16 (exon 2), and APC. Homozygous deletion of the p16 gene was defined through polymerase chain reaction followed by Southern blot. RESULTS: LOH at the p53, p16, and APC genes was not observed in Barrett's oesophagus without dysplasia, and increased to 90% (p53), 89% (p16), and 60% (APC) in the adenocarcinomas. The p53 gene was mutated in only two adenocarcinomas (codons 175 and 245). In one case a mutation at the APC gene (codon 1297) was found. No patient had mutation at the second exon of p16. However, this gene was homozygously deleted in three of the 12 adenocarcinomas. CONCLUSIONS: The tumour suppressor genes p53, p16, and APC are often deleted in adenocarcinomas derived from Barrett's oesophagus. Mutations at these genes are also found in the adenocarcinomas, including the homozygous deletion of the p16 gene. However, the absence of genetic alterations in the Barrett's oesophagus and the low grade dysplastic epithelia suggest that mutations at these genes develop later in the progression from Barrett's oesophagus to adenocarcinoma.
Sunscreen Penetration of Human Skin and Related Keratinocyte Toxicity after Topical Application

Sunscreen skin penetration and safety assessment should be considered together in order to ensure that in vitro cytotoxicity studies examine relevant doses of these organic chemical UV filters to which viable epidermal cells are realistically exposed. In this study, we sought to determine whether sufficient topically applied sunscreens penetrated into human viable epidermis to put the local keratinocyte cell populations at risk of toxicity. The penetration and retention of five commonly used sunscreen agents (avobenzone, octinoxate, octocrylene, oxybenzone and padimate O) in human skin was evaluated after application in mineral oil to isolated human epidermal membranes. Sunscreen concentration–human keratinocyte culture response curves were then defined using changes in cell morphology and proliferation (DNA synthesis using radiolabelled thymidine uptake studies) as evidence of sunscreens causing toxicity. Following 24 h of human epidermal exposure to sunscreens, detectable amounts of all sunscreens were present in the stratum corneum and viable epidermis, with epidermal penetration most evident with oxybenzone. The concentrations of each sunscreen found in human viable epidermis after topical application, adjusting for skin partitioning and binding effects, were at least 5-fold lower, based on levels detected in viable epidermal cells, than those appearing to cause toxicity in cultured human keratinocytes. It is concluded that the human viable epidermal levels of sunscreens are too low to cause any significant toxicity to the underlying human keratinocytes.
Implementation of Emotional Learning for Cognitive Tutoring Agents

We here describe some essential and fundamental learning mechanisms, both "conscious and unconscious". The proposed architecture is based on functional "consciousness" mechanisms. In this paper, we suggest an emotional learning mechanism (ELM) model, which can both learn new events and influence different types of "conscious" and "unconscious" learning. This will increase the agent's autonomy in unknown or changing environments, and thus improve its fitness. This architecture is inspired by mechanisms believed to exist in humans [6].
Productive human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) infection of nonproliferating human monocytes

Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) infection of T lymphocytes requires cellular proliferation and DNA synthesis. Human monocytes were shown to have low DNA synthesis rates, yet the monocytotropic BaL isolate of HIV-1 was able to infect these cells efficiently. Monocytes that were irradiated to assure no DNA synthesis could also be readily infected with HIV-1BaL. Such infections were associated with the integration of HIV-1BaL DNA into the high molecular weight, chromosomal DNA of monocytes. Thus, normal, nonproliferating monocytes differ from T lymphocytes in that a productive HIV-1 infection can occur independently of cellular DNA synthesis. These results suggest that normal nonproliferating mononuclear phagocytes, which are relatively resistant to the destructive effects of this virus, may serve as persistent and productive reservoirs for HIV-1 in vivo.
Topic discovery based on dual EM merging

Facing the enormous text on the Internet, automatic topic discovery out of large text corpus becomes an important task for advanced intelligence information analysis, such as opinion recognition, Web user interest analysis, etc. Although many topic mining methods have shown great success in dealing with topic-based analysis tasks, it is desired to discover meaningful topic descriptions for informatics analysis. To avoid words with different granularity to explain a topic, a mechanism for separating text corpus into two subsets with equal semantic topics is proposed. EM algorithm is employed to infer topics models for the subsets. Then a merging process is devised to generate topic descriptions based on the output of EM. Experiments on standard AP text corpus shows that the proposed topic discovery method can achieve better perplexity, which means better ability in predicting topics. Furthermore, a test of topics extraction on a collection of news documents about recent Expo 2010 Shanghai China shows that the description key words in topics are more meaningful and reasonable than that of tradition topic mining method.
Exploiting Non-Causal CPU-State Information for Energy-Efficient Mobile Cooperative Computing

