Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improving the depth sensitivity of time-resolved measurements by extracting the distribution of times-of-flight

Time-resolved (TR) techniques provide a means of discriminating photons based on their time-of-flight. Since early arriving photons have a lower probability of probing deeper tissue than photons with long time-of-flight, time-windowing has been suggested as a method for improving depth sensitivity. However, TR measurements also contain instrument contributions (instrument-response-function, IRF), which cause temporal broadening of the measured temporal point-spread function (TPSF) compared to the true distribution of times-of-flight (DTOF). The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of the IRF on the depth sensitivity of TR measurements. TPSFs were acquired on homogeneous and two-layer tissue-mimicking phantoms with varying optical properties. The measured IRF and TPSFs were deconvolved using a stable algorithm to recover the DTOFs. The microscopic Beer-Lambert law was applied to the TPSFs and DTOFs to obtain depth-resolved absorption changes. In contrast to the DTOF, the latest part of the TPSF was not the most sensitive to absorption changes in the lower layer, which was confirmed by computer simulations. The improved depth sensitivity of the DTOF was illustrated in a pig model of the adult human head. Specifically, it was shown that dynamic absorption changes obtained from the late part of the DTOFs recovered from TPSFs acquired by probes positioned on the scalp were similar to absorption changes measured directly on the brain. These results collectively demonstrate that this method improves the depth sensitivity of TR measurements by removing the effects of the IRF.
N-(4-hydroxyphenyl)retinamide activation of a distinct pathway signaling apoptosis.

The clinical and basic scientific understanding of the role of retinoids in cancer therapy and prevention has seen advances. Retinoids are synthetic and natural analogues of vitamin A [re-viewed in (1) ]. These compounds are ligands for the retinoid receptors, members of the steroid receptor superfamily (2,3). The biologic effects of retinoids are initiated through ligand-dependent activation of nuclear retinoid receptors. This interac-tion leads, in turn, to activation or repression of ‘‘target genes,’’ which results in growth and differentiation effects. The finding that the retinoid N -(4-hydroxyphenyl)retinamide (4HPR) induces apoptosis in cells resistant to all- trans -retinoic acid, a high-affinity ligand for the retinoic acid receptors (RARs) (2,3), has suggested that 4HPR signals through a mechanism independent of the retinoid receptors (4–7). In this issue of the Journal, an article by Oridate et al. (8) links the generation of reactive oxygen species to 4HPR-induced apoptosis in cervical cancer cells. Confirmation that this pathway is active in other cell contexts would provide important evidence for a novel retinoid mechanism signaling apoptosis in human tumor cells.
A robotic ecosystem with evolvable minds and bodies

This paper presents a proof of concept demonstration of a novel evolutionary robotic system where robots can self-reproduce. We construct and investigate a strongly embodied evolutionary system, where not only the controllers, but also the morphologies undergo evolution in an on-line fashion. Forced by the lack of available hardware we build this system in simulation. However, we use a high quality simulator (Webots) and an existing hardware platform (Roombots) which makes the system, in principle, constructible. Our system can be perceived as an Artificial Life habitat, where robots with evolvable bodies and minds live in an arena and actively induce an evolutionary process `from within', without a central evolutionary agency or a user-defined synthetic fitness function.
Systematics and Mitochondrial Genome Evolution of Australian Rosellas (Aves: Platycercidae)

We used six restriction endonucleases (D&I, HinfI, HpaII, MM, TagI, and Zmo37), each with a unique four-base recognition site, to digest 26 mitochondrial genomes from six Platycercus species in an investigation of the systematics of this speciose and variable Australian genus. The resulting fragments were end labeled and separated by means of polyacrylamide-gel electrophoresis. The number of substitutions per nucleotide site between each of the genomes was estimated on the basis of the distribution of fragments between samples by means of the method of Nei and Li. These pairwise distances were used to construct evolutionary trees either by assuming an evolutionary clock or by allowing the branch lengths to vary independently. The presence or absence of each restriction fragment was also scored and used as characters in Wagner parsimony analysis. In general, the phylogenies produced from mitochondrial genome diversity mirror the current classification of the genus, except for P. icterotis, which is not clustered with either of the superspecies of Platycercus and, as such, should probably be placed in a third group. To confirm that the family of parrots to which Platycercus belongs has a conservative nuclear genome, Nei’s genetic distance between and within Platycercus and other related species was estimated by means of cellogel electrophoresis of liver isozymes. Of the 26 Platycercus mitochondrial genomes studied, 23 different haplotypes were identified according to the limits of resolution of the technique. The mean interspecific mitochondrial genome diversity was 0.0457, and the intraspecific genome diversity varied between 0.003 1 (for P. caledonicus) and 0.0 142 (for P. eximius). These diversity values indicate either that the rate of rosella genome evolution is 2-3 orders of magnitude below the rate reported for primates or that the effective sizes of the rosella populations are 2-3 orders of magnitude below the sizes estimated on the basis of ecological methods.
The Role of Collateralized Household Debt in Macroeconomic Stabilization

