Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of keratometry with a novel Color-LED corneal topographer.

PURPOSE To assess the performance of a novel keratometer based on reflections of colored light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and compare it with devices based on Placido rings, monochromatic LEDs, and Scheimpflug images. METHODS Sixty-three eyes of 63 patients with virgin corneas underwent keratometry with color-LED corneal topography (Cassini; i-Optics, The Hague, The Netherlands) and with devices based on Placido ring reflections (Keratron; Optikon, Rome, Italy), monochromatic LED reflections (Lenstar; Haag-Streit, Koeniz, Switzerland), and Scheimpflug imaging (Pentacam; Oculus Optikgeräte, Wetzlar, Germany). Three repeated measurements were performed with each device. Comparability and repeatability of corneal power and cylinder measurements were assessed. The Bonferroni-corrected α-threshold for statistical significance was 0.016. RESULTS Corneal power measurements with the Cassini topographer were not statistically significantly different from those with the Pentacam (P = .64). They were statistically significantly lower than those with the Keratron and Lenstar (P < .01), but the differences were of negligible clinical relevance. Cylinder measurements with the Cassini topographer were not statistically significantly different from those with any other device (P = .46). Repeatability of Cassini corneal power measurements was not statistically significantly different from that of the Keratron (P = .02), but was statistically significantly lower than that of the Lenstar and Pentacam (P < .001). Repeatability of Cassini cylinder measurements was statistically significantly higher than that of the Pentacam and Keratron (P < .001), but was not statistically significantly different from that of the Lenstar (P > .05). CONCLUSIONS Corneal power and cylinder measurements with color-LED corneal topography yielded values that were comparable to those of other commonly used devices. Repeatability of corneal power measurements was lower compared to some devices, but repeatability of cylinder measurements was relatively high. This may be of particular interest when using toric intraocular lenses.
ZapDroid: Managing Infrequently Used Applications on Smartphones

User surveys have shown that a typical user has over a 100 apps on his/her smartphone <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">[1]</xref> , but stops using many of them. We conduct a user study to identify such unused apps, which we call zombies, and show via experiments that zombie apps consume significant resources on a user’s smartphone and access his/her private information. We then design and build <italic>ZapDroid</italic>, which enables users to detect and silo zombie apps in an effective way to prevent their undesired activities. If and when the user wishes to resume using such an app, <italic>ZapDroid</italic> restores the app quickly and effectively. Our evaluations show that: (i) <italic>ZapDroid </italic> saves twice the energy from unwanted zombie app behaviors as compared to apps from the Play Store that kill background unwanted processes, and (ii) it effectively prevents zombie apps from using undesired permissions. In addition, <italic>ZapDroid</italic> is energy-efficient, consuming <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$<4$ </tex-math><alternatives><inline-graphic xlink:href="singh-ieq1-2591546.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> percent of the battery per day.
Se p 20 06 Turbulent Comptonization in Relativistic Accretion Disks

Turbulent Comptonization, a potentially important damping and radiation mechanism in relativistic accretion flows, is discussed. Particular emphasis is placed on the physical basis, relative importance, and thermodynamics of turbulent Comptonization. The effects of metal-absorption opacity on the spectral component resulting from turbulent Comptonization is considered as well. 1. Overview of Thermal and Bulk
Social Network Collaborative Filtering: Preliminary Results

This paper reports on a preliminary empirical study comparing methods for collaborative filtering (CF) using explicit consumers’ social networks. As user-generated social networks become increasingly important and visible in technology-mediated consumer interactions, we can begin to ask how the rich associated information can be used to improve inference. Theories from social psychology have long discussed that social relationships are likely to connect similar people. If the social similarity is in line with the recommendation task, the social network may provide a small, dense set of “recommenders” for CF. To our knowledge this is the first study to show effects of social-network information for estimating purchase behavior with CF. We examine a data set of consumers that contains a social network of consumer-selected friends, as well as their purchases from a large online retailer. We examine two ways to incorporate social-network information into CF: using proximity in the social network to modify the traditional CF, and using the social network to restrict the set of recommenders selected. The results show that social network proximity does not seem to improve recommendations. On the other hand, CF with social-network members selected as recommenders predicts purchases far better than CF with the recommenders not socially connected.
A new adaptive algorithm for data dissemination in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks

