Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Conspicuity and evolution of lesions in Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease at diffusion-weighted imaging.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Diffusion-weighted imaging can disclose distinct hyperintense lesions in Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). However, these findings and chronologic changes of CJD at diffusion-weighted imaging have not been fully investigated. Our purpose was to assess the diagnostic value of diffusion-weighted imaging in depicting CJD-related lesions and in tracking the evolution of these lesions. We also compared the sensitivity of diffusion-weighted imaging in depicting CJD-related lesions to that of fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) imaging. METHODS We reviewed findings in 13 patients with a diagnosis of CJD who underwent MR imaging, including diffusion-weighted imaging. Nine patients were initially examined within 4 months of onset of symptoms (early stage), and eight were examined 4 months or later (late stage). We evaluated four items: 1) distribution of lesions at diffusion-weighted imaging, 2) conspicuity of lesions at diffusion-weighted imaging and FLAIR imaging, 3) chronologic changes in lesions at diffusion-weighted imaging, and 4) chronologic changes in lesions revealed by apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) maps. RESULTS Patients had striatal lesions or cerebral cortical lesions or both. The thalamus was involved in only one patient, and the globus pallidus was spared in all patients. The sensitivity of diffusion-weighted imaging in depicting lesions was superior or at least equal to that of FLAIR imaging. Hyperintense lesions at diffusion-weighted imaging changed in extent and intensity over time. Unlike infarction, lesional ADC decreased for 2 weeks or longer. CONCLUSION The progressively hyperintense changes in the striata and cerebral cortices at diffusion-weighted imaging are considered characteristic of CJD. Diffusion-weighted imaging may be useful for the early diagnosis of CJD.
Correctness of Slicing Finite State Machines 30 December 2013

We consider slicing of extended finite state machines. These may be nondeterministic and hence standard techniques for slicing, developed for control flow graphs, are not immediately applicable. In this paper we propose ways of expressing the semantic correctness of slicing. We shall demand that the sliced machine simulates the original machine, so an “observable” step taken by the latter can also be done by the former. In the other direction, we cannot hope for a perfect simulation, but demand that for each observable step by the sliced machine, either the original machine simulates it or (i) it gets stuck, or (ii) it loops. To ensure correctness, it suffices to demand that the set of transitions in the slice satisfies two conditions: it must be closed under the well-known notion of data dependence, and it must have the “weak commitment” property highlighted by Danicic et al. If the slice also has the “strong commitment” property, the case (ii) above can be ruled out, meaning that the original machine will simulate the sliced machine except that it may get stuck. We prove that for each of the properties “weak commitment” and “strong commitment”, there exists a least set with that property; we also give algorithms to compute that least set. UCL DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
Respiratory Viruses Associated Hospitalization among Children Aged <5 Years in Bangladesh: 2010-2014

Background We combined hospital-based surveillance and health utilization survey data to estimate the incidence of respiratory viral infections associated hospitalization among children aged < 5 years in Bangladesh. Methods Surveillance physicians collected respiratory specimens from children aged <5 years hospitalized with respiratory illness and residing in the primary hospital catchment areas. We tested respiratory specimens for respiratory syncytial virus, parainfluenza viruses, human metapneumovirus, influenza, adenovirus and rhinoviruses using rRT-PCR. During 2013, we conducted a health utilization survey in the primary catchment areas of the hospitals to determine the proportion of all hospitalizations for respiratory illness among children aged <5 years at the surveillance hospitals during the preceding 12 months. We estimated the respiratory virus-specific incidence of hospitalization by dividing the estimated number of hospitalized children with a laboratory confirmed infection with a respiratory virus by the population aged <5 years of the catchment areas and adjusted for the proportion of children who were hospitalized at the surveillance hospitals. Results We estimated that the annual incidence per 1000 children (95% CI) of all cause associated respiratory hospitalization was 11.5 (10–12). The incidences per 1000 children (95% CI) per year for respiratory syncytial virus, parainfluenza, adenovirus, human metapneumovirus and influenza infections were 3(2–3), 0.5(0.4–0.8), 0.4 (0.3–0.6), 0.4 (0.3–0.6), and 0.4 (0.3–0.6) respectively. The incidences per 1000 children (95%CI) of rhinovirus-associated infections among hospitalized children were 5 (3–7), 2 (1–3), 1 (0.6–2), and 3 (2–4) in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013, respectively. Conclusion Our data suggest that respiratory viruses are associated with a substantial burden of hospitalization in children aged <5 years in Bangladesh.
NEWS Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment GEWEX Modelling and Prediction Panel ( GMPP ) Studies Advancing Parameterization