A novel method of reclaiming cured polyurethane elastomers comprises milling particulate cured polyurethane elastomer under shear sufficient to increase the temperature of the elastomer for a time sufficient to form the elastomer into a cohesive mass and then continuing the milling at elevated temperature and pressure in the presence of a selected devulcanizing agent until a uniform, continuous, cohesive, partially devulcanized product is obtained. The novel product has properties which are improved over those of the cured starting material including improved heat resistance, abrasion resistance and tensile strength.
Molecular Pathogenesis of Myelodysplastic Syndromes

Myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) are a group of clonal hematologic disorders characterized by inefficient hematopoiesis, hypercellular bone marrow, dysplasia of blood cells and cytopenias. Most patients are diagnosed in their late 60s to early 70s. MDS is a risk factor for the development of acute myeloid leukemia which can occur in 10-15% of patients with MDS. A variety of pathophysiologic mechanisms contributes to the genesis and persistence of MDS including immunologic, epigenetic, cytogenetic and genetic factors. The only potential curative option for MDS is hematopoietic cell transplantation which is suitable for only a few patients. Currently approved therapeutic options for MDS, including lenalidomide, decitabine, and 5-azacytidine, are targeted to improve transfusion requirements and quality of life. Moreover, 5-azacytidine has also been demonstrated to improve survival in some patients with higher risk MDS. New ways to predict which patients will better gain benefit from currently available therapeutic agents are the primary challenges in MDS. In the last 10 years, chromosome scanning and high throughput technologies (single nucleotide polymorphism array genotyping, comparative genomic hybridization, and whole genome/ exome sequencing) have tremendously increased our knowledge of MDS pathogenesis. Indeed, the molecular heterogeneity of MDS supports the idea of different therapeutic approaches which will take into account the diverse morphologic and clinical presentations of MDS patients rather than a restricted therapeutic strategy. This review will summarize the molecular abnormalities in key relevant components of the biology and pathogenesis of MDS and will provide an update on the clinical impact and therapeutic response in MDS patients.
A descendant-based link analysis algorithm for Web search

The abilit y to accurately estimate the semantic distance between hypertext documents is fundamental to Web search and retrieval. Over the past years, a number of link-based approaches to computing similarity have been proposed. Link-based approaches are “content-free” in they completely ignore document terms, and instead estimate similarity based on the hyperlink structure between documents. This property is important because, as the Web grows increasingly diverse, documents written in many different languages will proli ferate, so content-based approaches will have to become increasingly sophisticated to support cross-language similarity assessment. Motivated by previous bibliometrics research, we propose a descendant-based link-based similarity measure, which we empirically compare with four alternative approaches. We demonstrate that comparing common descendants yields more accurate estimates than comparing common ancestors, which agrees with the intuition that, due to the decentralized nature of the Web, a page’s outlinks are a more reliable indicator of semantic content than its inlinks.
Algorithm of multithreshold decoding for non-binary self-orthogonal concatenated codes

Non-binary multithreshold decoding (qMTD) for q-ary self-orthogonal codes (qSOC) is considered. The SER performance of qMTD is shown to be close to the results provided by optimum total search methods, which are not realizable for non-binary codes in general. qMTD decoders are compared with different decoders for Reed-Solomon codes. The performance provided with qMTD in some cases is unattainable with classical decoders for arbitrary long Reed-Solomon codes. The result of concatenation of qSOC with simple to decode outer codes is described. Method of improving of qMTD decoder's performance for qSOC is offered. Some simulated results obtained by using these two decoding techniques (the base and modified ways) are presented as well. Comparison of the results showed that the change in the threshold element's algorithm can significantly improve speed of qMTD work. It's shown that for a larger gain this modification qMTD should be used after conventional decoding iterations.
Traffic Analysis of P2P IPTV and Comparison with BT-Like Application Based on Live Measurement

