Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dissolved Oxygen Sensor in Animal-Borne Instruments: An Innovation for Monitoring the Health of Oceans and Investigating the Functioning of Marine Ecosystems

The current decline in dissolved oxygen concentration within the oceans is a sensitive indicator of the effect of climate change on marine environment. However the impact of its declining on marine life and ecosystems’ health is still quite unclear because of the difficulty in obtaining in situ data, especially in remote areas, like the Southern Ocean (SO). Southern elephant seals (Mirounga leonina) proved to be a relevant alternative to the traditional oceanographic platforms to measure physical and biogeochemical structure of oceanic regions rarely observed. In this study, we use a new stage of development in biologging technology to draw a picture of dissolved oxygen concentration in the SO. We present the first results obtained from a dissolved oxygen sensor added to Argos CTD-SRDL tags and deployed on 5 female elephant seals at Kerguelen. From October 2010 and October 2011, 742 oxygen profiles associated with temperature and salinity measurements were recorded. Whether a part of the data must be considered cautiously, especially because of offsets and temporal drifts of the sensors, the range of values recorded was consistent with a concomitant survey conducted from a research vessel (Keops-2 project). Once again, elephant seals reinforced the relationship between marine ecology and oceanography, delivering essential information about the water masses properties and the biological status of the Southern Ocean. But more than the presentation of a new stage of development in animal-borne instrumentation, this pilot study opens a new field of investigation in marine ecology and could be enlarged in a near future to other key marine predators, especially large fish species like swordfish, tuna or sharks, for which dissolved oxygen is expected to play a crucial role in distribution and behaviour.
Heuristic Strategy for Geometric Hashing Based Protein Structure Comparison of Ellipsoidal Representation

Many protein structure comparison methods use secondary structure information to do fast structure similarity search for initial alignment finding and refine the results from possible optimal candidate solutions by iteratively dynamic programming to optimize the final results. In this paper, we develop a method, Ellipsoidal Model Protein Structure Comparison, based on the concept of secondary structure elements alignment followed by iteratively refinement. In order to utilize all possible structure information to obtain alternative solutions for further analysis, we use ellipsoidal model to represent not only mainly -helices and -sheets, but the remaining fragments for structural alignment. Different heuristic filters and geometric hashing based global alignment estimation are applied for quick finding better initial alignments. We also provide top-N solutions without increasing extra computational time rather than only best solution in the previous works. Now, we provide the online web service, Ballerina (http://ballerina.csie.ntu.edu.tw/), for protein structure comparison.
Strategies for improving the monitoring of vital events in Brazil.

BACKGROUND In view of the limitations of survey-based demographic techniques for infant mortality estimation, the current strategy of some developing countries is to improve vital information. This article presents recent progress in the improvement of national databases in Brazil. METHODS For the vital information analysis, the data sources are the Mortality Information System and the Live Birth Information System. The adequacy analysis is based on five indicators calculated at the municipality level per 3-year period. Adequacy criteria are established by means of the indicator percentile distributions among Brazilian municipalities. To complement the vital data analysis, in 2001, a proactive search of infant deaths was carried out in selected areas of the North and North-east with very deficient information. RESULTS Temporal trends of the adequacy indicators indicate advances in both information systems. In 2003-05, 80.3% of municipalities (87.3% population) have adequate live birth data and 63.6% of municipalities (77.9% population) have a satisfactory level of mortality information. The most important problem refers to deaths with undetermined causes, mainly in the North-east. The proactive search of infant deaths showed large deficiencies of vital information in areas of extreme poverty: from 520 infant deaths found in the study, only 175 (33.7%) were reported to the Mortality Information System. CONCLUSIONS The monitoring of vital events is an essential step in the process of reducing infant mortality. The analysis of local irregularities not only improves the quality of vital data registration, making possible to estimate the infant mortality rate, but also identifies priority areas for intervention.
Likelihood normalization for face authentication in variable recording conditions

In this paper we evaluate the effectiveness of two likelihood normalization techniques, the background model set (BMS) and the universal background model (UBM), for improving performance and robustness of four face authentication systems utilizing a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) classifier. The systems differ in the feature extraction method used: eigenfaces (PCA), 2-D DCT, 2-D Gabor wavelets and DCT-mod2. Experiments on the VidTIMIT database, using test images corrupted either by an illumination change or compression artefacts, suggest that likelihood normalization has little effect when using PCA derived features, while providing significant performance improvements when using the remaining features.
The Diagnosis and Management of Aortic Dissection

