Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A phase-field image segmentation for topological texture image

The topological texture image, as a branch of texture image, contains many serpentine curves, regular or irregular geometric shapes, symmetrical or unsymmetrical patterns. All kinds of jacquard patterns in textile CAD, tissue textures in medical images, and ancient mural images belong to the research objects of topological texture image. For a topological image consists of many complex patterns which contain detailed, intricate topological curves, most of existing image segmentation algorithms have difficulty in capturing complex structure of visual features, such as complex contours of a topological pattern. In this paper, a phase-field model for topological image segmentation, based on a generalized variational formulation of the phase-field functional is proposed, which is capable of handling changes in the topology of the evolving contour. Two Euler-Lagrange equations are firstly derived for optimizing the model and presenting their efficient implementation by using a conjugate gradient scheme. Then, considering the important role of a discrete finite element approximation for phase field model, a mesh adjustment procedure is deployed with finite elements in space and time. The proposed method has been evaluated on real topological images and the obtained results have shown the desirable segmentation performance.
METHODS FOR THE USE OF INDIUM AS AN ELECTRON STAIN FOR NUCLEIC ACIDS

Methods are presented for the staining of blocks of tissue with trivalent indium so that good contrast and good specificity for nucleic acids is achieved for the electron microscope. The tissue is fixed in organic fixative, dehydrated, subjected to reduction by lithium borohydride, acetylated by acetic anhydride, stained with trivalent indium dissolved in organic solvent, and embedded. The embedding material may be either Vestopal or butyl methacrylate especially handled to eliminate the "explosion" phenomenon. Numerous new problems encountered are discussed and a brief description of the findings is included.
Higher-dimensional orthogonal range reporting and rectangle stabbing in the pointer machine model

In this paper, we consider two fundamental problems in the pointer machine model of computation, namely orthogonal range reporting and rectangle stabbing. Orthogonal range reporting is the problem of storing a set of n points in d-dimensional space in a data structure, such that the t points in an axis-aligned query rectangle can be reported efficiently. Rectangle stabbing is the "dual" problem where a set of n axis-aligned rectangles should be stored in a data structure, such that the t rectangles that contain a query point can be reported efficiently. Very recently an optimal O(log n+t) query time pointer machine data structure was developed for the three-dimensional version of the orthogonal range reporting problem. However, in four dimensions the best known query bound of O(log2n / log log n + t) has not been improved for decades. We describe an orthogonal range reporting data structure that is the first structure to achieve significantly less than O(log2n+t) query time in four dimensions. More precisely, we develop a structure that uses O(n (log n /log log n)d) space and can answer d-dimensional orthogonal range reporting queries (for d ≥ 4) in O( log n (log n /log log n)d-4+1/(d-2) + t) time. Ignoring log log n factors, this speeds up the best previous query time by a log1-1/(d-2)n factor. For the rectangle stabbing problem, we show that any data structure that uses nh space must use Ω(log n (log n / log h)d-2 + t) time to answer a query. This improves the previous results by a log h factor, and is the first lower bound that is optimal for a large range of h, namely for h ≥ logd-2+ε n where ε>0 is an arbitrarily small constant. By a simple geometric transformation, our result also implies an improved query lower bound for orthogonal range reporting.
Stormwater Treatment Areas : Experiences with Nitrate Removal

Inorganic nitrogen is commonly found in three different forms: Ammonia (NH4), nitrite (NO2), and nitrate (NO3). Ammonia is a principle form of nitrogen found in urban wastewater and runoff especially from pastures and feedlots. According to Kadlec and Knight (1996), ammonia, or ammonium nitrogen, is the preferred nutrient form for most wetland plants because of its importance in plant growth. Ammonium nitrogen is readily oxidized, resulting in significant consumption of oxygen, which creates high dissolved oxygen levels.
Advanced guide cane for the visually impaired people

This paper focuses on developing a new type of cane for the visually challenged and blind. This advanced guide cane will help the visually challenged person navigate both indoors and outdoors. This cane consists of an obstacle detection system as well as GPS navigation system. The GPS navigation system works only outdoors while the obstacle detector system works everywhere. Both these systems provide a series of audio feedbacks to aid the user. The systems are attached to a walking stick, and are portable and light weight. The advanced guide cane is powered by a rechargeable source and consumes low power. The GPS navigation system is pre-programmed to help the user navigate in the area of his/her choice. The project uses Raspberry Pi, which enables ease of programming and integration of the two systems in our cane.
Thermal Studies on the Interaction of Water and Microcrystalline Cellulose

