Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Robust Nonnegative Sparse Recovery and the Nullspace Property of 0/1 Measurements

We investigate recovery of nonnegative vectors from non-adaptive compressive measurements in the presence of noise of unknown power. In the absence of noise, existing results in the literature identify properties of the measurement that assure uniqueness in the non-negative orthant. By linking such uniqueness results to nullspace properties, we deduce uniform and robust compressed sensing guarantees for nonnegative least squares. No <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\ell _{1}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-regularization is required. As an important proof of principle, we establish that <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$m\times n$ </tex-math></inline-formula> random i.i. d. 0/1-valued Bernoulli matrices obey the required conditions with overwhelming probability provided that <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$m= \mathcal {O}(s\log (n/s))$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. We achieve this by establishing the robust nullspace property for random 0/1-matrices—a novel result in its own right. Our analysis is motivated by applications in wireless network activity detection.
Mice expressing aberrant sperm-specific protein PMIS2 produce normal-looking but fertilization-incompetent spermatozoa

The identification, cloning, and gene disruption of two novel testis-specific proteins are reported. Pmis2-knockout males produce normal-looking spermatozoa but are sterile because of a severe defect in sperm migration from the uterus into the oviducts. PMIS2 is shown to be one of the key factors in producing sperm fertility.
[Topical cyclosporine for the treatment of ocular surface changes in contact lens wearers].

OBJECTIVE To assess opportunities for the use of cyclosporine emulsion 0.05% for the treatment of dry eye syndrome in long-term contact lens wearers. MATERIAL AND METHODS A total of 25 long-term contact lens wearers (50 eyes) with signs of dry eye syndrome and corneal epitheliopathy of different degree, unresponsive to conventional artificial tears therapy, were observed. All of them were prescribed cyclosporine emulsion 0.05% twice daily at 12-hour intervals 10 min before inserting contact lenses or after removing. Biomicroscopy with fluorescein eye stain test, determination of the tear film break-up time (Norn's test), optical coherence tomography of tear meniscus (OCT-meniscometry), Jones test, impression cytology, and corneal confocal microscopy (Confoscan-4, "Nidek", Japan) were used to evaluate the treatment effect. RESULTS The treatment resulted in better contact lens tolerance, significantly increased mean values of tear film break-up time (by 13.2% at 1 month, 62% at 3 months, and 37.3% at 6 months as compared with the baseline) and basal tear secretion (by 29%, 32%, and 82.4% at 1, 3, and 6 months correspondingly). Confocal microscopy revealed restitution of corneal superficial epithelial structure and cell density. Goblet cells were present in impression cytology specimens. CONCLUSION Topical use of cyclosporine emulsion 0.05% has a positive effect on morphofunctional parameters of ocular surface and promotes basal tear secretion and precorneal tear film stability.
Cortical Auditory Evoked Potentials to Acoustic Changes in Speech Stimuli in Children

Objective: To compare the maturation of speech-evoked N170 components of cortical auditory evoked potentials with that of tone-evoked N1 components. Patients and Methods: Cortical auditory evoked potentials to speech and tone stimuli were derived in 42 children from age 4 to 14 years. The N170 was derived from the difference curve of responses to monosyllabic words with initial consonant-to-vowel transitions and their intensity-equivalent noise signals. Results: The incidence of N1 increased from 71% below age 9 to 91% above, that of N170 tended to increase from 40 to 67% above. From age 9, adult-like morphologies of the difference waveforms were found and the time constants of N1 and N170 latency maturation were nearly identical. Conclusion: The N170 component is interpreted as a response to speech-specific acoustic changes such as the consonant-vowel transition. The late appearance of N170 indicates an electrophysiological correlate of speech perception that continues to develop into adolescence. Its clinical application, however, is limited due to the low incidence of N170.
Solving LWE problem with bounded errors in polynomial time