Aortic dissection represents the most common aortic emergency, affecting 3 to 4 per 100 000 people per year and is still associated with a high mortality. Twenty percent of the patients with aortic dissection die before reaching hospital and 30% die during hospital admission. Aortic dissections may be classified in 3 ways: according to their anatomical extent (the Stanford or DeBakey systems), according to the time from onset (acute or chronic), and according to the underlying pathology (the European Society of Cardiologists’ system). Advances in endovascular technology have provided new treatment options. Hybrid endovascular and conventional open surgical repair represent the mainstay of treatment for acute type A dissection. Medical management remains the gold standard for acute and uncomplicated chronic type B dissection, though endovascular surgery offers exciting potential in the management of complicated type B dissection through sealing of the intimal entry tear.
A single-chip dual-band 22-to-29GHz/77-to-81GHz BiCMOS transceiver for automotive radars

In the last few years, silicon-based 24GHz short-range automotive radars have been investigated both by industry and academia [1,2]. Intensive research/development is also underway for developing 77GHz long-range [3] and 77-to-81GHz short-range radars [4] in silicon technologies. While ETSI will discontinue the use of the 24GHz allocation for automotive short-range sensors in mid-2013 [5], thereafter mandating a shift to 79GHz, mature 24GHz technology will continue to dominate non-European markets. Therefore, next-generation radar sensors may well be required to support both frequency bands, for compatibility and lower overall cost. This paper presents a dual-band millimeter-wave (mmWave) transceiver (TRX) in a 0. 18µm BiCMOS technology (fT/fmax=200/180GHz). The dual-band TRX operates in the 22-to-29GHz and 77-to-81GHz short-range automotive radar bands.
Exploring both Content and Link Quality for Anti-Spamming

Search engines are playing a more and more important role in discovering information on the web nowadays. Spam web pages, however, are employing various tricks to bamboozle search engines, therefore achieving undeserved ranks. In this paper, we propose a new page importance metric, which takes both the content quality and the link quality into consideration. Based on this metric, we can judge the trust scores of all the web pages using the web link graph. Experimental results running on over 15 million web pages show that our method can filter out spam and identify reputable sites effectively.
Biofortified cassava increases β-carotene and vitamin A concentrations in the TAG-rich plasma layer of American women

Biofortification of cassava with the provitamin A carotenoid β-carotene is a potential mechanism for alleviating vitamin A deficiency. Cassava is a staple food in the African diet, but data regarding the human bioavailability of β-carotene from this food are scarce. The objective of the present study was to evaluate provitamin A-enhanced cassava as a source of β-carotene and vitamin A for healthy adult women. The study was a randomised, cross-over trial of ten American women. The subjects consumed three different porridges separated by 2 week washout periods. Treatment meals (containing 100 g cassava) included: biofortified cassava (2 mg β-carotene) porridge with added oil (15 ml peanut or rapeseed oil, 20 g total fat); biofortified cassava porridge without added oil (6 g total fat); unfortified white cassava porridge with a 0·3 mg retinyl palmitate reference dose and added oil (20 g total fat). Blood was collected six times from − 0·5 to 9·5 h post-feeding. TAG-rich lipoprotein (TRL) plasma was separated by ultracentrifugation and analysed using HPLC with coulometric array electrochemical detection. The AUC for retinyl palmitate increased after the biofortified cassava meals were fed (P< 0·05). Vitamin A conversion was 4·2 (sd 3·1) and 4·5 (sd 3·1) μg β-carotene:1 μg retinol, with and without added oil, respectively. These results show that biofortified cassava increases β-carotene and retinyl palmitate TRL plasma concentrations in healthy well-nourished adult women, suggesting that it is a viable intervention food for preventing vitamin A deficiency.
développement d'une méthode d'éco-innovation