Abstract— The interaction between water and microcrystalline cellulose in the absence and presence of lactose has been studied by thermogravimetric analysis, differential thermal analysis and immersional calorimetry. The results indicate that most of the water held within a system used for the preparation of spherical granules by extrusion/spheronization is present as free water which may be readily lost by evaporation. There is approximately 0.856 mol of water per 100 g of microcrystalline cellulose which appears to be absorbed as structured water. Microcrystalline cellulose may therefore be described as a ‘molecular sponge’. The enthalpy of fusion of the ‘free’ water offers a simple method of estimating the effective surface area of the microcrystalline cellulose.
Association of p60c-src with endosomal membranes in mammalian fibroblasts

We have examined the subcellular localization of p60c-src in mammalian fibroblasts. Analysis of indirect immunofluorescence by three- dimensional optical sectioning microscopy revealed a granular cytoplasmic staining that co-localized with the microtubule organizing center. Immunofluorescence experiments with antibodies against a number of membrane markers demonstrated a striking co-localization between p60c-src and the cation-dependent mannose-6-phosphate receptor (CI- MPR), a marker that identifies endosomes. Both p60c-src and the CI-MPR were found to cluster at the spindle poles throughout mitosis. In addition, treatment of interphase and mitotic cells with brefeldin A resulted in a clustering of p60c-src and CI-MPR at a peri-centriolar position. Biochemical fractionation of cellular membranes showed that a major proportion of p60c-src co-enriched with endocytic membranes. Treatment of membranes containing HRP to alter their apparent density also altered the density of p60c-src-containing membranes. Similar density shift experiments with total cellular membranes revealed that the majority of membrane-associated p60c-src in the cell is associated with endosomes, while very little is associated with plasma membranes. These results support a role for p60c-src in the regulation of endosomal membranes and protein trafficking.
Peculiarities of boron distribution in as-grown boron-doped diamond

Boron doped diamond (BDD) single crystals have been grown under conditions of high isostatic pressure by the temperature gradient method. Numerous equilateral triangles were found on the fluorescence images of {111}-diamond facets. Structural peculiarities of BDD were investigated by JEM-2010 transmission electron microscope with GIF Quantum attachment for electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS). High resolution image of diamond lattice revealed some distorted {111}-layers. EELS testifies the presence of boron in distorted regions of diamond lattice. The crystallographic features of BDD and their connection with the superconductivity are discussed.
Abnormal cortical motor excitability in dystonia

To assess the excitability of the motor system, we studied 11 patients with task-specific dystonia and 11 age-matched normal subjects. The dominant side was affected in nine of the patients. We delivered transcranial magnetic stimuli at different stimulus intensities and with different levels of muscle facilitation to the side contralateral to the side of electromyographic recording, and recorded motor evoked potentials (MEPs) from the flexor carpi radialis muscles bilaterally. The threshold intensity for eliciting MEPs at rest did not differ between patients and normal subjects. We compared the affected side in patients with the dominant side in normal subjects. With facilitation, the percentage of the area of the MEP to the M wave (MEP area%) was similar in both groups at low stimulus intensities, but with increasing stimulus intensity the increase in the MEP area% was greater in patients than in normal subjects (ANOVA, p <0.001). The increase in MEP area% was similar in both groups with increasing facilitation levels. The duration of the silent period was similar in patients and normal subjects. We conclude that cortical motor excitability is increased in dystonia.
Walking ability following hybrid assistive limb treatment for a patient with chronic myelopathy after surgery for cervical ossification of the posterior longitudinal ligament

Context: The hybrid assistive limb (HAL) (the wearable robot) can assist kinesis during voluntary control of hip and knee joint motion by detecting the wearer's bioelectric signals on the surface of their skin. The purpose of this study was to report on walking ability following the wearable robot treatment in a patient with chronic myelopathy after surgery for cervical ossification of the posterior longitudinal ligament (OPLL). Findings: The patient was a 66-year-old woman with cervical OPLL who was able to ambulate independently with the aid of bilateral crutches. The wearable robot treatment was received once every 2 weeks for ten sessions beginning approximately 14 years after surgery. Improvements were observed in gait speed (BL 22.5; post 46.7 m/min), step length (BL 0.36; post 0.57 m), and cadence (BL 61.9; post 81.6 m/min) based on a 10-m walk test and a 2-minute walk test (BL 63.4; post 103.7 m) assessing total walking distance. The improvements in walking ability were maintained after the wearable robot treatment for 6 months. Conclusion: We report the functional recovery in the walking ability of a patient with chronic cervical myelopathy following the wearable robot treatment, suggesting that as a rehabilitation tool, the wearable robot has the potential to effectively improve functional ambulation in chronic cervical myelopathy patients whose walking ability has plateaued, even many years after surgery. Video Abstract Read the transcript Watch the video on Vimeo
Administration of group A streptococcal cell walls to rats induces an interleukin 2 deficiency