In this paper, we present a new algorithm, such that, for the learning with errors (LWE) problems, if the errors are bounded – the errors do not span the whole prime finite field Fq but a fixed known subset of size D (D < q), which we call the learning with bounded errors (LWBE) problems, we can solve it with complexity O(n).
Interleaving Planning and Robot Execution for Asynchronous User Requests

ROGUE is an architecture built on a real robot which provides algorithms for the integration of high-level planning, low-level robotic execution, and learning. ROGUE addresses successfully several of the challenges of a dynamic office gopher environment. This article presents the techniques for the integration of planning and execution.ROGUE uses and extends a classical planning algorithm to create plans for multiple interacting goals introduced by asynchronous user requests. ROGUE translates the planner';s actions to robot execution actions and monitors real world execution. ROGUE is currently implemented using the PRODIGY4.0 planner and the Xavier robot. This article describes how plans are created for multiple asynchronous goals, and how task priority and compatibility information are used to achieve appropriate efficient execution. We describe how ROGUE communicates with the planner and the robot to interleave planning with execution so that the planner can replan for failed actions, identify the actual outcome of an action with multiple possible outcomes, and take opportunities from changes in the environment.ROGUE represents a successful integration of a classical artificial intelligence planner with a real mobile robot.
Throughput Scaling Of Convolution For Error-Tolerant Multimedia Applications

Convolution and cross-correlation are the basis of filtering and pattern or template matching in multimedia signal processing. We propose two throughput scaling options for any one-dimensional convolution kernel in programmable processors by adjusting the imprecision (distortion) of computation. Our approach is based on scalar quantization, followed by two forms of tight packing in floating-point (one of which is proposed in this paper) that allow for concurrent calculation of multiple results. We illustrate how our approach can operate as an optional pre- and post-processing layer for off-the-shelf optimized convolution routines. This is useful for multimedia applications that are tolerant to processing imprecision and for cases where the input signals are inherently noisy (error tolerant multimedia applications). Indicative experimental results with a digital music matching system and an MPEG-7 audio descriptor system demonstrate that the proposed approach offers up to 175% increase in processing throughput against optimized (full-precision) convolution with virtually no effect in the accuracy of the results. Based on marginal statistics of the input data, it is also shown how the throughput and distortion can be adjusted per input block of samples under constraints on the signal-to-noise ratio against the full-precision convolution.
CAPS and syntaxin dock dense core vesicles to the plasma membrane in neurons

Docking to the plasma membrane prepares vesicles for rapid release. Here, we describe a mechanism for dense core vesicle docking in neurons. In Caenorhabditis elegans motor neurons, dense core vesicles dock at the plasma membrane but are excluded from active zones at synapses. We have found that the calcium-activated protein for secretion (CAPS) protein is required for dense core vesicle docking but not synaptic vesicle docking. In contrast, we see that UNC-13, a docking factor for synaptic vesicles, is not essential for dense core vesicle docking. Both the CAPS and UNC-13 docking pathways converge on syntaxin, a component of the SNARE (soluble N-ethyl-maleimide-sensitive fusion protein attachment receptor) complex. Overexpression of open syntaxin can bypass the requirement for CAPS in dense core vesicle docking. Thus, CAPS likely promotes the open state of syntaxin, which then docks dense core vesicles. CAPS function in dense core vesicle docking parallels UNC-13 in synaptic vesicle docking, which suggests that these related proteins act similarly to promote docking of independent vesicle populations.
Towards objectively quantifying sensory hypersensitivity: a pilot study of the “Ariana effect”

