Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Nutrition in Bone Health Revisited: A Story Beyond Calcium

Osteoporosis is a complex, multi-factorial condition characterized by reduced bone mass and impaired micro-architectural structure, leading to an increased susceptibility to fractures. Although most of the bone strength (including bone mass and quality) is genetically determined, many other factors (nutritional, environmental and life-style) also influence bone. Nutrition is important modifiable factor in the development and maintenance of bone mass and the prevention and treatment of osteoporosis. Approximately 80–90% of bone mineral content is comprised of calcium and phosphorus. Other dietary components, such as protein, magnesium, zinc, copper, iron, fluoride, vitamins D, A, C, and K are required for normal bone metabolism, while other ingested compounds not usually categorized as nutrients (e.g. caffeine, alcohol, phytoestrogens) may also impact bone health. Unraveling the interaction between different factors; nutritional, environmental, life style, and heredity help us to understand the complexity of the development of osteoporosis and subsequent fractures. This paper reviews the role of dietary components on bone health throughout different stages of life. Each nutrient is discussed separately, however the fact that many nutrients are co-dependent and simultaneously interact with genetic and environmental factors should not be neglected. The complexity of the interactions is probably the reason why there are controversial or inconsistent findings regarding the contribution of a single or a group of nutrients in bone health.
Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology

Victorian Britain, with its maritime economy and strong links between government and scientific enterprises, founded an office to collect meteorological statistics in 1854 in an effort to foster a modern science of the weather. But as the office turned to prediction rather than data collection, the fragile science became a public spectacle, with its forecasts open to daily scrutiny in the newspapers. And meteorology came to assume a pivotal role in debates about the responsibility of scientists and the authority of science. Studying meteorology as a means to examine the historical identity of prediction, Katharine Anderson offers here an engrossing account of forecasting that analyzes scientific practice and ideas about evidence, the organization of science in public life, and the articulation of scientific values in Victorian culture. In "Predicting the Weather," Anderson grapples with fundamental questions about the function, intelligibility, and boundaries of scientific work while exposing the public expectations that shaped the practice of science during this period. A cogent analysis of the remarkable history of weather forecasting in Victorian Britain, "Predicting the Weather" will be essential reading for scholars interested in the public dimensions of science.
ORTHOGONAL APPROXIMATELY HARMONIC PROJECTION FOR FACE RECOGNITION

Face recognition has attracted growing attention for applications such as identity authentication and human-computer interface. However, a major challenge of face recognition is that the captured face image often lies in a high-dimensional feature space. To overcome the curse of dimensionality problem and improve the performance of face recognition, a novel manifold learning algorithm called orthogonal approximately harmonic projection (OMMP) is proposed in this paper. The OAHP algorithm is based on the harmonic projection (AHP) and explicitly considers the local geometrical structure and cluster structure of the face space. Meanwhile, the OAHP method can produce orthogonal basis vectors to preserve the metric structure of face space, which greatly enhances the discriminating power of the reduced lower-dimensional feature space. Experimental results on three face databases show that the proposed OAHP performs much better than related algorithms in terms of recognition rate.
Distributed Graph Clustering by Load Balancing

Graph clustering is a fundamental computational problem with a number of applications in algorithm design, machine learning, data mining, and analysis of social networks. Over the past decades, researchers have proposed a number of algorithmic design methods for graph clustering. However, most of these methods are based on complicated spectral techniques or convex optimisation, and cannot be applied directly for clustering many networks that occur in practice, whose information is often collected on different sites. Designing a simple and distributed clustering algorithm is of great interest, and has wide applications for processing big datasets. In this paper we present a simple and distributed algorithm for graph clustering: for a wide class of graphs that are characterised by a strong cluster-structure, our algorithm finishes in a poly-logarithmic number of rounds, and recovers a partition of the graph close to an optimal partition. The main component of our algorithm is an application of the random matching model of load balancing, which is a fundamental protocol in distributed computing and has been extensively studied in the past 20 years. Hence, our result highlights an intrinsic and interesting connection between graph clustering and load balancing. At a technical level, we present a purely algebraic result characterising the early behaviours of load balancing processes for graphs exhibiting a cluster-structure. We believe that this result can be further applied to analyse other gossip processes, such as rumour spreading and averaging processes.
Segmental sinusoidal model for speech coding