Nous assistons aujourd'hui a une evolution de la conscience collective pour la prise en compte de l'environnement en conception de produit industriel. Cette realite du monde industriel conduit a reconsiderer le developpement d'outils classiques de conception et d'innovation pour integrer la problematique environnementale. L'innovation, parametre majeur du developpement et de la croissance de l'entreprise, doit aussi conduire a des concepts eco-innovants. Il existe peu de methodes completes d'eco-innovation. Il est indispensable de developper une methode alliant l'analyse du probleme dans le sens du developpement durable, la formalisation adaptee et la selection des outils de resolution adequats. L'utilisation des outils d'eco-innovation permettra aux entreprises de s'approprier le concept de developpement durable a l'echelle de l'emergence de leurs produits. Cette approche integree de conception permet d'influencer les modes de production et de consommation, d'anticiper les besoins futurs des utilisateurs et d'assurer la perennite de la societe. Ces travaux de these s'inscrit dans le cadre de la mutation de la Methode d'Aide a l'INnovation (MAL'IN) vers un outil d'eco-innovation. La demarche actuelle MAL'IN permet d'analyser et structurer un probleme de conception de produit, de le formaliser et de le resoudre. Adaptee aux phases preliminaires de conception, la methodologie est basee sur l'analyse fonctionnelle, l'analyse des phenomenes physiques et sur la definition des biais d'attaque du probleme. La resolution fait appel a des outils adaptes de la theorie TRIZ et d'autres outils developpes dans ce cadre. L'enjeu de la these concerne l'integration de la vision developpement durable dans la methode actuelle MAL'IN a travers la structuration et la mise en place de connaissances environnementales necessaires au stade de la recherche de concepts et de ainsi faire evoluer cet outil vers un outil d'eco-innovation. Les travaux de these impliquent d'une part, l'integration de la vision environnementale aux outils existants de la methode MAL'IN notamment dans la phase d'analyse et de formalisation du probleme de conception et, d'autre part, le developpement de nouveaux outils d'eco-innovation permettant d'adapter et de structurer la demarche existante en fonction des nouvelles donnees d'analyse environnementale du produit. L'ensemble des methodes proposees doit apporter des reponses coherentes de la specification du besoin jusqu'a la recherche de concepts eco-innovants. La methode developpee doit convenir a tous les membres du groupe de creativite, en particulier, il faut s'assurer que l'expression des differentes connaissances et des orientations de structuration et de formalisation soit comprehensibles et interpretables par les participants. L'eco-innovation impose, entre autres, la personnalisation du produit, un designer intervient classiquement dans ce cadre. Les outils doivent etre concus pour etre interpretes par cet intervenant particulier.
Heredity and environment in speech recognition: the role of a priori information vs. data

Most significant advances in speech recognition over the last thirty years can be attributed to the easy availability of ever-increasing corpora of speech and language data and the development of simple trainable parametric statistical models that take advantage of this data. Hidden Markov Models, n-gram language models, and linear-discriminant based feature extraction are all examples of such data-driven algorithms. However, there is a general feeling in the recognition community that there is a large untapped body of knowledge encompassing a priori sources of information in speech and language that can be mined to serve as the basis for the next generation of improvements in speech recognition systems. Such sources of information include constraints imposed by articulatory models, the grammatical structure of language, and phonology. This paper reviews previous abortive attempts to utilize a priori information in speech recognition and contrasts them with data-driven approaches that seem to more successfully capture information of a similar nature. It also highlights some recent attempts to incorporate explicit sources of speech and language knowledge and speculates on possibilities for synergy between the two approaches in the future.
Swarm Intelligence for Perception Layer Design of Internet of Things

Internet of Things is the extension and expansion of Internet from the virtual world to the real world, in which a large number of resource-constrained devices are used to collaborative perception, and it identifies objects and gathers information in the case of no centralized control, no global model. However, the swarm intelligence can take advantage of many simple autonomous individuals to exhibit complex emergent behaviors. In this paper, the characteristics and commonality of perception layer and swarm intelligence were analyzed firstly, and then the architecture of smart individual, self-organization modeling, swarm behavior emergence pattern were analyzed and designed. Finally, intelligentization for perception layer was achieved on the support of middleware. DOI : http://dx.doi. org/10.11591/telkomnika.v12i1. 4149
A memorial to Kenneth G. Lutterman, PhD

In the sudden death of Dr. Kenneth G. Lutterman, December 1, 2001, social work lost one of its best friends and most ardent protagonists. Ken Lutterman had a distinguished career through his 31-year service as Associate Director of Services and Intervention Research at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and his brief tenure as Assistant Dean for Research at the University of Michigan School of Social Work. I was privileged to have known Ken well, to have benefited from his wisdom, and to have shared with him a decade-long partnership in working to advance mental health research in social work. As I so enjoyed recalling with him, I met Ken one August weekend in late July 1991, and the course of my professional life was indelibly changed. The pivotal event was a meeting in Berkeley, California, that Ken convened to inform social work deans and doctoral program chairs about a forthcoming NIMH grant program to establish research development centers in schools of social work. I was captivated by the possibility of this exciting new venture, for it provided an avenue for our school to fulfill its long-standing desire to strengthen our research in the area of mental health. The person of Ken Lutterman captivated me even more. Never before had I met a public servant so passionate, so persuasive, and so genuine. Ken's commitment to quality mental health services was personal, and he pursued it selflessly. Although mental health was the focus of Ken's career and provided the context for our work with him, his lessons to us and the rewards of our work with him extend profession-wide. Ken persistently and fervently called attention to the gap between what we, as a profession, did and what we could. He saw social work--the largest mental health profession--practicing on the basis of knowledge developed by other disciplines and challenged us to pose our own meaningful research questions and to grow a larger store of our own knowledge. He saw social work producing too few researchers (only about half the number needed for available faculty positions each year), and challenged us to develop a pipeline for early research career development. He saw that social work stipends for doctoral students were thousands of dollars lower than those offered by other disciplines and showed us how to prepare successful training grants to provide not only competitive stipends but also focused and rigorous programs of study. …
Physical exercise during pregnancy: a systematic review