Background. Normally one habituates rapidly to steady, faint sensations. People with sensory hypersensitivity (SH), by contrast, continue to attend to such stimuli and find them noxious. SH is common in Tourette syndrome (TS) and autism, and methods to quantify SH may lead to better understanding of these disorders. In an attempt to objectively quantify SH severity, the authors tested whether a choice reaction time (CRT) task was a sensitive enough measure to detect significant distraction from a steady tactile stimulus, and to detect significantly greater distraction in subjects with more severe SH. Methods. Nineteen ambulatory adult volunteers with varying scores on the Adult Sensory Questionnaire (ASQ), a clinical measure of SH, completed a CRT task in the alternating presence and absence of tactile stimulation. Results. Tactile stimulation interfered with attention (i.e., produced longer reaction times), and this effect was significantly greater in participants with more SH (higher ASQ scores). Accuracy on the CRT was high in blocks with and without stimulation. Habituation within stimulation blocks was not detected. Conclusion. This approach can detect distraction from a cognitive task by a steady, faint tactile stimulus that does not degrade response accuracy. The method was also sensitive to the hypothesized enhancement of this effect by SH. These results support the potential utility of this approach to quantifying SH, and suggest possible refinements for future studies.
Very high-dose methotrexate (33.6 g/m2) as central nervous system preventive therapy for childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia: results of National Cancer Institute/Children's Cancer Group trials CCG-191P, CCG-134P and CCG-144P

Between 1977 and 1991, the Children's Cancer Group and the National Cancer Institute conducted three trials of very high-dose methotrexate (33.6 g/m2; VHD-MTX) in place of cranial radiation (CRT) as central nervous system (CNS) preventive therapy, and assessed efficacy, acute toxicity and long-term neurocognitive outcome. CCG-191P compared VHD-MTX to CRT plus intrathecal methotrexate (IT-MTX) in 181 patients and demonstrated equivalent survival. However, patients treated with CRT had poorer performance on neurocognitive testing over time. CCG-134P evaluated the addition of intensified systemic and intrathecal therapy to VHD-MTX in 128 patients with high-risk acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) and demonstrated reduced CNS relapse compared to the CCG-191P trial, but equivalent survival. CCG-144P compared VHD-MTX to IT-MTX alone in 175 patients with average-risk ALL and demonstrated equivalent survival. VHD-MTX was associated with significant toxicities, particularly neutropenia, transient hepatic dysfunction and sepsis. VHD-MTX achieved similar survival to other CNS-directed therapies without the long-term impact on intelligence, but with substantial acute toxicities.
Predicting sentiment toward transportation in social media using visual and textual features

Social media platforms can be used by transportation agencies to receive feedback from their customers, thus creating two-way communication between the service provider and its consumers. Sentiment analysis is one method of aggregating overall polarity (positive or negative) towards a topic. However, most sentiment analysis methods rely on text processing, thus ignoring the large amount of image data present in popular social networks. The primary aim of this study is to exploit image data in conjunction with text and to evaluate this integrated approach for sentiment analysis for transportation. This study used image, captions, and comments data from the Instagram social network that were marked as being relevant to California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) and attempted to predict the expressed sentiment towards this agency. A set of high-level features were extracted from images using the web-based Microsoft Cognitive Services APIs. These features included the detection of faces and 86 categories which describe the images. Text features included the set of individual words and structural features. The experiment results of different machine learning techniques show a gain in precision when images and texts are combined compared to text-only approaches, thus confirming the relevance of visual content usage. The precision reaches a performance close to human classification agreement (typically approximately 80%). However, the results do not indicate that visual features are more informative than text features.
Ultra-long scan depth optical coherence tomography for imaging the anterior segment of human eye

Spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) was developed in order to image the anterior segment of human eye. The optical path at reference arm was switched to compensate the sensitivity drop in OCT images. An scan depth of 12.28 mm and an axial resolution of 12.8 μm in air were achieved. The anterior segment from cornea to posterior surface of crystalline lens was clearly imaged and measured using this system. A custom designed Badal optometer was coupled into the sample arm to induce the accommodation, and the movement of crystalline lens was traced after the image registration. Our research demonstrates that SD-OCT with ultra-long scan depth can be used to image the human eye for accommodation research.
A Three-State Switching Boost Converter Mixed With Magnetic Coupling and Voltage Multiplier Techniques for High Gain Conversion

