Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Safety of liposome extended-release bupivacaine for postoperative pain control

Background: Ideal postoperative pain management requires a multidisciplinary approach in combination with a variety of dosage regimens. Approximately 21–30% of patients experience moderate to severe pain in the postoperative period, which may have a significant impact on recovery rate, standard of living, psychological health, and postoperative complications. Objective: Analysis of the incidence and characterization of reported adverse effects with DepoFoam bupivacaine compared to conventional bupivacaine or placebo. Methods: A systematic review of prospective studies on the use of DepoFoam versus bupivacaine or placebo was performed in order to answer the clinically relevant question: is DepoFoam a safer formulation in place of bupivacaine single injection or continuous local infusion techniques for postoperative pain management? Inclusion criteria required randomized, controlled, double-blind trials in patients 18 years old or older, single dose used for postoperative pain control, and a primary procedure performed. Results: Six studies fitted the inclusion criteria for analysis, DepoFoam bupivacaine used in therapeutic doses was well-tolerated, had a higher safety margin, and showed a favorable safety profile compared to bupivacaine and control groups. Conclusion: Extended drug delivery system DepoFoam bupivacaine is a promising drug formulation that may significantly improve postoperative care and pain control in surgical patients.
Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of A Narrative Self : Developmental and Cultural Perspectives

Contents: R. Fivush, C.A. Haden, Introduction: Autobiographical Memory, Narrative, and Self. Part I: The Development of Autobiographical Memory and Self-Understanding. K. Nelson, Narrative and Self, Myth and Memory: Emergence of the Cultural Self. E. Reese, K. Farrant, Social Origins of Reminiscing. C.A. Haden, Joint Encoding and Joint Reminiscing: Implications for Young Children's Understanding and Remembering of Personal Experiences. Part II: Cross-Cultural Variation in Narrative Environments and Self-Construal. M.D. Leichtman, Q. Wang, D.B. Pillemer, Cultural Variations in Interdependence and Autobiographical Memory: Lessons From Korea, China, India, and the United States. H. Hayne, S. MacDonald, The Socialization of Autobiographical Memory in Children and Adults: The Roles of Culture and Gender. R.W. Schrauf, D.C. Rubin, On the Bilingual's Two Sets of Memories. Part III: The Construction of Gender and Identity Concepts in Developmental and Situational Contexts. R. Fivush, J.P. Buckner, Creating Gender and Identity Through Autobiographical Narratives. A. Thorne, K.C. McLean, Telling Traumatic Events in Adolescence: A Study of Master Narrative Positioning. D.P. McAdams, Identity and the Life Story. J. Bruner, Self-Making Narratives.
Zebrafish Numb and Numblike Are Involved in Primitive Erythrocyte Differentiation

Background Notch signaling is an evolutionarily conserved regulatory circuitry implicated in cell fate determination in various developmental processes including hematopoietic stem cell self-renewal and differentiation of blood lineages. Known endogenous inhibitors of Notch activity are Numb-Nb and Numblike-Nbl, which play partially redundant functions in specifying and maintaining neuronal differentiation. Nb and Nbl are expressed in most tissues including embryonic and adult hematopoietic tissues in mice and humans, suggesting possible roles for these proteins in hematopoiesis. Methodology and Principal Findings We employed zebrafish to investigate the possible functional role of Numb and Numblike during hematopoiesis, as this system allows a detailed analysis even in embryos with severe defects that would be lethal in other organisms. Here we describe that nb/nbl knockdown results in severe reduction or absence of embryonic erythrocytes in zebrafish. Interestingly, nb/nbl knocked-down embryos present severe downregulation of the erythroid transcription factor gata1. This results in erythroblasts which fail to mature and undergo apoptosis. Our results indicate that Notch activity is increased in embryos injected with nb/nbl morpholino, and we show that inhibition of Notch activation can partially rescue the hematopoietic phenotype. Conclusions and Significance Our results provide the first in vivo evidence of an involvement of Numb and Numblike in zebrafish erythroid differentiation during primitive hematopoiesis. Furthermore, we found that, at least in part, the nb/nbl morphant phenotype is due to enhanced Notch activation within hematopoietic districts, which in turn results in primitive erythroid differentiation defects.
Homer conferencing - A multimedia test bed for various experiments and measurements

