Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Riemannian manifold learning based k-nearest-neighbor for hyperspectral image classification

The existence of nonlinear characteristics in hyperspectral data is considered as an influential factor curtailing the classification accuracy of canonical linear classifier like k-nearest neighbor (k-NN). To deal with the problem, we investigated approaches to combine manifold learning methods and the k-NN classifier to preserve nonlinear characteristics contained in hyperspectral imagery. Then we proposed a Riemannian manifold learning (RML) based k-NN classifier for hyperspectral image classification, which substitutes the Euclidean distances used in canonical kNN by geodesic distances yielded by RML. The experimental results on AVIRIS data show that in most cases, the RML-kNN Classifier accesses higher classification accuracies than canonical k-NN.
Resveratrol, a Polyphenolic Phytoalexin Present in Red Wine, Enhances Expression and Activity of Endothelial Nitric Oxide Synthase

Background—Estrogens can upregulate endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS) in human endothelial cells by increasing eNOS promoter activity and enhancing the binding activity of the transcription factor Sp1. Resveratrol, a polyphenolic phytoalexin found in grapes and wine, has been reported to act as an agonist at the estrogen receptor. Therefore, we tested the effect of this putative phytoestrogen on eNOS expression in human endothelial cells. Methods and Results—Incubation of human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC) and HUVEC-derived EA.hy 926 cells with resveratrol for 24 to 72 hours upregulated eNOS mRNA expression in a time- and concentration-dependent manner (up to 2.8-fold). eNOS protein expression and eNOS-derived NO production were also increased after long-term incubation with resveratrol. Resveratrol increased the activity of the eNOS promoter (3.5-kb fragment) in a concentration-dependent fashion, with the essential trans-stimulated sequence being located in the proximal 263 bp of the promoter sequence. In addition, eNOS mRNA was stabilized by resveratrol. The effect of resveratrol on eNOS expression was not modified by the estrogen receptor antagonists ICI 182780 and RU 58668. In electrophoretic mobility shift assays, nuclear extracts from resveratrol-incubated EA.hy 926 cells showed no enhanced binding activity of the eNOS promoter-relevant transcription factors Sp1, GATA, PEA3, YY1, or Elf-1. In addition to its long-term effects on eNOS expression, resveratrol also enhanced the production of bioactive NO in the short-term (after a 2-minute incubation). Conclusions—In concert with other effects, the stimulation of eNOS expression and activity may contribute to the cardiovascular protective effects attributed to resveratrol.
Methodology for estimating regional and global trends of child malnutrition.

BACKGROUND Child malnutrition is an important indicator for monitoring progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). This paper describes the methodology developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) to derive global and regional trends of child stunting and underweight, and reports trends in prevalence and numbers affected for 1990-2005. METHODS National prevalence data from 139 countries were extracted from the WHO Global Database on Child Growth and Malnutrition. A total of 419 and 388 survey data points were available for underweight and stunting, respectively. To estimate trends we used linear mixed-effect models allowing for random effects at country level and for heterogeneous covariance structures. One model was fitted for each United Nation's region using the logit transform of the prevalence and results back-transformed to the original scale. Best models were selected based on explicit statistical and graphical criteria. RESULTS During 1990-2000 global stunting and underweight prevalences declined from 34% to 27% and 27% to 22%, respectively. Large declines were achieved in Eastern and South-eastern Asia, while South-central Asia continued to suffer very high levels of malnutrition. Substantial improvements were also made in Latin America and the Caribbean, whereas in Africa numbers of stunted and underweight children increased from 40 to 45, and 25 to 31 million, respectively. CONCLUSION Linear mixed-effect models made best use of all available information. Trends are uneven across regions, with some showing a need for more concerted and efficient interventions to meet the MDG of reducing levels of child malnutrition by half between 1990 and 2015.
Old risks, new challenges: exploring differences in security between home computer and mobile device use

ABSTRACT Home users are particularly vulnerable to information security threats as they must make decisions about how to protect themselves, often with little knowledge of the technology. Furthermore, information for home users tends to focus on the traditional PC and may downplay threats faced on mobile devices, transforming well-known and old risks into new challenges for information security. To address the need for more behavioural information security research that focusses on mobile devices, this paper reports on the first large-scale study comparing security perceptions and behaviours on home computer and mobile devices. Data from 629 users revealed that in addition to differences in information security behaviour, the following security-related perceptions all differ significantly between home computer and mobile device use: perceived severity, security self-efficacy, response efficacy, response cost, descriptive norm, psychological ownership and intention to perform security behaviours. In each case, the direction of the difference was such that mobile devices were more likely to be at risk than a home computer. The practical implications of these differences are discussed.
Triamcinolone acetonide modulates permeability and intercellular adhesion molecule‐1 (ICAM‐1) expression of the ECV304 cell line: implications for macular degeneration