Purpose of review This review aims to provide an update on the recent evidence concerning exercise during pregnancy including effects for mother and fetus and the types, frequency, intensity, duration and rate of progression of exercise performed. Recent findings Exercises during pregnancy are associated with higher cardiorespiratory fitness, prevention of urinary incontinence and low back pain, reduced symptoms of depression, gestational weight gain control, and for cases of gestational diabetes, reduced number of women who required insulin. There is no association with reduction in birth weight or preterm birth rate. The type of exercise shows no difference on results, and its intensity should be mild or moderate for previous sedentary women and moderate to high for active women. The exercise recommendations still are based on the current guidelines on moderate-intensity, low-impact, aerobic exercise at least three times a week. Yet, new guidelines propose increasing weekly physical-activity expenditure while incorporating vigorous exercise and adding light strength training to the exercise routine of healthy pregnant women. In the case of other chronic diseases like hypertension, there are still few data, and therefore more studies should be performed to assess the safety of the intervention. Summary Physical exercise is beneficial for women during pregnancy and also in the postpartum period; it is not associated with risks for the newborn and can lead to changes in lifestyle that imply long-term benefits.
Clinicopathologic significances of nuclear expression of nuclear factor-κB transcription factors in retinoblastoma

Aims The nuclear factor-κB (NF-κB) transcription factors family is thought to play an important role in the development of certain cancers. In this study, the clinical significance of NF-κB transcription factor expression and the MIB-1 labelling index (MIB-1 LI) were studied in retinoblastoma. Methods Immunohistochemical analysis of normal retina (n=6) and retinoblastoma tumour (n=62) specimens obtained from multiple centres was performed in order to evaluate the pathological associations of NF-κB subunits and retinoblastoma. Results Expression of NF-κB proteins was frequently detected in retinoblastoma but not in normal retina samples with c-Rel being the most commonly detected (61%). This protein was more frequently detected in poorly-differentiated and invasive tumours than in well-differentiated and non-invasive tumours. RelA expression in invasive tumours was also significantly higher. Furthermore, expression of c-Rel correlated positively with the MIB-1 LI in retinoblastoma, and RelA/c-Rel revealed positive correlation with RelA/RelB. Conclusions This study demonstrated that expression of RelA and c-Rel proteins represents a reliable prognostic marker of retinoblastoma and that NF-κB is related to retinoblastoma tumorigenesis and progression through a non-conventional pathway. This data suggests that therapeutic strategies targeting NF-κB combined with other therapies may represent a novel approach to retinoblastoma therapy.
Agglomeration and Knowledge Diffusion

According to New Growth Theory one can not rely on the convergence mechanisms inherent in traditional neoclassical constant returns to scale models. Convergence as well as divergence is possible, in general, depending on the assumptions about technology, factor mobility and ease of knowledge diffusion. The paper shows by a two-regions endogenous growth model under what conditions divergence, convergence or a stable centre-periphery structure emerge. The model allows for different degrees of knowledge diffusion as well as for different degrees of labor and capital mobility. The paper also evaluates dynamic market equilibria with respect to allocative efficiency. It is shown that the market solution tends to be under-agglomerated, except for parameter constellations generating particularly low agglomeration forces. If agglomeration forces are low enough, no concentration emerges, and this is also socially desirable. For higher agglomeration forces, however, concentration becomes desirable though the market may not bring it about or brings it about to an insufficient degree only.
Shame: Theory, Therapy, Theology

Part I. Approaching Shame: 1. Emotional confusion 2. Problems in approaching shame Part II. Encountering Shame: 3. The ecology of shame 4. Chronic shame 5. Some effects and implications of chronic shame 6. Aspects of the socio-historical significance of shame 7. Dealing with shame: the task of integration Part III. Shame and Christianity: 8. Modern Christian responses to shame 9. Shame in Christianity 10. Towards more adequate approaches to shame Epilogue.
Combinatorial peptide ligand libraries: The conquest of the ‘hidden proteome’ advances at great strides

The combinatorial peptide ligand library (CPLL) is compared here with the immuno‐depletion method for evaluating their respective abilities in digging deeper and deeper into the low‐abundance proteome. A recent report suggested in fact that immuno‐subtraction for biomarkers discovery in sera does not perform so well, since it results in a meagre 25% increase in identified proteins compared with unfractionated plasma, leaving little capacity to sample lower abundance proteins. On the contrary, CPLLs permit from 300 to 600% increments in detection abilities, as amply demonstrated in several reports. Moreover, when dealing with large sample volumes, an amplification factor of up to four orders of magnitude for trace proteins could be demonstrated, with 80% capture efficiencies even in large (up to 1 L) sample volumes. At present, the lower detection ability of CPLLs has been evaluated at 1 ng/mL (traces of casein additives in white wines).