Transferring multimedia data from and to customers is one of the biggest challenges of current network engineering. A key challenge, researchers are confronted with, is to understand what kind of real-time support is needed, what the network could provide to the application and how the application could utilize codecs, quality settings and transmission protocols in order to assure the service. In this paper we introduce the open source software Homer-Conferencing (HC) as multimedia test bed for research purposes. Our approach was developed during the last four years. The main goal of our work is to allow researchers implementing deep analysis of multiple kinds of multimedia traffic. For this purpose, exchangeable codecs and adjustable transmission qualities can be used in a video conferencing application. In this paper, we describe the architecture of HC and highlight based on selected experiments the benefits the HC system provides for experiments and measurements in currently used networks as well as future Internet platforms.
Improvement of regional myocardial blood flow and function and reduction of infarct size with ivabradine: protection beyond heart rate reduction.

AIMS Effects of the bradycardic agent ivabradine on regional blood flow, contractile function, and infarct size were studied in a pig model of myocardial ischaemia/reperfusion. Heart rate reduction by beta-blockade is associated with negative inotropism and unmasked alpha-adrenergic coronary vasoconstriction. Ivabradine is the only available bradycardic agent for clinical use. METHODS AND RESULTS Anaesthetized pigs were subjected to 90 min controlled left anterior descending coronary artery hypoperfusion and 120 min reperfusion. Regional blood flow was measured with microspheres, regional function with sonomicrometry, and infarct size with triphenyl tetrazolium chloride staining. Pigs received placebo or ivabradine (0.6 mg/kg i.v.) before or during ischaemia or before reperfusion, respectively. Pre-treatment with ivabradine reduced infarct size from 35 +/- 4 (SEM) to 19 +/- 4% of area at risk (AAR). Ivabradine 15-20 min after the onset of ischaemia increased regional myocardial blood flow from 2.12 +/- 0.31 to 3.55 +/- 0.56 microL/beat/g and systolic wall thickening from 6.7 +/- 1.0 to 16.3 +/- 3.0%; infarct size was reduced from 12 +/- 4 to 2 +/- 1% of AAR. Ivabradine 5 min before reperfusion still reduced infarct size from 36 +/- 4 to 21 +/- 5% of AAR. The benefit of ivabradine on flow and function was eliminated by atrial pacing, but part of the reduction of infarct size by ivabradine was not. CONCLUSION Ivabradine's protection goes beyond heart rate reduction.
Norway rats reciprocate help according to the quality of help they received

Direct reciprocity, according to the decision rule ‘help someone who has helped you before’, reflects cooperation based on the principle of postponed benefits. A predominant factor influencing Homo sapiens' motivation to reciprocate is an individual's perceived benefit resulting from the value of received help. But hitherto it has been unclear whether other species also base their decision to cooperate on the quality of received help. Previous experiments have demonstrated that Norway rats, Rattus norvegicus, cooperate using direct reciprocity decision rules in a variant of the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, where they preferentially help cooperators instead of defectors. But, as the quality of obtained benefits has not been varied, it is yet unclear whether rats use the value of received help as decision criterion to pay help back. Here, we tested whether rats distinguish between different cooperators depending purely on the quality of their help. Our data show that a rat's propensity to reciprocate help is, indeed, adjusted to the perceived quality of the partner's previous help. When cooperating with two conspecific partners expending the same effort, rats apparently rely on obtained benefit to adjust their level of returned help.
Mathematics-Based Modeling of a Series-Hybrid Electric Vehicle