The idea or concept of intelligent traffic management in which data from the TIC (Traffic Information Centre) infrastructures could be reachable at any point is included mightily in Smart cities. Living labs (cities in which new designed systems can be tested in real conditions) have been created all over Europe to test the possibilities of these future cities. It's the new concept where vehicular networks play relevant role. The Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks VANETs are a sub-class of the most studied Mobile Ad hoc Networks MANET, in which vehicles are considered as mobile nodes. VANETs differ from other MANETs because of their specific characteristics, inducing numerous problems and constraints, which lead us to discuss many issues in VANETs as they are decentralized, self organized, self monitoring with distributed nature of network. When and if deployed, VANETs will be the most implemented MANET ever and will continue their development over next years; it is indeed the reason why many issues are of great concern to be studied. Ample research efforts have been devoted to VANETs in the broadcasting domain. In order to have optimal and adaptive approaches, we focus on a number of requirements. In this light, this article will present an overview of VANETs, chiefly broadcasting protocols with the aim to resolve this relevant related issue, it also present some suggested broadcasting solutions and a propose a new algorithm with the idea of integrating the concept of Intelligent Traffic Lights ITLs in order to solve the core's problem which is how to minimize the number of rebroadcast packets while maintaining good latency and reachability using dynamic parameters from the counter, probability based and distance based.
Uncovering Dominant Social Class in Neighborhoods through Building Footprints: A Case Study of Residential Zones in Massachusetts using Computer Vision

In urban theory, urban form is related to social and economic status. This paper explores to uncover zip-code level income through urban form by analyzing figure-ground map, a simple, prevailing and precise representation of urban form in the field of urban study. Deep learning in computer vision enables such representation maps to be studied at a large scale. We propose to train a DCNN model to identify and uncover the internal bridge between social class and urban form. Further, using hand-crafted informative visual features related with urban form properties (building size, building density, etc.), we apply a random forest classifier to interpret how morphological properties are related with social class.
EFFECT OF GLUTAMATE NEUROTOXICITY ON CAM KINASE IMMUNOREACTIVITY IN VIVO

It has been hypothesized that glutamate released during ischemia causes delayed neuronal cell death in vulnerable brain regions including the hippocampus. It has also been observed that calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (CaM kinase) activity and immunoreactivity are decreased following ischemia. Recently, it was reported that glutamate induced reduction of CaM kinase immunoreactivity preceded neuronal cell death in cell culture. The present study was conducted to test the effect of glutamate neurotoxicity on CaM kinase immunoreactivity in vivo. In Experiment I, 9 pi L-glutamate at a concentration of 34 pg/pl was bilaterally injected into the dorsal hippocampus of 10 gerbils. Five animals were perfused at 12 hr after infusion while the remaining 5 animals were perfused at 24 hr. Significant cell death was observed at 24 hr, but not at 12 hr following injection. The result demonstrated that injection of L-glutamate at this concentration caused cell death that was delayed. Gerbils in Experiment II were injected with 9 pi L-glutamate (n=5) or Dglutamate (n=5) each at a concentration of 34 pg/pl. Twenty-four hrs following infusion, the animals were perfused. Significant cell death was observed in Lglutamate injected animals, but not D-glutamate injected animals. The results suggest that at this time point, damage to the pyramidal cell was a result of Lglutamate toxicity rather than alterations in osmotic pressure. Thus, the damage to pyramidal cells appeared to be mediated by stimulation of glutamate receptors. In Experiment III, 10 gerbils received bilateral glutamate injections at a concentration of 34 pg/pl while a second group of 10 received saline injections. At 12 hr following glutamate injection, ten gerbils (5 glutamate-injected and 5 salineinjected) were behaviorally tested followed by perfusion and subsequent immunocytochemistry processing. The remaining 10 gerbils (5 glutamate injected and 5 saline injected) were euthanized at 12 hr following injection and hippocampi removed for immunoblot processing. During behavior testing, gerbils that received L-glutamate were not significantly more active than saline controls. However, gerbils injected with L-glutamate had a significant reduction in CaM kinase immunoreactivity than gerbils injected with saline. These findings suggest that reduction of CaM kinase immunoreactivity post injection is mediated by glutamate and supports the notion that CaM kinase plays a role in glutamate-dependent, delayed neuronal cell death.
Selective prediction-set models with coverage guarantees

Though black-box predictors are state-of-the-art for many complex tasks, they often fail to properly quantify predictive uncertainty and may provide inappropriate predictions for unfamiliar data. Instead, we can learn more reliable models by letting them either output a prediction set or abstain when the uncertainty is high. We propose training these selective prediction-set models using an uncertainty-aware loss minimization framework, which unifies ideas from decision theory and robust maximum likelihood. Moreover, since black-box methods are not guaranteed to output well-calibrated prediction sets, we show how to calculate point estimates and confidence intervals for the true coverage of any selective prediction-set model, as well as a uniform mixture of K set models obtained from K-fold sample-splitting. When applied to predicting in-hospital mortality and length-of-stay for ICU patients, our model outperforms existing approaches on both in-sample and out-of-sample age groups, and our recalibration method provides accurate inference for prediction set coverage.
Changes in serial blood lead levels during pregnancy.