An asymmetrical three-state switching boost converter, combining the benefits of magnetic coupling and voltage multiplier techniques, is presented in this paper. The derivation procedure for the proposed topology is depicted. The new converter can achieve a very high-voltage gain and a very low-voltage stress on the power devices without high turn ratio and extreme duty cycles. Thus, the low-voltage-rated MOSFETs with low resistance rDS (ON) can be selected to reduce the switching losses and cost. Moreover, the usage of voltage multiplier technique not only raises the voltage gain but also offers lossless passive clamp performance, so the voltage spikes across the main switches are alleviated and the leakage-inductor energy of the coupled inductors can be recycled. In addition, the interleaved structure is employed in the input side, which not only reduces the current stress through each power switch, but also constrains the input current ripple. In addition, the reverse-recovery problem of the diodes is alleviated, and the efficiency can be further improved. The operating principles and the steady-state analysis of the presented converter are discussed in detail. Finally, a prototype circuit with 400-W nominal rating is implemented in the laboratory to verify the performance of the proposed converter.
An adaptive Euler-Maruyama scheme for SDEs: convergence and stability

The understanding of adaptive algorithms for stochastic differential equations (SDEs) is an open area, where many issues related to both convergence and stability (long-time behaviour) of algorithms are unresolved. This paper considers a very simple adaptive algorithm, based on controlling only the drift component of a time step. Both convergence and stability are studied. The primary issue in the convergence analysis is that the adaptive method does not necessarily drive the time steps to zero with the user-input tolerance. This possibility must be quantified and shown to have low probability. The primary issue in the stability analysis is ergodicity. It is assumed that the noise is nondegenerate, so that the diffusion process is elliptic, and the drift is assumed to satisfy a coercivity condition. The SDE is then geometrically ergodic (averages converge to statistical equilibrium exponentially quickly). If the drift is not linearly bounded, then explicit fixed time step approximations, such as the Euler-Maruyama scheme, may fail to be ergodic. In this work, it is shown that the simple adaptive time-stepping strategy cures this problem. In addition to proving ergodicity, an exponential moment bound is also proved, generalizing a result known to hold for the SDE itself.
A Robust Non-Blind Watermarking Technique for Color Video Based on Combined DWT-DFT Transforms and SVD Technique

The rise of popularity of Digital video in the past decade has been tremendous thereby leading to malicious copying and distribution. So the need for preservation of ownership and in tackling copyright issues has become an imminent issue. Digital Video Watermarking has been in existence as a solution for this. The paper proposes a non-blind watermarking technique based on combined DWT-DFT transforms using singular values of SVD matrix in YCbCr color space. The technique uses Fibonacci series for selection of frames to enhance security and thereby maintaining quality of original video. Watermark encryption is done by scrambling the watermark using Arnold transform. Geometric and non- geometric attacks on watermarked video have been performed to test the robustness of the proposed technique. Quality of watermarked video is measured using PSNR and NC gives the similarity between extracted and the original watermark.
Hiphop: a synchronous reactive extension for hop

Hop is a Scheme-based language and system to build rich multi-tier web applications. We present HipHop, a new language layer within Hop dedicated to request and event orchestration. HipHop follows the synchronous reactive model of the Esterel and ReactiveC languages, originally developed for embedded systems programming. It is based on synchronous concurrency and preemption primitives, which are known to be key components for the modular design of complex temporal behaviors. Although the language is concurrent, the generated code is purely sequential and thread-free; HipHop is translated to Hop for the server side and to straight JavaScript for the client side. With a music playing example, we show how to modularly build non-trivial orchestration code with HipHop.
Efficacy of a Brief Psychosocial Intervention for Symptoms of Stress and Distress Among Patients in Primary Care