The recent increase in oil price and environmental concerns has attracted various research efforts on hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) which provide promising alternatives to conventional engine-powered vehicles with better fuel economy and fewer emissions. To speed up the design and prototyping processes of new HEVs, a method that automatically generates mathematics equations governing the vehicle system response in an optimized symbolic form is desirable. To achieve this goal, we employed MapleSim TM 4.0, a new physical modeling tool developed by Maplesoft Inc., to develop the multi-domain model of a series-HEV, utilizing the symbolic computing algorithms of Maple software package to generate an optimized set of governing equations. The HEV model consists of a mean-value internal combustion engine (ICE), a chemistry-based NiMH battery pack, and a multibody vehicle model. Simulations are then used to demonstrate the performance of the developed HEV system. Simulation results show that the model is viable and the number of governing equations is reduced significantly, resulting in a computationally efficient system.
STUDIES ON THE OXIDATIVE METABOLISM OF SACCHAROMYCES CEREVISIAE

Vegetative cells of Saccharomyces cerevisiae were fixed with potassium permanganate followed by uranyl nitrate, embedded in methacrylate, and studied in electron micrographs of thin sections. Details of the structure of the cell wall, cytoplasmic membrane, nucleus, vacuole, and mitochondria are described. Cell membranes, about 70 to 80 A thick, have been resolved into two dense layers, 20 to 25 A thick, separated by a light layer of the same dimensions, which correspond in thickness and appearance to the components of the "unit membrane" as described by Robertson (15). The cell wall is made up of zones of different electron opacity. Underlying the cell wall is the cytoplasmic membrane, a sinuous structure with numerous invaginations. The nucleoplasm, often of uneven electron opacity, is enclosed in a pair of unit membranes in which nuclear pores are apparent. The vacuole, limited by a single unit membrane, is usually irregular in outline and contains some dense material. Rod-shaped mitochondria, 0.4 to 0.6 µ in length and 0.2 to 0.3 µ in diameter, are smaller in size, but similar in structure to some of those described in plant and animal cells. Attempts to use osmium tetroxide as fixative were unsuccessful, a result similar to that obtained by other workers. It is suggested that yeast cells are impermeable to osmium tetroxide, except when grown under specific conditions.
A modified approach to cluster refinement for speaker diarization

Speaker clustering, in a speaker diarization system is of great importance since the result of speaker clustering impacts deeply on the final diarization result. However, errors can happen in every step in the clustering process, such as the estimation of the cluster number, the initialization of the cluster centers and so on. Therefore, it is necessary to modify the clustering result and improve the accuracy of the diarization system. In this paper, a modified clustering refinement approach based on “cross EM refinement” is presented to solve these issues. According to the experiment results, the performance of diarization result improved a lot with our modified refinement, and can handle much more badly speaker clustering results than the original cross EM refinement method. The experiments are carried out three datasets of different types- meeting, broadcast news and talk-show.
Multistage LSCMA Beamforming Algorithm for Smart Antenna with SMI initialization

The multistage LSCMA beamforming algorithm is capable of detecting multiple input signals sources without pilot or training signals. it is comprised of acascade of LSCM array subsections, eash of which captures one of the signals impinging on the array. An adaptative signal canceller folows each LSCM array to remove captured signal from the input before processing by subsequent section. We also propose in this paper new method for blind algorithm initialization. The SMI is used to estimate initial weights of the LSCMA for a few samples. Keywords—Smart antenna, beamforming algorithm, constant modulus algorithm (CMA), direct matrix inversion (DMI), normalized constant modulus algorithm (NCMA),
Multi-target Tracking based on Level Set Segmentation and Contextual Information