Whilst animal studies and a pilot clinical trial suggest that intravitreal triamcinolone acetonide (TA) may be useful in the treatment of age‐related macular degeneration (AMD), its mode of action remains to be fully elucidated. The present study has investigated the capacity of TA to modulate the expression of adhesion molecules and permeability using a human epithelial cell line (ECV304) as a model of the outer blood–retinal barrier (BRB). The influence of TA on the expression of ICAM‐1 and MHC‐I was studied on resting and phorbol myristate acetate (PMA)‐ or interferon‐gamma (IFN‐γ)‐ and/or tumour necrosis factor‐alpha (TNF‐α)‐activated cells using flow cytometry and immunocytochemistry. Additionally, ECV304 cells were grown to confluence in uncoated Transwell chambers; transepithelial resistance (TER) across resting and PMA‐activated cells was monitored. TA significantly decreased the paracellular permeability of ECV304 cells and down‐regulated ICAM‐1 expression, consistent with immunocytochemical observations. PMA‐induced permeability changes were dose‐dependent and TA decreased permeability of both resting and PMA‐activated monolayers. MHC‐I expression by ECV304 cells however, was not significantly affected by TA treatment. The modulation of TER and ICAM‐1 expression in vitro correlate with clinical observations, suggesting re‐establishment of the BRB and down‐regulation of inflammatory markers are the principal effects of intravitreal TA in vivo. The results further indicate that TA has the potential to influence cellular permeability, including the barrier function of the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) in AMD‐affected retinae.
Feature based Sentiment Analysis using a Domain Ontology

With the increase of unstructured social media data, sentiment analysis can be applied to infer useful information to assist organizations and their customers. We propose a model for feature-based sentiment analysis using ontology to address queries like: “which car is more comfortable? , which car has better performance and interior? ” . Feature based sentiment analysis is done using SentiWordNet with word sense disambiguation and an ontology that is developed by us. Data Tables are prepared from the RDF triples of parsed ontology and the sentiment ranks of car attributes. To relate the RDBM data to the built ontology of car, mapping axioms are proposed to connect them using OBDA model. Using SPARQL query, the results of the proposed model are compared with a dictionary-based method with respect to different car attributes. The performance of our model is better than dictionary based method.
Feasibility of acute physiology and chronic health evaluation (APACHE) II and III score-based screening in patients receiving allogeneic hematopoietic stem-cell transplantation

Patients who require management in the intensive care unit (ICU) for complications after allogeneic hematopoietic stem-cell transplantation (HSCT) generally have a poor outcome. We retrospectively studied whether the risk-prediction stratification systems commonly used for patients admitted to the ICU, that is, the Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation (APACHE) II and APACHE III systems, could be useful for identifying patients who should receive intensive care earlier. We reviewed the medical records of 210 patients who underwent allogeneic HSCT and found that 18 (8.6%) had been admitted to the ICU for acute respiratory failure (n=9), acute renal failure (n=7), and septic shock (n=2). The median APACHE II and III scores were, respectively, 16 (10–27) and 55 (22–87) at the onset of complications and 26 (15–43) and 101 (65–157) upon admission to the ICU. Thus, both the APACHE II and APACHE III scores at ICU admission were higher than those at the onset of complications (P <0.0001). Seventeen patients (94%) subsequently died, with a median ICU stay of 7.5 days (1–51 days), as a result of multiorgan failure (n=14), respiratory failure (n=2), and septic shock (n=1). The APACHE II and III scores of the sole surviving patient were, respectively, 21 and 71 at the onset and 24 and 86 upon transfer to the ICU. Thus, the APACHE scores in this study were lower than those reported for other surgical or medical patients treated in the ICU, despite their uniform poor prognosis. Although nine patients had developed grade III to IV acute graft-versus-host disease, which is the most common cause of morbidity and mortality after allogeneic HSCT, this was not fully evaluated in the current scoring systems. Application of these systems to HSCT will require adequate modification, with particular attention to organ dysfunction secondary to graft-versus-host disease.
Constraints on particle properties from the cosmic microwave background

In our first project, we considered a decaying dark matter component as a source of reionization in addition to the reionization process caused by astrophysical objects. Both of these reionization sources impact the angular power spectrum of the CMB in a similar way. We took into account two different parametrizations for the astrophysical reionization process. Using Planck 2015 data, we constrained the effective dark matter decay rate to Γeff < 2.9× 10−25/s at 95% CL. This limit is robust, as it only weakly depends on the chosen parametrization of astrophysical reionization. We also applied our results to a keV-mass sterile neutrino as a specific dark matter candidate and obtain constraints on its mixing angle and mass.
Hand motion recognition via fuzzy active curve axis Gaussian mixture models: A comparative study

