Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Window into the Brain: Advances in Psychiatric fMRI

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) plays a key role in modern psychiatric research. It provides a means to assay differences in brain systems that underlie psychiatric illness, treatment response, and properties of brain structure and function that convey risk factor for mental diseases. Here we review recent advances in fMRI methods in general use and progress made in understanding the neural basis of mental illness. Drawing on concepts and findings from psychiatric fMRI, we propose that mental illness may not be associated with abnormalities in specific local regions but rather corresponds to variation in the overall organization of functional communication throughout the brain network. Future research may need to integrate neuroimaging information drawn from different analysis methods and delineate spatial and temporal patterns of brain responses that are specific to certain types of psychiatric disorders.
A New Unequal Clustering Algorithm using Energy-Balanced Area Partitioning for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract Multi-hop Clustering is more preferred than the single-hop one because the transmission range of the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) nodes is not determined by the size of the network area. However, the multi-hop method brings a new problem related to the workload imbalance between the cluster-heads (CHs). Unequal Clustering becomes the most proposed solution of the unbalance load, but the calculation of the radius clusters still become a big challenge to achieve a maximum balancing degree. In this paper, we propose a new unequal clustering algorithm based on the partitioned circles network model, having better accuracy in the energy consumption analysis than the rectangular one. The superiority of the algorithm we propose is cluster parameters, by which the region width and cluster-head probability, are obtained with a complete energy consumption analysis. Through the simulation evaluation, the algorithm brings the better performance than the equal clustering.
Aspirin down Regulates Hepcidin by Inhibiting NF-κB and IL6/JAK2/STAT3 Pathways in BV-2 Microglial Cells Treated with Lipopolysaccharide

Aspirin down regulates transferrin receptor 1 (TfR1) and up regulates ferroportin 1 (Fpn1) and ferritin expression in BV-2 microglial cells treated without lipopolysaccharides (LPS), as well as down regulates hepcidin and interleukin 6 (IL-6) in cells treated with LPS. However, the relevant mechanisms are unknown. Here, we investigate the effects of aspirin on expression of hepcidin and iron regulatory protein 1 (IRP1), phosphorylation of Janus kinase 2 (JAK2), signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) and P65 (nuclear factor-κB), and the production of nitric oxide (NO) in BV-2 microglial cells treated with and without LPS. We demonstrated that aspirin inhibited hepcidin mRNA as well as NO production in cells treated with LPS, but not in cells without LPS, suppresses IL-6, JAK2, STAT3, and P65 (nuclear factor-κB) phosphorylation and has no effect on IRP1 in cells treated with or without LPS. These findings provide evidence that aspirin down regulates hepcidin by inhibiting IL6/JAK2/STAT3 and P65 (nuclear factor-κB) pathways in the cells under inflammatory conditions, and imply that an aspirin-induced reduction in TfR1 and an increase in ferritin are not associated with IRP1 and NO.
Worst-case delay analysis on a real-time heterogeneous network

A heterogeneous network, where a switched Ethernet backbone interconnects several existing CAN buses via bridges, is a promising candidate to build a large scale network. For real-time applications, deterministic communication is a key issue. A worst-case delay analysis on such a network has to deal with heterogeneity properties, such as different bandwidths, scheduling policies and bridging strategies. In this paper, two approaches are proposed. The first one is based on a hierarchical component-based approach. The second one is an adapted Trajectory approach which integrates heterogeneity properties. Moreover, pessimism introduced by the adapted Trajectory approach is analyzed and an optimization of this approach is proposed.
Larvae in A * phibian Development and Evolution

The tremendous intellectual excitement and activity that have attended the study of the relation between development and evolution over the past 20-25 years rival those characteristic of the "Golden Age" of zoology in the latter half of the lgth and early 20th centuries (Goldschmidt, 1956; Hall, 1992; Muller, 1991; Raff, 1996; D. B. wake et al., r99r). Then, as now, scientists strove to tease apart the complex relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny, including studies of both pattern and process (ChurchilI, 1997; Gould, L977; Luckenbill-Edds, 1997). In both periods, amphibians-and especially amphibian larvae-occupy center stage. Evolutionary biologists have long
Photometry and membership for low mass stars in the young open cluster NGC 2516

Received; accepted Abstract. We present the results of a 0.86 square degree CCD photometric survey of the open cluster NGC 2516, which has an age of about 150Myr and may have a much lower metallicity than the similarly-aged Pleiades. Our BV Ic survey of cluster members is complete to V ≃ 20 and is used to select a preliminary catalogue of 1254 low mass (0.2 1.5M⊙) stars included. Taking this into account, it is probable that the whole-cluster mass functions for NGC 2516 and the Pleiades are similar down to 0.3M⊙. The mass of NGC 2516 stars with M > 0.3M⊙ inside our survey is 950 −1200M⊙, depending on metallicity and what corrections are applied for unresolved binarity. Correcting for mass segregation increases this to ∼ 1240 − 1560M⊙, about twice the total mass of the Pleiades. If NGC 2516 and the Pleiades do have similar mass functions, then less massive stars and brown dwarfs contribute about a further 15 percent to the mass of NGC 2516 and we predict a cluster population of about 360-440 brown dwarfs with 0.030 < M < 0.075M⊙.
Adaptive Diversity of Genetic Algorithm for QoS-based Cloud Service Selection