Speech signal could be represented as a combination of sinusoidal signal with infinite combination of amplitude, frequency and phase. On quantization based on peak to peak, speech signal is detected its peaks, both of positive and negative. Then time distance between peak to peak would be quantized. In this paper, we explain a new method to quantize the speech signal which is segmented into peak to peak based on sinusoidal modeling. The part of signal between positive peak and following negative peak or vice versa is estimated as a half period of sinusoidal signal. Magnitude between peaks is the double of the ed sine amplitude. The experiment result showed that synthesis signal quality is reduced on the high frequency interval. Human perception due to the synthesis signal is good enough, because of less sensitivity human perception above 1 kHz.
Quantitative motor assessment of upperlimb after unilateral stroke: A preliminary feasibility study with H-Man, a planar robot

This paper presents the results of a preliminary assessment study to investigate baseline performance measures and differences between control and stroke participants during reaching tasks in three directions. H-Man, planar robot is, used for this purpose. Thirteen healthy and two chronic stroke patients with upper limb motor impairment participated in the study. Assessment of performance was made through three task parameters (smoothness of movement, peak velocity, and time to peak velocity). The results from healthy subjects indicate no significant difference between different directions, however significant differences are observed in stroke participants across different directions for smoothness measure (Spectral Arc Length). All the three measures show significant differences between control and Stroke participants for corresponding directions.
NetTrust – Socio-Technical Solution to Phishing

NetTrust is a system that informs individual browsing and information-sharing decisions by leveraging first, second and third party information. Net Trust uses first person browsing history to create implicit ratings as well as enabling explicit ratings and comments. NetTrust similarly provides information from a user-selected social network by sharing ratings from browsing histories and annotations. This second person information is similar to social browsing. Net Trust integrates third party ratings into the display these individual ratings. NetTrust uses social trust to enable informed human trust decisions. NetTrust allows an individual to select their own sources of social trust to rate particular sites as trustworthy (or not). Also, NetTrust allows an individual to select their own trusted authoritative sources of information from a market of third party ratings agencies. Of course, Net Trust is useful only to the extent that it is usable and that it informs trust behaviors. After a usability study we conclude that Net Trust is usable, sometimes even enjoyable, but could be improved. We detail both the system and the usability tests in this work. Author
Occluded Pedestrian Tracking Using Body-Part Tracklets

Detection of pedestrians under occlusion has been addressed previously with body-part-based approaches, in particular using the generalised Hough transform. Tracking is usually addressed by first detecting pedestrians in each frame independently and then tracking the detections over time. This paper presents a novel variation on the generalised Hough approach: tracking is performed first, and detection second. Robust features on a pedestrian are tracked over short time-frames to form tracklets. Not only do tracklets reduce false alarms due to unstable features, but they provide temporal correspondence information in Hough space. Consequently tracking can be posed as optimal path finding in Hough space and efficiently solved using the Viterbi algorithm. The paper also presents an improvement to the random Hough forest training method by using multi-objective optimisation.
Pay, politics, and economic performance in Ireland, 1970-1987

Part 1 The logic of "concertative" economic policies: the context of "concertation" in post-war political economy the logic of trade union action conditions facilitating concertation. Part 2 The international context of the Irish case: political adaptation in small open economies the economic context of pay policy in Ireland collective bargaining as a focus of policy interest. Part 3 The politicization of collective bargaining: the centralized agreements 1970-1980 centralized agreements and government's input. Part 4 Evaluating the centralized pay agreements: performance in areas of employer and trade union interest the role of government. Part 5 The trade union movement - capacity for strategy and problems of collective action: collective identity and collective action the structure of the trade union movement ICTU as a strategic actor implications for trade union strategy the intensification of local bargaining activity. Part 6 Employers' associations and centralized bargaining: associability and collective purpose in employers' associations membership and functions of employers' associations implications for employers' solidarity employers' associations and government policy. Part 7 Economic interests and party politics: the significance of the role of government the parliamentary representation of interests non-ideological politics and the electoral system priorities in public policy the dominance of the concertative approach. Part 8 Collective bargaining in the 1980s: employers' experiences of collective bargaining in recession the trade unions' responses to recession government's experiences - fiscal and pay policy the approach to a new centralized agreement. Conclusion: structural change in the small open economy dependent development in the small open economy centralized agreements and class politics public policy and trade union strategy.
COMPARISON OF THE CLASSICAL BMO WITH THE BMO SPACES ASSOCIATED WITH OPERATORS AND APPLICATIONS

Let L be a generator of a semigroup satisfying the Gaussian upper bounds. In this paper, we study further a new BMOL space associated with L which was intro- duced recently by Duong and Yan. We discuss applications of the new BMOL spaces in the theory of singular integration such as BMOL estimates and interpolation results for fractional powers, purely imaginary powers and spectral multipliers of self adjoint operators. We also demonstrate that the space BMOL might coincide with or might be essentially different from the classical BMO space.
Premalignant Prostate Tumors Epithelial FGF 9 to Stromal FGFR 3 in Two-Compartment Directionally Specific Paracrine Communication Mediated by Updated