Psychosocial problems and symptoms of emotional distress play a prominent role in patients reporting to primary care settings. Interpersonal counseling (IPC) was developed as a brief psychosocial intervention for patients with stress and distress to be administered by nurse practitioners in a primary care setting. The results of a pilot study indicate more rapid reduction of symptoms and improvement in emotional sysmptoms and psychosocial functioning in the IPC group than in a comparison group with initially elevated scores on the General Health Questionnaire. The priorities for further testing are discussed, and possible implications for service delivery are explored.
Bimanual-Vertical Hand Movements

Abstract Patients often demonstrate attentional and action-intentional biases in both the transverse and coronal planes. In addition, when making forelimb movements in the transverse plane, normal participants also have spatial and magnitude asymmetries, but forelimb spatial asymmetries have not been studied in coronal space. Thus, to learn if when normal people make vertical movements they have right–left spatial and magnitude biases, seventeen healthy, blindfolded volunteers had their hands (holding pens) placed vertically in their midsagittal plane, 10 inches apart, on pieces of paper positioned above, below, and at eye-level. Participants were asked to move their hands together vertically and meet in the middle. Participants demonstrated less angular deviation in the below-eye condition than in the other spatial conditions, when moving down than up, and with their right than left hand. Movements toward eye level from upper or lower space were also more accurate than movements in the other directions. Independent of hand, lines were longer with downward than upward movements and the right hand moved more distance than the left. These attentional-intentional asymmetries may be related to gravitational force, hand-hemispheric dominance, and spatial “where” asymmetries; however, the mechanisms accounting for these asymmetries must be ascertained by future research. (JINS, 2011, 17, 732–739)
On the Measure and Mismeasure of Narcissism

Narcissism continues to suffer from a lack of consensual definition. Variability in the definition is reflected in the growing multitude of measures with oftentimes diverging nomological nets. Although the themes of narcissistic grandiosity and vulnerability appear to have achieved reasonable agreement on their central importance, the lower order structure of each is not well understood and debates remain about how (and whether) they can be integrated into a coherent whole. However, it is clear that a narrow focus on higher order grandiosity without consideration of concomitant vulnerability neglects clinically important features of narcissism. Occasioned by the potential for a new personality disorder model in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders–Fifth edition, several colleagues and I demonstrated that pathological narcissism, as measured by the Pathological Narcissism Inventory, could not be adequately summarized by the lower order traits of Grandiosity and Attention Seeking, and argued that this should be reflected in the diagnostic manual in some form. Miller, Lynam, and Campbell then subjected these same data to critical reanalysis and interpretation. I respond here to several points raised by Miller and colleagues. In so doing, I highlight areas of agreement, disagreement, and suggest directions for future research.
Portability in the Janus Natural Language Interface

Although natural language technology has achieved a high degree of domain independence through separating domain-independent modules from domain-dependent knowledge bases, portability, as measured by effort to move from one application to another, is still a problem. Here we describe a knowledge acquisition tool (KNACQ) that has sharply decreased our effort in building knowledge bases. The knowledge bases acquired with KNACQ are used by both the understanding components and the generation components of Janus.
Incorporating Explanatory Models in Planning Nutrition Education Programmes in Thailand1

An intersectoral child development services project is being undertaken in Thailand to develp a model process for providing age appropriate care and education to rural children through an integrated programme of nutrition, health and educational services designed to meet community needs and perceptions. Using behavioral analysis and explanatory models, project results show that the effectiveness of nutrition education can be facilitated by (1) recognizing the family as the unit of service, (2) focusing on solutions rather than problems, (3) using a two-stage promotional message strategy to encourage better child caretaking, and (4) viewing potential new practices as behavioral processes, rather than single entities aimed at a specific outcome. Program planning should also include the successive construction and analysis of community-based explanatory models which justify people's nutrition and health behaviors. The ultimate aim is to identify differences between explanatory models held by community members and health/nutrition educators, negotiate this conflict, and thereafter develop more practical and realistic methods for modifying behavior.