An elitist selection adaptive Genetic Algorithm i s presented to select an optimal cloud service compos ite plan from a lot of composite plans on the basis of globa l Qualityof-Service (QoS) constraints. In this Algorithm, so me strategies are provided to improve convergence and population diversity and raise fitness result. Thes e strategies include an elitist selection strategy, an individua l selection method based on ranking selection and an adaptive m utation strategy. The elitist selection strategy gives a gu rantee that the degradation of population fitness can be avoide d. The individual selection method provides a simple and e ffective way to control selective pressure. The adaptive mut ation strategy uses a special population measurement to d ecide individuals’ similarity. The value of the dynamic m utation probability changes on the basis of population dive rsity. Some simulation results on cloud service selection with global QoS constraints have shown that the elitist selection a daptive Genetic Algorithm can gain better composition servi ce plan.
Burnout among nursery school teachers : first results of an explorative questionnaire survey

Aim This article presents first results from a pilot project of nursery school teachers in Switzerland, investigating their stress in work situations. The aim of this study was to find out which factors at the workplace of teaching professionals result in stress situations and to what extent. Subjects and Methods In this study, 66 questionnaires from 13 different day care centers in Zurich were descriptively analyzed. To estimate the risk and scope of burnout, the tool "Burnout Screening Scale" (BOSS I to III) was used. Results The teaching professionals surveyed were only slightly affected by stress factors in their professional and personal lives and only a few developed strong physical, mental or emotional symptoms. On the other hand, the teaching professionals in the study exhibited a satisfactory level of available resources. In addition to staff shortage, the working environment, affected by poor communication patterns, has been identified as the main stress factor.
Évaluation et curriculum : à la recherche d'une nouvelle signification de l'enseignement et de l'apprentissage

La problématique développée dans le présent document s'inscrit dans la question épistémologique de la spécialisation de certains champs appartenant au domaine de l'éducation ou des sciences de l'éducation, selon la matrice épistémologique dans laquelle la discussion s'insère. Dans ce cas, nous prendrons comme référence principale le cadre des sciences de l'éducation, car il est prédominant dans les approches théoriques et de la recherche au Portugal, en grande partie d'influence francophone. Cependant, l'approche des mêmes questions dans le cadre conceptuel du domaine de connaissance désigné comme éducation, plus enracinée dans des contextes de production scientifique avec une matrice anglo-saxonne, apporte au débat, et ceci de différentes façons, les concepts du curriculum et de l’élaboration des curricula, dans lequel le savoir relatif à l'évaluation est mobilisé et s'intègre. Cette analyse cherche ainsi à faire converger ces deux macro-lentilles d'analyse, sans perdre de vue les différentes approches qui caractérisent, en vue de la discussion de la question qui nous concerne, la relation entre le champ de l'évaluation et celui du curriculum, au sein du savoir de l'éducation et dans le champ praxéologique de cette même éducation.
Network Formation with Heterogeneous Players

This paper studies network formation in settings where players are heterogeneous with respect to benefits as well as the costs of forming links. Our results demonstrate that centrality, center-sponsorship and short network diameter are robust features of equilibrium networks. We find that in a society with many groups, where it is cheaper to connect within groups as compared to across groups, strategic play by individuals leads to a network architecture in which there is a core group which is entirely internally connected while all the other groups are entirely externally linked and hence completely fragmented. Since internal/within group links are cheaper to form, this implies that individual incentives may generate a significant waste of valuable social resources.
Towards physiological motion compensation for flexible needle interventions

Flexible bevel-tipped needle steering has been an active research topic since the last decade. However, most of the work presented so far performs flexible needle steering in static phantoms or non-static virtual environments. The insertion of flexible bevel-tipped needles into soft-tissue subjected to motion disturbances is still an open research problem. In this paper, we propose a flexible needle steering algorithm that is able to handle physiological motion disturbances. The system estimates the disturbance using the force information provided by a force sensor placed in contact with the soft-tissue. The system is evaluated through experiments steering a flexible needle towards a physical target into a moving soft-tissue phantom. Three experimental cases with motion disturbances based on clinical procedures in the lung, kidney and heart are used to assess the targeting error. The average targeting error of all 15 experimental trials is 1:05±0:41mm. Our results demonstrate the ability of the proposed system to compensate for motion disturbances applied to the soft-tissue phantom.
S-buffer: Sparsity-aware Multi-fragment Rendering