Tissue homeostasis in normal prostate and two-compartment nonmalignant prostate tumors depends on harmonious two-way communications between epithelial and stromal compartments. Within the fibroblast growth factor (FGF) family, signaling to an epithelial cell-specific FGF receptor (FGFR) 2IIIb-heparan sulfate complex from stromal-specific FGF7 and FGF10 delivers directionally specific instruction from stroma to epithelium without autocrine interference. Using a two-compartment transplantable prostate tumor model in which survival of stromal cells in vivo depends on epithelial cells, we show that signaling from epithelial FGF9 to stromal FGFR3 potentially mediates epithelial-to-stromal communication that also is directionally specific. FGF9 mRNA was expressed exclusively in the epithelial cells derived from well-differentiated, twocompartment Dunning R3327 rat prostate tumors. In contrast, FGFR3 was expressed at functionally significant levels only in the derived stromal cells. Competition binding and immunoprecipitation assays revealed that FGF9 only bound to an FGFR on the stromal cells. FGF9 also failed to covalently cross-link to clonal lines of stromal cells devoid of FGFR3 that expressed FGFR1 and FGFR2IIIc. Furthermore, FGF9 specifically stimulated DNA synthesis in stromal cells expressing FGFR3. These results demonstrate a directionally specific paracrine signaling from epithelial FGF9 and stromal FGFR3. Similar to the FGF7/FGF10 to FGFR2IIIb signaling from the stroma to the epithelium, the directional specificity from epithelium to stroma appears set by a combination of cell-specific expression of isoforms and cell-context specificity of FGFR isotypes for FGF.
Robust discrete‐time nonlinear sliding mode state estimation of uncertain nonlinear systems

In this paper, we propose a discrete‐time nonlinear sliding mode observer for state and unknown input estimations of a class of single‐input/single‐output nonlinear uncertain systems. The uncertainties are characterized by a state‐dependent vector and a scalar disturbance/unknown input. The discrete‐time model is derived through Taylor series expansion together with nonlinear state transformation. A design methodology that combines the discrete‐time sliding mode (DSM) and a nonlinear observer design is adopted, and a strategy is developed to guarantee the convergence of the estimation error to a bound within the specified boundary layer. A relation between sliding mode gain and boundary layer is established for the existence of DSM, and the estimation is made robust to external disturbances and uncertainties. The unknown input or disturbance can also be estimated through the sliding mode. The conditions for the asymptotical stability of the estimation error are analysed. Application to a bioreactor is given and the simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Primary Treatment Results of Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma (NPC) in Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Introduction Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma (NPC) is a major health problem in southern and eastern Asia. In Indonesia NPC is the most frequent cancer in the head and neck area. NPC is very sensitive to radiotherapy resulting in 3-year disease-free and overall survival of approximately 70% and 80%, respectively. Here we present routine treatment results in a prospective study on NPC in a top referral; university hospital in Indonesia. Methods All NPC patients presenting from September 2008 till January 2011 at the ear, nose and throat (ENT) department of the Dr. Sardjito General Hospital, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, were possible candidates. Patients were included if the biopsy was a histological proven NPC without distant metastasis and were assessed during counselling sessions prior to treatment, as being able to complete the entire treatment. Results In total 78 patients were included for treatment analysis. The median time between diagnosis and start of radiotherapy is 120 days. Forty-eight (62%) patients eventually finished all fractions of radiotherapy. The median duration of the radiotherapy is 62 days for 66 Gy. Median overall survival is 21 months (95% CI 18–35) from day of diagnosis. Conclusion The results presented here reveal that currently the treatment of NPC at an Indonesian hospital is not sufficient and cannot be compared to the treatment results in literature. Main reasons for these poor treatment results are (1) a long waiting time prior to the start of radiotherapy, (2) the extended overall duration of radiotherapy and (3) the advanced stage of disease at presentation.
Animated Agents for Language Conversation Training

Animated agents are cartoon-style characters that facilitate the learning process. We take an animated agent approach to improve English conversation skills of Japanese students. In particular, we use animated agents as conversational partners in interactive role-playing environments (theater, drama, and games). In order to engage the language student, animated agents feature believability-enhancing behaviors such emotional responses and social competence.
Activation of Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor Is Required for NTHi-Induced NF-κB-Dependent Inflammation