With the success of P2P file sharing application and the development of multimedia coding technique, IPTV, a new emerging P2P application, arises on the Internet for streaming content. In order to gain insights into P2P IPTV systems, we have undertaken an in-depth measurement study of one of the most popular IPTV systems, namely UUSee, compared with BT-like file sharing application. The measurement result shows that there exist some differences that should not be ignored in the further optimization and could be generalized as follows. Firstly the download throughput is not greedy, but keeps stable. Then many of peers don't share any data with our controlled host. And many data peers are unidirectional. Furthermore user behavior is even impacted by the TV program. Finally there exist many short lifetime sessions.
Power Laws in Economics and Finance

A power law is the form taken by a large number of surprising empirical regularities in economics and finance. This article surveys well-documented empirical power laws concerning income and wealth, the size of cities and firms, stock market returns, trading volume, international trade, and executive pay. It reviews detail-independent theoretical motivations that make sharp predictions concerning the existence and coefficients of power laws, without requiring delicate tuning of model parameters. These theoretical mechanisms include random growth, optimization, and the economics of superstars coupled with extreme value theory. Some of the empirical regularities currently lack an appropriate explanation. This article highlights these open areas for future research.
Producing Referring Expressions in Identification Tasks and Route Directions: What’s the Difference?

ABSTRACT Although communicative purposes are an important element in language production, few studies investigate the extent to which they might affect referential choices. In this study we contrast two tasks with different purposes: identification and route directions giving. In Experiment 1 speakers referred to a target building nearby or further away so their addressee would distinguish it from other buildings (identification) or give route directions and use the same building as a landmark (instructions). Our results showed that irrespective of the speaker’s purposes, referring expressions consisted of the same types of attributes, yet the attribute frequency and formulation differed. In the identification task the referring expressions were longer and contained more locative and more postnominal modifiers. In addition, referential choices were influenced by the visual distance between the speaker and the target: When speakers observed the target from afar, their references were longer and contained more often locative modifiers. In Experiment 2 a different group of participants had to evaluate references produced in Experiment 1 while assessing descriptions of objects or descriptions of objects extracted from route directions. Neither task, distance, nor the length of the phrases influenced their choice, indicating that addressees consider references produced in both conditions equally adequate in both uses.
Logics for XML

This work describes the theoretical and practical foundations of a system for the static analysis of XML processing languages. The system relies on a fixpoint modal logic with converse where models are finite trees. This calculus is expressive enough to capture regular tree types along with multi-directional navigation in trees. The decidability of the logic is proved in time 2^O(n) where n is the size of the input formula. XPath expressions and XML schemas are linearly translated into the logic. Based on these embeddings, several problems of major importance in XML applications are reduced to logical satisfiability. The focus is then given to a sound and complete algorithm for deciding the logic, along with crucial implementation techniques for building an effective solver. Practical experiments using a full system implementation are presented. The system appears efficient in practice for several realistic scenarios. The main application of this work is a new class of static analyzers for programs manipulating XML data. Such analyzers allow to ensure at compile-time valuable properties such as type-safety and optimizations, for safer and more efficient XML processing.
M-CONFIDANT: A Multicast based Cooperation of Node Fairness in Dynamic Ad hoc Network

Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) consists of many wireless mobile nodes that temporally constitute a dynamic infrastructure less network. To enable communication between nodes that do not have direct contact, each node must function as a wireless access point and potentially forward data traffic on behalf of the other nodes present in the network. Due to limitation of resources with these Mobile nodes the property of selfishness is exhibited. A technique system level based Cooperation of Node Fairness in Dynamic Ad hoc Network that promise to detect and nullify the effect of selfish nodes on the basis of monitoring, assigning reputation measure to every node and isolation of the detected misbehaving nodes. Previously, this scheme was implemented in GloMoSim simulator using unicast protocol and the idea is to integrate the CONFIDANT protocol with multicast protocol, so that the network performance can be boosted. In this paper, we suggest a M-CONFIDANT: A Multicast based Cooperation of Node Fairness in Dynamic Ad hoc Network. This scheme integrates a multicast based MAODV protocol with the CONFDIANT protocol previously integrated with DSR protocol.
Addressing the Mental Health Gap in Working with Indigenous Youth: Some Considerations for Non‐Indigenous Psychologists Working with Indigenous Youth