This work introduces S-buffer, an ef ﬁ cient and memory-friendly gpu-accelerated A-buffer architecture for multi-fragment rendering. Memory is organized into variable contiguous regions for each pixel, thus avoiding limitations set in linked-lists and ﬁ xed-array techniques. S-buffer exploits fragment distribution for precise allocation of the needed storage and pixel sparsity (empty pixel ratio) for computing the memory offsets for each pixel in a parallel fashion. An experimental comparative evaluation of our technique over previous multi-fragment rendering approaches in terms of memory and performance is provided.
Predicting Generalized Anxiety Disorder among women using random forest approach

Mental health presents one of the greatest challenges to the current generation. Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) is one of the many mental health problems. People with this disorder experience exaggerated worries and tensions about everyday events. It has been reported that about 5% of the population in developed countries is affected by GAD, with women twice as likely to be affected compared to men. Anxiety disorders are a growing occurrence in Malaysia, and this phenomenon has contributed to extensive mental health related data. This raw data is a valuable resource, but it is underutilized. It could potentially be transformed into useful knowledge via data mining technology. Data mining reveals significant insights due to its nature in identifying hidden patterns and relationships that can be used for predicting generalized anxiety disorder. For effective prediction, random forest approach is one of the classification data mining techniques which embeds good predictive characteristics. Therefore, this research adopts random forest approach to predict Generalized Anxiety Disorder among women, and the accuracy of the predictive result is reported. The generated prediction model is expected to provide an effective screening process for Generalized Anxiety Disorder among women in Malaysia.
Effects of Obesity and Physical Activity on Health Care Utilization and Costs

The study analyses the combined influence of obesity and lifestyle behaviors on health care utilization and health care costs. Therefore I analyze the interaction of obesity, nutrition and physical activity based on a community level dataset from a German city. In addition to the expected convex effects of age and chronic diseases for utilization, the results indicate that BMI and physical inactivity have an independent influence on G.P. visits as well as for hospitalization. The key finding of the cost analysis is that health care costs increase in consequence of a completely sedentary lifestyle by 505 € independent of the individual’s BMI level. The results also confirm that compared to individuals of normal weight, the medical costs of the group of overweight people (by 377 €) and the group of obese people (by 565 €) are significantly increased. Even without significant weight reductions public programs against a sedentary lifestyle can be a way to reduce health care spending, and thus a sole focus on weight reduction might underestimate the additional benefits of changes in lifestyle behaviors.
Pattern-driven performance optimization at runtime: experiment on JEE systems

Poor-performance solutions need to be refactored for optimizing the performance in distributed computing systems. This paper presents a case study of pattern-driven online performance optimization by automatically detecting poor-performance solutions and refactoring them into great-performance ones. Poor-performance solutions are abstracted as negative patterns and the corresponding great-performance ones are abstracted as positive patterns. Both negative and positive patterns are manually defined by experts using a meta-model in order to make the patterns understandable for middleware and reusable. For a running system, poor-performance solutions are detected automatically by discovering the negative patterns from the runtime context. For a detected poor-performance solution, the refactoring operations which change the running system from the poor-performance solution to the great-performance one are automatically generated by comparing the negative and positive pattern. The refactoring operations will be mapped to the actual management operations provided by the middleware which then executes the refactoring without stopping the running system.
Deterministic Deployment for Wireless Image Sensor Nodes

Wireless sensor networks composed of camera enabled source nodes can provide visual information of an area of interest, potentially enriching monitoring applications. The node deployment is one of the key issues in the application of wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we take the effective coverage and connectivity as the evaluation indices to analyze the effect of the perceivable angle and the ratio of communication radius and sensing radius for the deterministic circular deployment. Experimental results demonstrate that the effective coverage area of the triangle deployment is the largest when using the same number of nodes. When the nodes are deployed in the same monitoring area in the premise of ensuring connectivity, rhombus deployment is optimal when 2 / 3 c s r r < < . The research results of this paper provide an important reference for the deployment of the image sensor networks with the given parameters.
Tundra burning in Alaska: Linkages to climatic change and sea ice retreat