Background Inflammation is a hallmark of many serious human diseases. Nontypeable Haemophilus influenzae (NTHi) is an important human pathogen causing respiratory tract infections in both adults and children. NTHi infections are characterized by inflammation, which is mainly mediated by nuclear transcription factor-kappa B (NF-κB)-dependent production of proinflammatory mediators. Epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) has been shown to play important roles in regulating diverse biological processes, including cell growth, differentiation, apoptosis, adhesion, and migration. Its role in regulating NF-κB activation and inflammation, however, remains largely unknown. Methodology/Principal Findings In the present study, we demonstrate that EGFR plays a vital role in NTHi-induced NF-κB activation and the subsequent induction of proinflammatory mediators in human middle ear epithelial cells and other cell types. Importantly, we found that AG1478, a specific tyrosine kinase inhibitor of EGFR potently inhibited NTHi-induced inflammatory responses in the middle ears and lungs of mice in vivo. Moreover, we found that MKK3/6-p38 and PI3K/Akt signaling pathways are required for mediating EGFR-dependent NF-κB activation and inflammatory responses by NTHi. Conclusions/Significance Here, we provide direct evidence that EGFR plays a critical role in mediating NTHi-induced NF-κB activation and inflammation in vitro and in vivo. Given that EGFR inhibitors have been approved in clinical use for the treatment of cancers, current studies will not only provide novel insights into the molecular mechanisms underlying the regulation of inflammation, but may also lead to the development of novel therapeutic strategies for the treatment of respiratory inflammatory diseases and other inflammatory diseases.
A Critical Examination of RESCAL for Completion of Knowledge Bases with Transitive Relations

Link prediction in large knowledge graphs has received a lot of attention recently because of its importance for inferring missing relations and for completing and improving noisily extracted knowledge graphs. Over the years a number of machine learning researchers have presented various models for predicting the presence of missing relations in a knowledge base. Although all the previous methods are presented with empirical results that show high performance on select datasets, there is almost no previous work on understanding the connection between properties of a knowledge base and the performance of a model. In this paper we analyze the RESCAL method and prove that it can not encode asymmetric transitive relations in knowledge bases.
POSITIVE GENETIC CORRELATION BETWEEN PARASITE RESISTANCE AND BODY SIZE IN A FREE‐LIVING UNGULATE POPULATION

Abstract Parasite resistance and body size are subject to directional natural selection in a population of feral Soay sheep (Ovis aries) on the island of St. Kilda, Scotland. Classical evolutionary theory predicts that directional selection should erode additive genetic variation and favor the maintenance of alleles that have negative pleiotropic effects on other traits associated with fitness. Contrary to these predictions, in this study we show that there is considerable additive genetic variation for both parasite resistance, measured as fecal egg count (FEC), and body size, measured as weight and hindleg length, and that there are positive genetic correlations between parasite resistance and body size in both sexes. Body size traits had higher heritabilities than parasite resistance. This was not due to low levels of additive genetic variation for parasite resistance, but was a consequence of high levels of residual variance in FEC. Measured as coefficients of variation, levels of additive genetic variation for FEC were actually higher than for weight or hindleg length. High levels of additive genetic variation for parasite resistance may be maintained by a number of mechanisms including high mutational input, balancing selection, antagonistic pleiotropy, and host‐parasite coevolution. The positive genetic correlation between parasite resistance and body size, a trait also subject to sexual selection in males, suggests that parasite resistance and growth are not traded off in Soay sheep, but rather that genetically resistant individuals also experience superior growth.
LES NOUVELLES TENDANCES DU REPORTING DEVELOPPEMENT DURABLE: LE SECTEUR AUTOMOBILE EN EUROPE

This article suggests studying the new trends of sustainability reporting in the light of the institutional theory frame. We consider sustainability reporting as a meta-process consisted of two main processes: 1) the exercise of institutional pressures motivating the reporting and 2) the delivery of the speech of disclosure. The institutional pressures are at once statutory, normative and institutional pressures to promote a responsible behavior within the business sector. These last pressures depend on the degree of visibility of the business sector. The European automotive sector is specially exposed because of the existence of hundreds of SME and its effects on the other sectors. Automotive sector has important impacts in all sustainability aspects. According to the principle of materiality, the reporting of this sector has to reflect these aspects. The results of this research confirm that the reporting DD in the automotive sector is the result of various categories of institutional pressures. Our results also contribute to enlighten the relations between the concept of CSR and the information technologies. These results suggest that we enter a new phase of reporting which more emphasizes on key information being better convenient for the requests of the stakeholders. This evolution was facilitated by the use of Internet.