Unconstrained human hand motions consisting grasp motion and in-hand manipulation lead to a fundamental challenge that many algorithms have to face in both theoretical and practical development, mainly due to the complexity and dexterity of the human hand. In this paper, fuzzy active curve axis Gaussian Mixture Model (FAcaGMM) is proposed by introducing a weighting exponent on the fuzzy membership into active curve axis Gaussian Mixture Models (AcaGMM) to improve its convergence efficiency, and then FAcaGMM is used to recognize human hand motions. In addition, a comparative study of recognition methods including FAcaGMM, Time Clustering (TC), Empirical Copula (EC), GMM and HMM is presented to recognize human hand motions including both grasps and in-hand manipulations from different subjects with varying training samples.
Joint multiuser transmit-receive optimization using linear processing

In this paper we propose a novel method for joint transmit-receive linear optimization in the downlink of a multiuser MIMO communication system. This new method adapts existing joint linear optimization algorithms from the single user domain for application to the multiuser domain. The optimum transmit matrix is obtained using an iterative procedure based on a minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) criterion and a per-user power constraint; the optimum receive matrices for each user are then derived under an MMSE constraint. The proposed technique improves performance and increases data throughput in multiuser scenarios.
Contribution of high frequencies to speech recognition in quiet and noise in listeners with varying degrees of high-frequency sensorineural hearing loss.

PURPOSE The contribution of audible high-frequency information to speech-understanding performance in listeners with varying degrees of high-frequency sensorineural hearing loss was examined. METHOD Thirty-six elderly hearing-impaired (EHI) and 24 young normal-hearing (YNH) listeners were tested in quiet (+20 dB speech-to-noise ratio [SNR]) and noise (+5 dB SNR) and under different bandpass conditions (narrow, 200-1600 Hz; midband, 200-3200 Hz; broadband, 200-6400 Hz), both without and with spectral shaping of the stimuli. Monosyllabic word-recognition performance was examined through use of both whole-word scoring and phoneme scoring. The 36 EHI listeners were divided into 3 groups of 12 listeners each, with the groups differing in the amount of high-frequency hearing loss. The 24 YNH participants were separated into 2 groups, each serving as a reference group for either the unshaped or spectrally shaped speech listening conditions. RESULTS Results for spectrally shaped speech, in both quiet and noise, revealed that the 3 EHI groups performed equivalently in the different bandwidth conditions and demonstrated no change (increase or decrease) in word-recognition performance between the midband and broadband conditions. The YNH groups, however, demonstrated improved speech understanding attributable to the higher frequencies for the broadband condition in both the unshaped and shaped conditions. CONCLUSIONS Data from the EHI listeners revealed that performance for unshaped speech was correlated moderately and negatively with degree of high-frequency hearing loss. Alternatively, recognition performance for shaped speech was related to neither the performance for unshaped speech nor the amount of high-frequency hearing loss.
Learning to Recognize Speech by Watching Television

Our proposed technique gathers large amounts of speech from open broadcast sources and combines it with automatically obtained text or closed captioning to identify suitable speech-training material. George Zavaliagkos and Thomas Colthurst worked on a different approach to this method that uses confidence scoring on the acoustic data itself to improve performance in the absence of any transcribed data, but their approach only yielded marginal results. Our initial efforts also provided only limited success with small amounts of data. We describe our approach to collecting almost unlimited amounts of accurately transcribed speech data. This information serves as training data for the acoustic model component of most high-accuracy speaker-independent speech-recognition systems. The error-ridden closed-captioned text aligns with the similarly error-ridden speech recognizer output. We assume matching segments of sufficient length are reliable transcriptions of the corresponding speech. We then use these segments as the training data for an improved speech recognizer.
Oral Administration of Polymer Hyaluronic Acid Alleviates Symptoms of Knee Osteoarthritis: A Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Study over a 12-Month Period

This study was conducted to investigate the efficacy of oral hyaluronic acid (HA) administration for osteoarthritis (OA) in knee joints. Sixty osteoarthritic subjects (Kellgren-Lawrence grade 2 or 3) were randomly assigned to the HA or placebo group. The subjects in the HA group were given 200 mg of HA once a day everyday for 12 months, while the subjects in the placebo group were given placebo. The subjects in both groups were requested to conduct quadriceps strengthening exercise everyday as part of the treatment. The subjects' symptoms were evaluated by the Japanese Knee Osteoarthritis Measure (JKOM) score. The symptoms of the subjects as determined by the JKOM score improved with time in both the HA and placebo groups. This improvement tended to be more obvious with the HA group, and this trend was more obvious with the subjects aged 70 years or less. For these relatively younger subjects, the JKOM score was significantly better than the one for the placebo group at the 2nd and 4th months after the initiation of administration. Oral administration of HA may improve the symptoms of knee OA in patients aged 70 years or younger when combined with the quadriceps strengthening exercise.
Medical cost reductions associated with the usage of novel oral anticoagulants vs warfarin among atrial fibrillation patients, based on the RE-LY, ROCKET-AF, and ARISTOTLE trials