In the unconstrained environment for video tracking is essential for many applications, such as video surveillance, man-machine interaction. In fact, moving object in the sequences generally has the context information of others or the different moments of its own state. Our research focus on the complex scenes, tracking multiple articulated targets, obtaining the features of the target, getting the precise target segmentation and improving the accuracy and reliability of tracking. We propose using top-down segmentation to feedback object detection, also contains the shape information. And the local appearance information is embedded into the framework of the level set. Then we propose a method to solve the interference of similar appearance target and multi-target tracking, by using context information to create two auxiliary items: Misleading items and support items. Both of them are using continuous random ferns. We experimentally evaluate our proposed approach on challenging sequences and video in real-world demonstrate its good performance in practice.
Components of Variance of Scales With a Bifactor Subscale Structure From Two Calculations of α

Since Cronbach's (1951) elaboration of α from its introduction by Guttman (1945), this coefficient has become ubiquitous in characterizing assessment instruments in education, psychology, and other social sciences. Also ubiquitous are caveats on the calculation and interpretation of this coefficient. This article summarizes a recent contribution (Andrich, 2015) on the use of coefficient α which complements these many caveats. It shows that in the presence of a simple bifactor structure of a scale where unique components of variance are homogeneous in magnitude, three components of variance and the common latent common correlation among the subscales can be calculated from the ratio of two calculations of α, one at the level of the items, the other at the level of the subscales. It was suggested that these two ready calculations and their interpretation, and the reporting of all four indices in the analysis of scales with a subscale structure, would reduce the misinterpretation of this coefficient. An illustrative example of the application of the calculations is also shown.
Investigating Laser Scanner Accuracy

In a research project, i3mainz has installed a number of different test targets that allow an investigation in the quality of measurements obtained with laser scanners. The standardized tests, carried out since 2003, also allow a comparison between instruments of different manufacturers for the first time. The test procedures include scans of plane surfaces of different reflectivity in different ranges to obtain information about the noise of the range measurements and about systematic offsets caused by different materials. Several test fields using white spheres as targets have been installed to get information about the accuracy of distances in scanning direction and across. Due to different angular increments and spot sizes, not all 3D scanners have the same abilities to resolve small object details. 3D scanners are also known to produce errors at edges. Both phenomena are tested with appropriate targets. The tests are still available and producers and users are invited to have their instruments examined.
Question Classification using Semantic, Syntactic and Lexical features

Question classification is very important for question answering. This paper present our research work on question classification through machine learning approach. In order to train th e learning model, we designed a rich set of features that are predictive of question categories. An important component of question answering systems is question classification. The task of question classification is to predict the entity type of the answer of a natural language question. Question classification is typically done using machine learning techniques. Different lexical, syntactical and semantic features can be extracted from a question. In this work we combined lexical, syntactic and semantic f eatures which improve the accuracy of classification. Furthermore, we adopted three different classifiers: Nearest Neighbors (NN), Naive Bayes (NB), and Support Vector Machines (SVM) using two kinds of features: bag -of-words and bag-of n grams. Furthermore, we discovered that when we take SVM classifier and combine the semantic, syntactic, lexical feature we found that it will improve the accuracy of classification. We tested our proposed approaches on the well-known UIUC dataset and succeeded to achieve anew record on the accuracy of classification on this dataset.
Detecting the Moving Object in Dynamic Backgrounds by using Fuzzy-Extreme Learning Machine

: - Moving object detection in dynamic background is the important features in video surveillance systems. Detecting the moving object using the SOM in video streams are not suitable for dynamic background and it requires complex computation to adjust the threshold values based on HSV. This paper proposes Fuzzy-Extreme Learning Machine (FELM) for detecting the object in dynamic backgrounds. The proposed model involves Fuzzy-Extreme Learning Machine and Self Organizing Map (SOM) which are used to detect the moving objects as well as shadow elimination in dynamic background. Again it automatically determines the threshold values for various video sequences. The proposed approach identifies the moving objects automatically without human intervention and eliminates the shadows more effectively when compared to other existing methods in the recent literature.
Exploiting monotonicity via logistic regression in Bayesian network learning