Intraperitoneal administration of group A streptococcal cell walls to Lewis rats induces a chronic arthritis, whereas the Fischer strain is resistant to the development of the lesion. Spleen cells from cell wall- treated rats (Lewis and Fischer) are deficient in the synthesis of IL- 2. Using an mAb directed against the rat IL-2-R, the present studies indicate that the expression of IL-2-R on spleens of cell wall-treated rats is normal. However, the addition of exogenous IL-2 to spleen cells cultured with Con A does not stimulate the mitogenic response.
Your love is public now: questioning the use of personal information in authentication

Most social networking platforms protect user's private information by limiting access to it to a small group of members, typically friends of the user, while allowing (virtually) everyone's access to the user's public data. In this paper, we exploit public data available on Facebook to infer users' undisclosed interests on their profile pages. In particular, we infer their undisclosed interests from the public data fetched using Graph APIs provided by Facebook. We demonstrate that simply liking a Facebook page does not corroborate that the user is interested in the page. Instead, we perform sentiment-oriented mining on various attributes of a Facebook page to determine the user's real interests. Our experiments conducted on over 34,000 public pages collected from Facebook and data from volunteers show that our inference technique can infer interests that are often hidden by users on their personal profile with moderate accuracy. We are able to disclose 22 interests of a user and find more than 80,097 users with at least 2 interests. We also show how this inferred information can be used to break a preference based backup authentication system.
In Situ Thermal Measurements for Estimaton of Relative Metabolic Utilization in Skeletal Muscle

A variety of systems to drive cardiac assist devices with power from skeletal muscle have been proposed and are under development. The power available from a fixed mass of muscle is metabolically limited and maximizing sustained power is required for the successful application of such devices. The purpose of this study is to develop an approach that can yield relative metabolic utilization measures from single contractions of whole muscle used for cardiac assistance. Similar to classical muscle energetic studies, myothermic methods were employed in which muscle temperature was measured with a fast responding thermister and an infrared radiation thremopile transducer. In a series of tests on rabbit soleus muscle, the relative temperature increases during contractions were recorded. Relative muscle temperature increase was linearly related to the contraction duration. This relationship was incorporated into an existing muscle model to predict the optimum parameters for sustained skeletal muscle power generation.
Evolution Maps for Connected Components in Text Documents

For highly degraded text documents, common tasks such as binarization and line extraction, remain difficult tasks. Equipped with a reliable information regarding the distribution of character dimensions in the document, one can improve results of these algorithms significantly. We introduce a novel perspective of the image data which maps the evolution of connected components along the change in gray scale threshold. We use these maps to provide a robust algorithm for extracting information about character dimensions in degraded documents, and demonstrate improvement in binarization results using this information. We analyze statistically the characteristics of the evolution maps for text documents, and compare our results with ground truth data.
The mapping between the mental and the public Lexicon

© Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber 2012. Introduction There are words in the language we speak and concepts in our minds. For present purposes, we can use a relatively common-sense, unsophisticated notion of a linguistic word. A bit more needs to be said, now and later, about what we mean by a concept. We assume that mental representations have a structure not wholly unlike that of a sentence, and combine elements from a mental repertoire not wholly unlike a lexicon. These elements are mental concepts: so to speak, ‘words of mentalese’. Mental concepts are relatively stable and distinct structures in the mind, comparable to entries in an encyclopaedia or permanent files in a data-base. Their occurrence in a mental representation may determine matching causal and formal (semantic or logical) relationships. On the one hand, there are relationships between the mind and the world. The activation of a concept may play a major role in causal interactions between the organism and external objects that fall under that concept. On the other hand, there are relationships among representations within the mind. The occurrence of a concept in a mental representation may play a causal role in the derivation of further representations, and may also contribute to the justification of this derivation. Three types of mapping What kind of mapping is there (if any) between mental concepts and public words? One extreme view is that natural languages such as English or Swahili are the sole medium of thought. In this case, there is obviously a genuine one-to-one correspondence between public words and mental concepts. An opposite extreme view is that there are no such things as individual mental concepts at all, and therefore no conceptual counterparts to public words. We will ignore these extreme views. We assume that there are mental concepts, and that they are not simply internalisations of public words, so that the kind and degree of correspondence between concepts and words is a genuine and interesting empirical issue.
Probability distributions of correlation and differentials in block ciphers