Abstract Objective: The randomized clinical trials, RE-LY, ROCKET-AF, and ARISTOTLE, demonstrate that the novel oral anticoagulants (NOACs) are effective options for stroke prevention among non-valvular atrial fibrillation (AF) patients. This study aimed to evaluate the medical cost reductions associated with the use of individual NOACs instead of warfarin from the US payer perspective. Methods: Rates for efficacy and safety clinical events for warfarin were estimated as the weighted averages from the RE-LY, ROCKET-AF and ARISTOTLE trials, and event rates for NOACs were determined by applying trial hazard ratios or relative risk ratios to such weighted averages. Incremental medical costs to a US health payer of an AF patient experiencing a clinical event during 1 year following the event were obtained from published literature and inflation adjusted to 2010 cost levels. Medical costs, excluding drug costs, were evaluated and compared for each NOAC vs warfarin. Sensitivity analyses were conducted to determine the influence of variations in clinical event rates and incremental costs on the medical cost reduction. Results: In a patient year, the medical cost reduction associated with NOAC usage instead of warfarin was estimated to be −$179, −$89, and −$485 for dabigatran, rivaroxaban, and apixaban, respectively. When clinical event rates and costs were allowed to vary simultaneously, through a Monte Carlo simulation, the 95% confidence interval of annual medical costs differences ranged between −$424 and +$71 for dabigatran, −$301 and +$135 for rivaroxaban, and −$741 and −$252 for apixaban, with a negative number indicating a cost reduction. Of the 10,000 Monte-Carlo iterations 92.6%, 79.8%, and 100.0% were associated with a medical cost reduction >$0 for dabigatran, rivaroxaban, and apixaban, respectively. Conclusions: Usage of the NOACs, dabigatran, rivaroxaban, and apixaban may be associated with lower medical (excluding drug costs) costs relative to warfarin, with apixaban having the most substantial medical cost reduction.
Historical Changes in the Distribution and Abundance of Constructed Ponds in Response to Changing Population Density and Land Use

Abstract In the United States most ponds are constructed for varying purposes and at varying historical rates, yet little attention is paid to their presence or ecological impact. We evaluated changes in pond density, landscape position with respect to streams, and rates of pond construction and loss within a watershed in southeastern Pennsylvania and northern Delaware that has experienced increases in population density and associated changes in land use. Based on aerial photographs taken on nine dates between 1937 and 2005, and maps prepared in 1883, abundances of all water bodies declined slightly from 1883 to 1937, then increased 18-fold during the remainder of the study period. Most ponds in 1883 (94.6%) were ‘in-line’ impoundments receiving stream inflows, whereas ‘off-line’ water bodies without inflows represented 77.3% of total ponds in 2005. Pond loss rates averaged 3.2%/year between 1883 and 1946, but declined to 0.16%/year between 1946 and 2005. Because of their changing abundance and landscape position, ponds are assuming rapidly changing ecological roles within the watershed.
France and the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Model: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives

Beginning with a discussion of current debate in France about its own ‘social model’, this articles analyses French interpretations of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ model in both a contemporary and historical context. It argues specifically that present-day criticisms of what is taken to be Britain's liberal, free-market model are nothing new and find distinct echoes in a literature that dates back to the late 17th century. Even for its French admirers, England was seen as a country of inequality, whilst for its critics inequality was a reflection of a broader system of poverty and misery inflicted upon the mass of the population. In brief, the parameters of the debate – inequality compared with the virtues of equality, commerce against the claims of justice, individual liberty contrasted with solidarity, the market versus the State – have not changed significantly for over two centuries. The article concludes by referring to current misconceptions in France of policies pursued by the current Labour government. In memory of Andre Prochasson
No two ageisms are the same: testing measurement invariance in ageism experience across Europe

The article focuses on the topic of measurement invariance (equivalence) testing in comparative research. Measurement invariance is the basic requirement for comparative data and should be addressed by researchers before any international comparison begins. In the article, multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis is first performed to describe three methods of measurement invariance testing (configural, metric, and scalar). Subsequently, this procedure is applied to the case of measuring experience with ageism against seniors in the quantitative European Social Survey, Round 4. Measurement invariance in the concept is tested across 29 states participating in the survey. Hypotheses about the sources of the lack of measurement invariance between some countries are then tested by comparing the parameters of the models identified for different groups of European states. Finally, evidence of international comparability of items measuring experience with ageism against seniors is summarized and implications for other areas of comparative social research are discussed.