[1] Recent climatic warming has resulted in pronounced environmental changes in the Arctic, including shrub cover expansion and sea ice shrinkage. These changes foreshadow more dramatic impacts that will occur if the warming trend continues. Among the major challenges in anticipating these impacts are “surprises” stemming from changes in system components that have remained relatively stable in the historic record. Tundra burning is potentially one such component. Here we report paleoecological evidence showing that recent tundra burning is unprecedented in the central Alaskan Arctic within the last 5000 years. Analysis of lake sediment cores reveals peak values of charcoal accumulation corresponding to the Anaktuvuk River Fire in 2007, with no evidence of other fire events throughout the past five millennia in that area. Atmospheric reanalysis suggests that the fire was favored by exceptionally warm and dry weather conditions in summer and early autumn. Boosted regression tree modeling shows that such conditions also explain 95% of the interannual variability in tundra area burned throughout Alaska over the past 60 years and that the response of tundra burning to climatic warming is nonlinear. These results contribute to an emerging body of evidence suggesting that tundra ecosystems can burn more frequently under suitable climatic and fuel conditions. The Anaktuvuk River Fire coincides with extreme sea ice retreat, and tundra area burned in Alaska is moderately correlated with sea ice extent from 1979 to 2009 (r = −0.43, p = 0.02). Recurrences of large tundra fires as a result of sea ice disappearance may represent a novel manifestation of coupled marine-terrestrial responses to climatic warming.
In Vitro Administration of Gold Nanoparticles Functionalized with MUC-1 Protein Fragment Generates Anticancer Vaccine Response via Macrophage Activation and Polarization Mechanism

Therapeutic cancer vaccines (or active immunotherapy) aim to guide the patient's personal immune system to eradicate cancer cells. An exciting approach to cancer vaccines has been offered by nanoscale drug delivery systems containing tumor associated antigens (TAAs). Their capacity to stimulate the immune system has been suggested during late years. However, the role of the macrophages as key-elements in antigen-presentation process following TAAs-containing nanosystems is not completely understood. We aimed to evaluate the effect of gold nanoparticles functionalized with mucin-1 peptide (MUC-1) on murine peritoneal macrophages. Gold nanoparticles, obtained using a modified Turkevich method, were functionalized with MUC-1 protein using Clealand's reagent. The obtained GNP-MUC-1 solution was used to treat at various concentrations monolayers of peritoneum-derived macrophages that were further analyzed using confocal and hyperspectral microscopy, ELISA assays and spectroscopic techniques. The GNP-MUC-1 nano-construct had proven to function as a powerful macrophage activator with consequent release of cytokines such as: TNF-ɑ, IL-6, IL-10 and IL-12 on peritoneal macrophages we have isolated from mice. Our results demonstrate optimization of antigen-presenting process and predominant M1 polarization following exposure GNP-MUC-1. To our best knowledge this is the first study to evaluate the anticancer effects of a newly designed nano-biocompound on the complex antigen- processing apparatus of peritoneal macrophages.
Computation and Graphical Characterization of Robust Multiple-Contact Postures in Two-Dimensional Gravitational Environments

This paper is concerned with computation and graphical characterization of robust equilibrium postures suited to quasistatic multi-legged locomotion. Quasistatic locomotion consists of postures in which the mechanism supports itself against gravity while moving its free limbs to new positions. A posture is robust if the contacts can passively support the mechanism against gravity as well as disturbance forces generated by its moving limbs. This paper is concerned with planar mechanisms supported by frictional contacts in two-dimensional gravitational environments. The kinematic structure of the mechanism is lumped into a rigid body B having the same contacts with the environment and a variable center of mass. Inertial forces generated by moving parts of the mechanism are lumped into a neighborhood of wrenches centered at the nominal gravitational wrench. The robust equilibrium postures associated with a given set of contacts become the center-of-mass locations of B that maintain equilibrium with respect to all wrenches in the given neighborhood. The paper formulates the computation of the robust center-of-mass locations as a linear programming problem. It provides graphical characterization of the robust center-of-mass locations, and gives a geometric algorithm for computing these center-of-mass locations. The paper reports experiments validating the equilibrium criterion on a two-legged prototype. Finally, it describes initial progress toward computation of robust equilibrium postures in three dimensions.
Spin-lock gesture authentication for mobile devices

The security of authentication mechanisms on touchscreen mobile devices is often at risk due to various usability barriers. The most common authentication step mobile users go through is the lock screen that blocks access to the entire device. This is subject to a usability-vs-security tension: users want quick and easy access to their phones while ensuring it is protected from unauthorized access. Since ease-of-use is a critical attribute for any new authentication mechanism, we propose an authentication system inspired by an intuitive real-life paradigm, the single dial combination (spin) lock, and evaluate its usability and user acceptance. We show that a Spin-lock authentication is perceived by users as more enjoyable than other lock methods. We use this to discuss implications for the design of mobile authentication mechanisms and suggest situations for which real-life inspired locking systems may be preferable.
Constructions of Self-complementary Circulants with No Multiplicative Isomorphisms

The main topic of the paper is the question of the existence of self-complementary Cayley graphs Cay(G, S) with the property S? =G#\S for all ? Aut(G). We answer this question in the positive by constructing an infinite family of self-complementary circulants with this property. Moreover, we obtain a complete classification of primes p for which there exist self-complementary circulants of order p2with this property.