We study the probability distributions of difference propagation probabilities and input-output correlations for functions and block ciphers of given dimensions, for several of them for the first time. We show that these parameters have distributions that are well-studied in the field of probability such as the normal, Poisson and extreme value distributions. The results of this paper can be used to estimate how much effort will be required to generate functions satisfying certain criteria. The distributions we derive for block ciphers illustrate the significant difference between fixed-key parameters and averaged parameters.
Issue S in Informing Science and Information Technology a Strategic Review of Existing Mobile Agent- Based Intrusion Detection Systems

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) is defined as a component that analyses system and user operations in computer and network systems in search of activities considered undesirable from security perspectives. Applying mobile agent (MA) to intrusion detection design is a recent development and it is aimed at effective intrusion detection in distributed environment. From the literature , it is clear that most MA-based IDS that are available are not quite effective because their time to detection is high and detect limited intrusions.This paper proposes a way of classifying a typical IDS and then strategically reviews the existing mobile agent-based IDSs focusing on each of the categories of the classification, for example architecture, mode of data collection, the techniques for analysis, and the security of these intelligent codes. Their strengths and problems are stated wherever applicable. Furthermore, suggested ways of improving on current MAIDS designs are presented in order to achieve an efficient mobile agent-based IDS for future security of distributed network.
Cardiac damage in athlete’s heart: When the “supernormal” heart fails!

Intense exercise may cause heart remodeling to compensate increases in blood pressure or volume by increasing muscle mass. Cardiac changes do not involve only the left ventricle, but all heart chambers. Physiological cardiac modeling in athletes is associated with normal or enhanced cardiac function, but recent studies have documented decrements in left ventricular function during intense exercise and the release of cardiac markers of necrosis in athlete’s blood of uncertain significance. Furthermore, cardiac remodeling may predispose athletes to heart disease and result in electrical remodeling, responsible for arrhythmias. Athlete’s heart is a physiological condition and does not require a specific treatment. In some conditions, it is important to differentiate the physiological adaptations from pathological conditions, such as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, arrhythmogenic dysplasia of the right ventricle, and non-compaction myocardium, for the greater risk of sudden cardiac death of these conditions. Moreover, some drugs and performance-enhancing drugs can cause structural alterations and arrhythmias, therefore, their use should be excluded.
Using One-Class SVMs and Wavelets for Audio Surveillance

This paper presents a method aimed at recognizing environmental sounds for surveillance and security applications. We propose to apply one-class support vector machines (1-SVMs) together with a sophisticated dissimilarity measure in order to address audio classification, and more specifically, sound recognition. We illustrate the performance of this method on an audio database, which consists of 1015 sounds belonging to nine classes. The database used presents high intraclass diversity in temps of signal properties and some kind of interclass similarities. A large discrepancy in the number of items in each class implies nonuniform probability of sound appearances. The method proceeds as follows: first, the use of a set of state-of-the-art audio features is studied. Then, we introduce a set of novel features obtained by combining elementary features. Experiments conducted on a nine-class classification problem show the superiority of this novel sound recognition method. The best recognition accuracy (96.89%) is obtained when combining wavelet-based features, MFCCs, and individual temporal and frequency features. Our 1-SVM-based multiclass classification approach overperforms the conventional hidden Markov model-based system in the experiments conducted, the improvement in the error rate can reach 50%. Besides, we provide empirical results showing that the single-class SVM outperforms a combination of binary SVMs. Additional experiments demonstrate our method is robust to environmental noise.
Revenue and Wealth Maximization in the National Football League: The Impact of Stadia

The opening of the Palace of Auburn Hills, the SkyDome, and Oriole Park at Camden Yards led to the beginning of a construction boom in professional sport. In the National Football League (NFL) alone, 26 stadiums have been built or renovated in the past 10 years. Due to the additional revenue generated by these facilities and the NFL's current revenue sharing system, professional football franchises are building new stadia for economic reasons rather than to replace unusable or unsafe facilities. The purpose of this study was to determine if a significant difference in net revenue change existed for NFL teams that moved into a new facility and to determine if there was a significant change in valuation for these franchises. The findings indicated that new stadia significantly increase revenue and franchise value in the NFL; therefore, the primary goal of every firm, wealth maximization, is met for teams after opening a new facility.