Scavenging the idling computation resources at the enormous number of mobile devices, ranging from small IoT devices to powerful laptop computers, can provide a powerful platform for local mobile cloud computing. The vision can be realized by peer-to-peer cooperative computing between edge devices, referred to as co-computing. This paper exploits the non-causal helper’s CPU-state information to design energy-efficient co-computing policies for scavenging time-varying spare computation resources at peer mobiles. Specifically, we consider a co-computing system where a user offloads computation of input data to a helper. The helper controls the offloading process for the objective of minimizing the user’s energy consumption based on a predicted helper’s CPU-idling profile that specifies the amount of available computation resource for co-computing. Consider the scenario that the user has one-shot input-data arrival and the helper buffers offloaded bits. The problem for energy-efficient co-computing is formulated as two sub-problems: the slave problem corresponding to adaptive offloading and the master one to data partitioning. Given a fixed offloaded data size, the adaptive offloading aims at minimizing the energy consumption for offloading by controlling the offloading rate under the deadline and buffer constraints. By deriving the necessary and sufficient conditions for the optimal solution, we characterize the structure of the optimal policies and propose algorithms for computing the policies. Furthermore, we show that the problem of optimal data partitioning for offloading and local computing at the user is convex, admitting a simple solution using the sub-gradient method. Finally, the developed design approach for co-computing is extended to the scenario of bursty data arrivals at the user accounting for data causality constraints. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.
A longitudinal study of Caenorhabditis elegans larvae reveals a novel locomotion switch, regulated by Gαs signaling

Despite their simplicity, longitudinal studies of invertebrate models are rare. We thus sought to characterize behavioral trends of Caenorhabditis elegans, from the mid fourth larval stage through the mid young adult stage. We found that, outside of lethargus, animals exhibited abrupt switching between two distinct behavioral states: active wakefulness and quiet wakefulness. The durations of epochs of active wakefulness exhibited non-Poisson statistics. Increased Gαs signaling stabilized the active wakefulness state before, during and after lethargus. In contrast, decreased Gαs signaling, decreased neuropeptide release, or decreased CREB activity destabilized active wakefulness outside of, but not during, lethargus. Taken together, our findings support a model in which protein kinase A (PKA) stabilizes active wakefulness, at least in part through two of its downstream targets: neuropeptide release and CREB. However, during lethargus, when active wakefulness is strongly suppressed, the native role of PKA signaling in modulating locomotion and quiescence may be minor. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.00782. 001
Cross-Sectional Predictability : Rare Events in Heterogeneously Connected Orchards

We study an equilibrium asset pricing model with several Lucas (1978) trees subject to rare disasters, where the agent has incomplete information about the state of an underlying common factor and learns from the events occurring to each tree. Contrary to similar asset pricing models with learning, we find that learning and rare disasters can help to explain empirical equity premia and stock returns volatility, which are not bounded as a function of the risk aversion. Moreover, we find that learning helps to generate additional cross-sectional dispersion of returns relative to pure aggregate consumption risk models with complete information, thereby enhancing the scarce ability of some of these models to explain the cross-section of excess returns. Finally, the model provides a simple setting to study the asset pricing implications of orchards characterized by heterogeneous feed-back effects. JEL classification: G12, G13, D50
A Hybrid renewable DC microgrid voltage control

A DC microgrid is a hybrid renewable system that renewable sources supply the average load demand, while storage and nonrenewable generation maintain the power balance in the presence of the stochastic renewable sources. The control strategy can realize the optimal allocation of power by using DC bus signal and the bus voltage is controlled by PV converter, battery converter and fuel cell converter unaided and time-sharing. It can minimize economic cost of the overall system by giving the low-cost solar energy the first priority. At the same time, the system also has the advantages of high stability, simple control structure and high voltage bus. This paper expatiates on the system's structure and control law by analyzing a distributed hybrid system, describes MPPT control, takes into account the situation that the system operates under a diverse load and takes effective control to limit the influence of the diverse load. Finally, the implemental results are given to verify the correctness of the control method.
THE ROLE OF NICOTINIC ACETYLCHOLINE RECEPTORS IN ETHANOL RESPONSIVE BEHAVIORS AND DRINKING