GMPP Activities Highlighted in this Issue GPCI analyzes weather and climate models along a cross section of the Pacific Ocean. Histograms of total cloud cover versus latitude along the GPCI cross section for June–July–August 1998 from the UKMO/HadGAM model, ISCCP and the NCAR/CAM3 model. These show that some climate models (e.g., UKMO/HadGAM) exhibit a quasi-bimodal structure with cloud cover being either close to 100 percent or close to zero, while other climate models (e.g., NCAR/CAM3) show a more continuous transition. See article below.
The Bohm criterion and sheath formation

In the limit of a small Debye length ( lambda D to 0) the analysis of the plasma boundary layer leads to a two-scale problem of a collision free sheath and of a quasi-neutral presheath. Bohm's criterion expresses a necessary condition for the formation of a stationary sheath in front of a negative absorbing wall. The basic features of the plasma-sheath transition and their relation to the Bohm criterion are discussed and illustrated from a simple cold-ion fluid model. A rigorous kinetic analysis of the vicinity of the sheath edge allows one to generalize Bohm's criterion accounting not only for arbitrary ion and electron distributions, but also for general boundary conditions at the wall. It is shown that the generalized sheath condition is (apart from special exceptions) marginally fulfilled and related to a sheath edge field singularity. Due to this singularity, smooth matching of the presheath and sheath solutions requires an additional transition layer. Previous investigations concerning particular problems of the plasma-sheath transition are reviewed in the light of the general relations.
Long-Term Maintenance of Inhibition Training Effects in Older Adults: 1- and 3-Year Follow-Up.

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study is to examine the long-term maintenance of training benefits in inhibition, as measured with the Stroop task, in older adults over 1- and 3-year periods. METHODS Participants from an original 6-session Stroop training study (Wilkinson & Yang, 2012 [Wilkinson, A. J., & Yang, L. (2012). Plasticity of inhibition in older adults: Retest practice and transfer effects. Psychology and Aging, 27, 606-615. doi:10.1037/a0025926]) were invited to come back to the lab to complete a single session of the Stroop task at 2 different time points. Thirty-three older adults returned for the 1-year follow-up session, and 26 of them returned for the 3-year follow-up session. RESULTS The results revealed maintenance of the training-induced inhibition gains at both follow-up sessions. Furthermore, performance at the 2 follow-up sessions was better (i.e., reduced Stroop ratio interference score) than baseline level. DISCUSSION The findings demonstrate the durability of inhibition training gains in older adults for up to a 3-year period. These results further extend the literature on long-term maintenance of cognitive training benefits in older adults by examining the durability of training effects in inhibition, an important executive function, and by covering a substantial maintenance period (i.e., up to 3 years).
Large amplitude oscillatory shear flow of gluten dough: A model power-law gel

In a previous paper [T. S. K. Ng and G. H. McKinley, J. Rheol. 52(2), 417–449 (2008)], we demonstrated that gluten gels can best be understood as a polymeric network with a power-law frequency response that reflects the fractal structure of the gluten network. Large deformation tests in both transient shear and extension show that in the absence of rigid starch fillers these networks are also time-strain factorizable up to very large strain amplitudes (γ∗>5). In the present work, we further explore the nonlinear rheological behavior of these critical gels by considering the material response obtained in large amplitude oscillatory shear over a wide range of strains and frequencies. We use a Lissajous representation to compare the measured material response with the predictions of a network theory that is consistent with the proposed molecular structure of gluten gels. In the linear viscoelastic regime, the Lissajous figures are elliptical as expected and can be quantitatively described by the same power-l.
Latent geographic feature extraction from social media

In this work we present a framework for the unsupervised extraction of latent geographic features from georeferenced social media. A geographic feature represents a semantic dimension of a location and can be seen as a sensor that measures a signal of geographic semantics. Our goal is to extract a small number of informative geographic features from social media, to describe and explore geographic space, and for subsequent spatial analysis, e.g., in market research. We propose a framework that, first, transforms the unstructured and noisy geographic information in social media into a high-dimensional multivariate signal of geographic semantics. Then, we use dimensionality reduction to extract latent geographic features. We conduct experiments using two large-scale Flickr data sets covering the LA area and the US. We show that dimensionality reduction techniques extracting sparse latent features find dimensions with higher informational value. In addition, we show that prior normalization can be used as a parameter in the exploration process to extract features representing different geographic characteristics, that is, landmarks, regional phenomena, or global phenomena.
On Selection Cooperation in Distributed Networks

We argue for selection cooperation as an alternative to distributed space-time block coded (DSTBC) transmissions and other maximal ratio combining (MRC)-based schemes in cooperative wireless systems. While MRC is optimal in traditional receive diversity schemes, we show that in distributed networks, where transmitting nodes have a power constraint, selection cooperation outperforms MRC-based protocols. We present two different relay selection schemes based on available centralization and computing power and show that even the simplest selection scheme outperforms DSTBC in terms of outage probability.
Action recognition using bag of features extracted from a beam of trajectories