The first step in modeling lead kinetics during pregnancy includes a description of sequential maternal blood lead (PbB) during pregnancy and the factors controlling it. We analyzed PbB of 105 women living in the Valley of Mexico from week 12 to week 36 of pregnancy and again at parturition. We also used data from all women contributing blood at any stage of pregnancy to determine antecedents of PbB. Pregnancies were uneventful, and offspring were normal. Although geometric mean PbB level averaged around 7.0 micrograms/dl (0.34 mumol/l), with a range of 1.0-35.5 micrograms/dl throughout pregnancy, analysis of variance revealed a significant decrease in mean PbB from week 12 to week 20 (1.1 micrograms/dl) and various significant increases in mean PbB from week 20 to parturition (1.6 micrograms/dl). Regression analyses confirmed the positive linear PbB trend from 20 weeks to parturition and additional contributions of dietary calcium, reproductive history, lifetime residence of Mexico City, coffee drinking, and use of indigenous lead-glazed pottery. Although decreasing hematocrit has been suggested to explain first-half pregnancy PbB decrease, the time course of hematocrit decrease in the present study did not match the sequential changes in PbB. While hemodilution and organ growth in the first half of pregnancy may account for much of the PbB decrease seen between 12 and 20 weeks, the remaining hemodilution and accelerated organ growth of the last half of pregnancy do not predict the trend toward increasing maternal PbB concentration from 20 weeks to delivery. Mobilization of bone lead, increased gut absorption, and increased retention of lead may explain part of the upward PbB trend in the second half of pregnancy. Reduction of lifetime lead exposure may be required to decrease risk of fetal exposure. ImagesFigure 1.Figure 2.
The Cerebellum Predicts the Temporal Consequences of Observed Motor Acts

It is increasingly clear that we extract patterns of temporal regularity between events to optimize information processing. The ability to extract temporal patterns and regularity of events is referred as temporal expectation. Temporal expectation activates the same cerebral network usually engaged in action selection, comprising cerebellum. However, it is unclear whether the cerebellum is directly involved in temporal expectation, when timing information is processed to make predictions on the outcome of a motor act. Healthy volunteers received one session of either active (inhibitory, 1Hz) or sham repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation covering the right lateral cerebellum prior the execution of a temporal expectation task. Subjects were asked to predict the end of a visually perceived human body motion (right hand handwriting) and of an inanimate object motion (a moving circle reaching a target). Videos representing movements were shown in full; the actual tasks consisted of watching the same videos, but interrupted after a variable interval from its onset by a dark interval of variable duration. During the ‘dark’ interval, subjects were asked to indicate when the movement represented in the video reached its end by clicking on the spacebar of the keyboard. Performance on the timing task was analyzed measuring the absolute value of timing error, the coefficient of variability and the percentage of anticipation responses. The active group exhibited greater absolute timing error compared with the sham group only in the human body motion task. Our findings suggest that the cerebellum is engaged in cognitive and perceptual domains that are strictly connected to motor control.
What makes it hard to teach software engineering to end users? some directions from adaptive and personalized learning

Today, software is being co-designed, co-developed, co-maintained and customized by professionals from a wide range of other disciplines and end users from varied and different backgrounds in addition to software engineers. While there is extensive research on facilitating and supporting end users to write better software, there is sparse research on better ways of educating them with software engineering (SE) knowledge. On the other hand, learning domain has recognized the need for adaptive and personalized learning (APL) and developed numerous approaches, methods and tools to address that need. The main purpose of this paper is firstly to expose some challenges of teaching SE to end users with an aim of understanding learning needs of end users. We then present a brief overview of APL domain and an ontology based framework for integrating APL with software engineering education (SEE). We then discuss a brief example of end users from adult literacy followed by some future directions towards delivering personalized SEE.
Reentrant processing mediates object substitution masking: comment on Põder (2013)

Object-substitution masking (OSM) occurs when a target stimulus and a surrounding mask are displayed briefly together, and the display then continues with the mask alone. Target identification is accurate when the stimuli co-terminate but is progressively impaired as the duration of the trailing mask is increased. In reentrant accounts, OSM is said to arise from iterative exchanges between brain regions connected by two-way pathways. In an alternative account, OSM is explained on the basis of exclusively feed-forward processes, without recourse to reentry. Here I show that the feed-forward account runs afoul of the extant phenomenological, behavioral, brain-imaging, and electrophysiological evidence. Further, the feed-forward assumption that masking occurs when attention finds a degraded target is shown to be entirely ad hoc. In contrast, the evidence is uniformly consistent with a reentrant-processing account of OSM.
Virtual private social networks