An important challenge in machine learning is to find ways of learning quickly from very small amounts of training data. The only way to learn from small data samples is to constrain the learning process by exploiting background knowledge. In this report, we present a theoretical analysis on the use of constrained logistic regression for estimating conditional probability distribution in Bayesian Networks (BN) by using background knowledge in the form of qualitative monotonicity statements. Such background knowledge is treated as a set of constraints on the parameters of a logistic function during training. Our goal of finding the appropriate BN model is two-fold: (a) we want to exploit any monotonic relationship between random variables that may generally exist as domain knowledge and (b) we want to be able to address the problem of estimating the conditional distribution of a random variable with a large number of parents. We discuss variants of the logistic regression model and present an analysis on the corresponding constraints required to implement monotonicity. More importantly, we outline the problem in some of these variants in terms of the number of parameters and constraints which, in some cases, can grow exponentially with the number of parent variables. To address this problem, we present two variants of the constrained logistic regression model, M2b CLR and M3 CLR, in which the number of constraints required to implement monotonicity does not grow exponentially with the number of parents hence providing a practicable method for estimating conditional probabilities with very sparse data.
Book Review: WISC-V assessment and interpretation: Scientist-practitioner perspectives By Weiss, L. G., Saklofske, D. H., & Holdnack, J. A. (Eds.).

This edited book provides readers who use the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children–fifth edition (WISC-V) in their clinical assessment practice with a comprehensive overview of the instrument, detailed descriptions of its subtests, administration rules and tips, and guidance in meaningful interpretation of results. This book is intended for use by clinicians and graduate students who assess cognitive abilities as part of psychological evaluations for children and adolescents. As noted by Kaufman (2013), “intelligent testing demands that individually administered tests need to be personalized to each child or adult being assessed” (p. 231). Seemingly, with that in mind, this book’s main purposes are (a) to consolidate for the reader all the information about the newest Wechsler instrument, drawing from the research, development, and practice literature; (b) to guide the reader into the digital age of intelligence testing by introducing the Q-interactive system; (c) to serve as a resource for interpreting results and linking them to interventions; and (d) to guide clinicians through the process of creating a personalized assessment approach using the WISC-V.
A Manifesto, in 140 Characters or Fewer: Social Media as a Tool of Rebel Diplomacy

Can rebel organizations in a civil conflict use social media to garner international support? This article argues that the use of social media is a unique form of public diplomacy through which rebels project a favorable image to gain that support. It analyzes the Libyan civil war, during which rebels invested considerable resources in diplomatic efforts to gain US support. The study entails collecting original data, and finds that rebel public diplomacy via Twitter increases co-operation with the rebels when their message (1) clarifies the type of regime they intend to create and (2) emphasizes the atrocities perpetrated by the government. Providing rebels with an important tool of image projection, social media can affect dynamics in an ever more connected international arena.
Ontology-based user modeling for adaptive educational hypermedia system

To Construct an accurate and comprehensive User Model is required in E-learning. User model can describe explicitly the learning goals and information needs about an individual learner. In this paper, we analyze learner characters and propose an ontology-based user model, which involves five modules. After that, we separately introduce the representation methods and run mechanisms of the five modules in detail. This approach greatly improves the accuracy of knowledge acquisition. A new adaptive learning pattern is proposed. At present, this work has been applied in junior high school physics. Through experiments it proves to be an efficient method for adaptive learning.
International Master of Research in Computer Science : Computer Aided Decision Support Graph for Pattern Recognition

Attributed graphs are powerful data structures for the representation of complex entities. In a graph-based representation, vertices and their attributes describe objects (or part of objects) while edges represent interrelationships between the objects. Due to the inherent genericity of graph-based representations, and thanks to the improvement of computer capacities, structural representations have become more and more popular in the field of Pattern Recognition (PR). PR problems can take advantage of graph in two ways : • through Graph Matching • through Graph Embedding