A new spatio temporal descriptor is proposed for action recognition. The action is modelled from a beam of trajectories obtained using semi dense point tracking on the video sequence. We detect the dominant points of these trajectories as points of local extremum curvature and extract their corresponding feature vectors, to form a dictionary of atomic action elements. The high density of these informative and invariant elements allows effective statistical action description. Then, human action recognition is performed using a bag of feature model with SVM classifier. Experimentations show promising results on several well-known datasets.
Flexible Database Transformations: Teh SERF Approach

Database transformations is a critical task that occurs in many different domains. Schema evolution is one important class of problems for database transformations. In our work, we use existing technology and standards (ODMG, OQL, basic schema evolution primitives) to bring flexibility, extensibility and re-usability to current schema evolution systems, thus allowing the users to conveniently specify any customized transformation of their choice. We also investigate the re-usabilty of our framework to other applications beyond schema evolution such as web re-structuring.
ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROLS ON CORALLITE MORPHOLOGY IN THE REEF CORAL MONTASTRAEA ANNULARIS

Scleractinian reef-coral species display high phenotypic plasticity in skeletal mor phology. Understanding environmental and physiologic controls on this variation is essential to explaining the distribution and abundance of coral species as well as understanding their susceptibility to pollution and global climate change. Here we assess phenotypic plasticity in the corallite morphology of genetically determined colonies of Montastraea annularis s.s. (Ellis and Solander, 1786) by analyzing the three-dimensional morphology of calical surfaces and the two-dimensional coral lite morphology represented in transverse thin sections. Samples were collected along gradients of seawater depth and coastal influence on the island of Curacao, Netherlands Antilles, and additionally compared to M. annularis and two closely related species, M. franksi (Gregory, 1895), and M. faveolata (Ellis and Solander, 1786), collected from Panama. Significant phenotypic plasticity was found between seawater depths and localities of Curacao, as well as between the two geographic regions. Morphologic characters associated with calical surfaces were significantly more plastic than characters preserved in transverse thin sections. While charac ters preserved in thin section were more successful at classifying the three closely related species, characters associated with calical surfaces provide a basis for inter preting the adaptive significance of the observed differences between these three species. High variability in skeletal morphology is a well-known characteristic of sclerac
Ethnic Minorities and Their Health Needs: Crisis of Perception and Behaviours

There is considerable evidence to suggest that racial and ethnic disparities exist in the provision of emergency and wider healthcare. The importance of collecting patient ethnic data has received attention in literature across the world and eliminating ethnic and racial health equalities is one of the primary aims of healthcare providers internationally. The poor health status of certain racial and ethnic groups has been well documented. The improvement of racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare is at the forefront of many public health agendas. This article addresses important policy, practice, and cultural issues confronted by the pre-hospital emergency care setup. This aspect of care plays a unique role in the healthcare safety net in providing a service to a very diverse population, including members of ethnic and racial minorities. Competent decision making by the emergency care practitioners requires patient-specific information and the health provider's prior medical knowledge and clinical training. The article reviews the current ethnicity trends in the UK along with international evidence linking ethnicity and health inequalities. The study argues that serious difficulties will arise between the health provider and the patient if they come from different backgrounds and therefore experience difficulties in cross-cultural communication. This adversely impacts on the quality of diagnostic and clinical decision making for minority patients. The article offers few strategies to address health inequalities in emergency care and concludes by arguing that much more needs to be done to ensure that we are hearing the voices of more diverse groups, groups who are often excluded from engagement through barriers such as language or mobility difficulties.
TAGGING YOUR BODY VIRTUALLY Represent a place making process with social network

This research focuses on the virtual environment of place making. In this paper we would like to emphasize that the place making should be stressed collective views in order to obtain the design application of possibilities. However, in past researches there has been no study that tried to collect the collective views by digital ways. Accordingly, this paper proposes a response thought the Spatial Intention. It could be used to represent the human of body experience. The "moving" and "standing" are appropriate to two main considerations. Both of these could be connected to the action of "focus" and "choice. " these leads to a sequential relationship of place production. The positive significance of the spatial intention lies in the convertibility of physical experience could be implied with a specific understanding. It also could be used to mold the place of knowledge structure. Thereby in order to verify the reliability of the above, we made a social network of virtual environment and used the rapid prototyping method to develop a prototype system. Implementing on the Chinese garden of the actual case, we found that the tag could concentrate as an entire sense in somewhere of place. These tags also could be shared remotely through the social network. Different tags in the sharing mechanism could collage out a place of collective views. This perspective would be used to assist designers to understand the sense of place. It also would be applied to find out the environmental design of possibilities in the future studies.
Slow rupture and weakly pressure-sensitive strength enables compressional branching:

18 The 2012 M8.6 off-Sumatra earthquake, the largest strike-slip and intraplate earthquake recorded 19 to date, followed an exceptionally tortuous rupture path. It featured two episodes of branching 20 into fault segments that were experiencing increased compressive dynamic stresses, hence 21 increased frictional strength. Meng et al. (2012) attributed this unexpected compressional 22 branching to slow rupture and weak pressure-sensitivity of the fault strength. Here, by 23 conducting 2D dynamic rupture simulations, we confirm that the compressional branching can 24 only occur under slow rupture speed and low apparent friction coefficient. Poroelastic effects can 25 also contribute by buffering the dynamic clamping. We suggest that serpentinized minerals may 26 provide low friction, fluids and dynamic weakening down to 25 km depth, and ductile shear 27 heating instability may provide a weakening mechanism from 40 to 60 km depth. The absence of 28 known weakening mechanism in the intermediate depth range suggests that rupture may 29 penetrate over velocity-strengthening regions. 30
Model Predictive Control of Power Electronics Converter

This work makes a detailed analysis on the principles and characteristics of Direct Power Control (DPC) and Model Predictive Control (MPC) applied to three-phase half-bridge PWM Rectifier. Model predictive control has merits of forecast and real-time optimization. MPC controller computes the optimal space vector of input voltage to the PWM rectifier in the dq frame and then this desired space vector is modulated via space vector pulse width modulation. The simulation results from Matlab/Simulink illustrate the flexibility and effectiveness of MPC-SVPWM approach.
Automated Document Ranking Evaluation in Digital Libraries

The construction of Automated Digital Libraries has grabbed widespread popularity over recent years, rendering the value added services that suit to the tailored user requirements. In this context, carrying out traditional searches over text material by querying upon a given metadata or a set of domain keywords is predominantly observe, not to retrieve the relevant documents, although these end up in huge list of results containing query terms. In the present communication, the search is deviated from explicitly borrowed Metadata search to the context oriented search triggered from implicitly available Ontologies of the considered subject domain. The proposal is hereby analyzed to be most fruitful for Relevant Information Retrieval by User Communities, i.e. by those group of people who share common interests and benefit by their own accessed information. It is further emphasized that the search terms contributing to the background knowledge, can be implicitly made available from the collection of documents, which only need to be selectively defined, studying the User profiles of the search communities. The authors visualize this work as a tool to precisely rank the prescribed courseware material for Academic Digital Libraries.
Modulation signal bispectrum analysis of motor current signals for stator fault diagnosis

Induction motors are the most widely used electrical machines in industry. To diagnose any possible incipient faults, many techniques have been developed. Motor current signature analysis (MCSA) is a common practice in industry to find motor faults. However, because small modulations due to faults it is difficult to quantify it in the measured signals which predominates with supply frequency, higher order harmonics and noise. In this paper a modulation signal (MS) bispectrum is investigated to detect different severities of stator faults. It shows that MS bispectrum has the capability to accurately estimate modulation degrees and suppress the random and nonmodulation components. Test results show that MS bispectrum has a better performance in differentiating spectrum amplitudes due to stator faults and hence produces better diagnosis performance, compared with that of conventional power spectrum analysis.
QoS-Aware GASA: A QoS-Aware Grid Resource Selection Optimization Algorithm

In order to provide high Quality of Service (QoS), reasonable scheduling and resource allocation are needed when a great deal of tasks request grid resources. By quantifying some important properties of Grid QoS and maximizing cost-performance of the system, a grid resource selection optimization algorithm is provided based on Simulated Annealing Genetic Algorithm(SAGA): QoS-aware SAGA, and the flow of the algorithm is introduced. Finally, this algorithm is proved to be valid through a simulation experiment.
Spectral Density Driven Wavelet Representation of 2-D Images

The representation of images is a fundamental issue. Wavelet transform is the foundation on which the state of the art still-image compression algorithms are based. These algorithms exploit good energy compaction property of wavelet representation. In this work we propose a new paradigm in the wavelet based image representation. The proposed work uses the spectral property of a given image for the representation and can be applied to images having arbitrary spectra. The method is valid for both orthogonal as well as biorthogonal wavelets. The existing wavelet based schemes give good compression performance for images having spectra, which are dominantly low pass and where the signal energy decreases with increasing frequency. The simulation results clearly demonstrate the superior energy compaction property of the proposed scheme when compared with the standard wavelet representation