Social Networking Sites (SNSs) are having a significant impact on the social life of many people - even beyond the millions of people that use them directly. These websites usually allow users to present a profile of themselves through a long list of very detailed information. However, even when such SNSs have advanced privacy policies, users are often not aware of their settings and, on top of that, users cannot abstain from sharing a minimum set of information (e.g. name and location). Such a small set of information has been proven to be enough to completely re-identify a user [22, 25]. In this work we introduce the concept of Virtual Private Social Networks (VPSNs), a concept inspired by the one of Virtual Private Networks in traditional computer networks. We argue that VPSNs can mitigate the privacy issues of SNSs, building private social networks that leverage architecture publicly available for SNSs. Furthermore, we propose FaceVPSN, which is an implementation of VPSNs for Facebook, one of the most used SNSs. FaceVPSN is the first privacy threats mitigation solution that has a light and completely distributed architecture - no coordinator is required. Furthermore, it can be implemented without any particular collaboration from the SNS platform. Finally, experimental evaluation shows that FaceVPSN adds a limited overhead, which, we argue, is acceptable for the user.
Cell cycle and Alzheimer's disease: studies in non-neuronal cells

The most common cause of dementia in the elderly is Alzheimer disease (AD). In Europe, AD is a leading cause of death. The prevalence of this disease in developed countries is increasing because of very significant shifts in life expectancy and demographic parameters. AD is characterized by progressive cognitive impairment, resulting from dysfunction and degeneration of neurons in the limbic and cortical regions of the brain. Two prominent abnormalities in the affected brain regions are extracellular deposits of β-amyloid, and intracellular aggregates of tau protein in neurofibrillary tangles. The role of these features in AD pathogenesis and progression is not yet completely elucidated. Research over the last decade has revealed that the activation of cell cycle machinery in postmitotic neurons is one of the earliest events in neuronal degeneration in AD. Here we summarize evidence to support the hypothesis that cell cycle alterations occur in cells other than neurons in AD sufferers. Immortalized lymphocytes from AD patients have show an enhanced rate of proliferation associated with G1/S regulatory failure induced by alterations in the cyclin/CDK/pRb/E2F pathway. In addition, these cells have a higher resistance to serum deprivation-induced apoptosis. These neoplastic-like features, cell cycle dysfunction and impaired apoptosis can be considered systemic manifestations of AD disease.
Health, physical exercise and fear of aging: anti-aging problematizations in amateur bodybuilders speeches

Scientific arguments in favour of applying physical exercise as an intervention on "aging" insists on relying on the biological concept of health. Considering the hegemony of this concept in physical education, the present study questions in what extent it must be accepted that the relationship between health/aging remains summarized in the mere search for maintaining physiological capabilities? The aim was to analyse the problematizations on the relationship between health and exercise in a group of physically active women from the city of Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil, in the context of aging process. Forty-five amateur bodybuilders were selected utilizing the sample snowball technique. They answered an interview guide with pictures according to the photo elicitation technique, individually. It was utilized the speech analysis proposed by Foucault. The group understands the relationship health/aging as a way to build identities, overcoming the negative perception of old age as vital and negative process. The fear of aging denotes the presence of self-centred healthcare practices carried over the years. Physical exercise plays a role that transcends the mere control of biological variables, being a resource to strengthen the experience to look and feel younger.
Building service robot using U-Bot

Research into service robots is popular nowaday. In 2006, the RoboCup@home league was founded as part of the RoboCup competition[1]. In contrast to other robot competitions, the venue is an everyday human environment, where the robot has to perform a set of service tasks. This paper describes the design of our RoboCup@home robot based on the mobile U-Bot platform manufactured by the Taiwanese Industrial Technology Research Institute. Our design provides an integrated mobile service robot platform.
The need achievement orientation of Catholic and Protestant Mexican-Americans

The Need-achievement orientations of fifty-four Protestant and fifty-four Catholic Mexican-American subjects of similar levels of acculturation and socio-economic background are here reported. It was hypothesized that values relevant to the “Protestant Ethic” would be reflected by Protestant subjects. One instrument, evaluat­ing basic achievement motivation, reflected an equal drive in both groups but a second instrument reflecting values and attitudes showed the Protestants to have achievement goals more related to an activistic-individualistic-future orientation. It is suggested that certain elements of the Protestant religion such as stewardship, indi­vidual responsibility, asceticism and self-discipline are responsible for the attitude differences expressed by Protestant subjects.
Generalized Lagrangian Thermodynamics of Thermorheology

The thermodynamic principle of virtual dissipation is given a formulation with variations of the field components freed from any constraints. Application of the principle and the introduction of a new state variable called heat content leads to the integro-differential field equations of thermorheology. Rigorous Lagrangian equations are also obtained which avoid the use of the entropy produced as an auxiliary variable while taking into account the heat generated. Quasi-isothermal and quasi-adiabatic evolutions are considered. Attention is called to the completeness of the generalized coordinate description and to implications in finite-element and bifurcation analysis based on the Lagrangian equations.