It has long been recognised that Indigenous youth between the ages of 15–24 years are one of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged groups in contemporary Australian society. There is a plethora of available reports and statistical information gathered over the past 20 years that highlights the perilous situation of Indigenous youth and the specific challenges that confront this group. This article provides a review of the state of our knowledge regarding Indigenous youth with a particular focus upon their mental health needs and their broader social and emotional well‐being. This article examines the relevance and potential effectiveness of focused psychological strategies as applied under the Access to Allied Psychological Services program in addressing the needs of Indigenous youth. There is a clear and important role for non‐Indigenous Psychologists to play in closing the mental health gap, but practitioners need to have at least an adequate degree of cultural competence in order to engage with Indigenous young people, and be able to deliver psychological interventions that are culturally appropriate and safe and consistent with Indigenous world views. This article provides some guidance for non‐Indigenous Psychologists in working with Indigenous youth.
MinSet: a general approach to derive maximally representative database subsets by using fragment dictionaries and its application to the SCOP database

MOTIVATION The size of current protein databases is a challenge for many Bioinformatics applications, both in terms of processing speed and information redundancy. It may be therefore desirable to efficiently reduce the database of interest to a maximally representative subset. RESULTS The MinSet method employs a combination of a Suffix Tree and a Genetic Algorithm for the generation, selection and assessment of database subsets. The approach is generally applicable to any type of string-encoded data, allowing for a drastic reduction of the database size whilst retaining most of the information contained in the original set. We demonstrate the performance of the method on a database of protein domain structures encoded as strings. We used the SCOP40 domain database by translating protein structures into character strings by means of a structural alphabet and by extracting optimized subsets according to an entropy score that is based on a constant-length fragment dictionary. Therefore, optimized subsets are maximally representative for the distribution and range of local structures. Subsets containing only 10% of the SCOP structure classes show a coverage of >90% for fragments of length 1-4. AVAILABILITY http://mathbio.nimr. mrc.ac. uk/~jkleinj/MinSet. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Tuning transmission opportunity (TXOP) limits for providing bit-based fairness in IEEE 802.11p V2I networks

In this paper, we address an unfairness problem that exists among vehicles of distinct mean velocities in a Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) network used for drive-thru Internet applications. A vehicle moving with higher velocity has less chance to communicate with the Road Side Unit (RSU), as compared to the slow moving vehicle, due to its shorter residence time in the coverage area of RSU. Accordingly, the data transfer of a higher velocity vehicle gets degraded significantly, as compared to that of the vehicle with lower velocity, resulting in unfairness among them. In this paper, our aim is to resolve this unfairness problem by assigning Transmission Opportunity (TXOP) limits according to vehicle's mean velocity. Using an analytical model, we prove that tuning TXOP limit proportional to mean velocity can ensure fairness among vehicles belonging to distinct classes of mean velocities, in the sense of equal chance of communicating with RSU. Analytical results are validated using extensive simulations.
The Internet and Political Participation

There is a growing literature exploring the role of the Internet in influencing levels and styles of political participation. However, it is not yet clear why the Internet is perceived as a medium that can, at least potentially, increase participation. Moreover, putting the emphasis on the Internet as a technology rather than on its information and communication capabilities signals a tendency for technological determinism. In order to avoid this, the article explores the relation between the Internet and political participation by examining three different facets of the Internet: the Internet as an information source, as a communication medium and as a virtual public sphere. The main argument of the article is that it is these facets of the Internet that may affect levels and styles of political participation and hence are of interest for political scientists. The article also emphasizes the relevance of established theories of participation within political science in evaluating the potential role of the Internet for affecting levels and styles of political participation.
A novel neural sliding mode control for multi-link robots

A novel neural sliding mode controller is presented for trajectory tracking control of multi-link robots with external disturbances and uncertain system parameter errors. This approach combines neural networks and global sliding mode control. It adopts a global sliding mode manifold which eliminates reaching mode phase of conventional sliding mode control and robustness exists over all the system process. A radius basis function (RBF) neural network is applied to learn the system parameter errors and external disturbances. So the control system can automatically track the robot parameters and disturbances, and reduces chattering of the controller. Prediction estimation for robot parameters and disturbances is not needed too. Moreover, the system stability is proved by Lyapunov principle. Simulation results verify the validity of the control scheme.
Action Recognition From Weak Alignment of Body Parts

We propose a method for human action recognition from still images that uses the silhouette and the upper body as a proxy for the pose of the person, and also to guide alignment between instances for the purpose of computing registered feature descriptors. Our contributions include an efficient algorithm, formulated as an energy minimization, for using the silhouette to align body parts between imaged human samples. The descriptors computed over the aligned body parts are incorporated in a multiple kernel framework to learn a classifier for each action class. Experiments on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on the majority of action classes.