THE ROLE OF NICOTINIC ACETYLCHOLINE RECEPTORS IN ETHANOL RESPONSIVE BEHAVIORS AND DRINKING By Anton Jerome Dawson, B.S., B.A. A Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University. Virginia Commonwealth University, 2013 Major Director: M. Imad Damaj, PhD Professor, Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology The high co-morbidity between alcohol (ethanol) and nicotine abuse suggests that nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs), which are thought to underlie nicotine dependence, may also be involved in alcohol dependence. A genomic region that encodes the α5* nAChR subtype has recently been shown to be associated with alcohol dependence phenotypes in humans. Therefore, the aim of this study was to determine the role of α5* nAChRs in ethanol-responsive behaviors upon acute administration in mice as well as in their drinking behavior. We conducted tests in mice lacking the α5 coding gene (Chrna5) in ethanol-induced hypothermia, hypnosis, anxiolysis, and conditioned place preference. We also assessed drinking behavior in these mice using models of voluntary ethanol consumption, two-bottle choice preference and intermittent access, as well as acute binge drinking behavior in the Drinking-in-the-Dark paradigm.
Research Progress of Lattice Bases Reduction Algorithms

As a linear structure, cryptosystems based on lattice has the incomparable advantage of lower energy consumption, so in the future they will also have a wide range of use for intelligent terminal. Compared with traditional public key cryptosystem: RSA, ECC, the based lattice cryptosystems can be proved secure, it have shown the important role in post-quantum cryptography era. The core of the algorithm's problems are base reduction, for 20 years, being inspired LLL lattice reduction algorithm, there are some stronger, and faster algorithm, no matter in accurate, or approximate, they has an important role to cryptanalysis and cryptosystem's design. This article attempts to give a survey of state-of-the-art lattice reduction algorithm.
International Czech and Slovak cooperation in the treatment of patients with differentiated thyroid cancer.

BACKGROUND The aim of this paper is to present our experience concerning cooperation in the treatment of Slovak patients with differentiated thyroid cancer in Slovak and Czech hospitals. The objectives of this study were to demonstrate the means of this cooperation and the results of therapy. MATERIAL AND METHODS From September 1991 to October 2005 in the Department of Nuclear Medicine in Ostrava 357 patients from the Slovak Republic with differentiated thyroid cancers (follicular and papillary) underwent complex therapy. They were diagnosed and operated due to the cancer (near-total thyroidectomy and removal of lymph node metastases) in Slovak hospitals. Then they were sent to the Department of Nuclear Medicine in Ostrava in the Czech Republic. In this department a radioiodine ablation of thyroid remnants, by means of the treatment amount of radioiodine of a standard activity of 3.7 GBq, was performed, and then a suppression and substitution therapy of thyroid hormones was started. After 3-6 months some patients were examined by means of diagnostic whole body scintigraphy after application of 300 MBq 131I. Some patients were treated by means of a standard activity of 7.4 GBq 131I and after 5 days whole body scintigraphy (WBS) was performed. In both of these groups of patients the diagnostic or therapeutic radioiodine application was done after withdrawal of thyroid hormone treatment. If thyroglobulin levels were low and WBSs were negative, patients were followed up in the Department of Nuclear Medicine in Martin. Patients with radioiodine accumulated metastases were again treated with radioiodine in Ostrava. If indicated, external radiation therapy targeted on the neck and upper mediastinum was performed in the Slovak Republic, in the University Hospital in Martin. Newly formed lymph node metastases were surgically treated in Slovakia, too. Generally we have very good treatment results. Also, economically our partnership is cost effective. Our collaboration also successfully continues after entrance of the Slovak Republic and the Czech Republic to the European Union in 2004. CONCLUSIONS The results of this multi-centre study show that international Czech and Slovak cooperation in the complex therapy of patients with differentiated thyroid cancers is successful, with high efficacy. The treatment results were very similar to therapeutic results in our patients from the Czech Republic.