Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Markovian Approach for DEM Estimation From Multiple InSAR Data With Atmospheric Contributions

Accurate digital elevation model (DEM) estimation using synthetic aperture radar interferometry still remains a challenging problem in the geographical information science community, particularly in dealing with a high noise rate and atmospheric disturbances. Such task suffers from the lack of efficient and reliable methods to overcome these artifacts. This work provides a method that aims to solve this problem through a Bayesian formulation with the Markovian energy minimization framework. The DEM is generated from a set of multifrequency/multibaseline interferograms using a multichannel phase unwrapping algorithm combined with an estimation method of the atmospheric artifacts. A set of experimental results illustrates the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed approach.
AN ENDOGENOUS CIRCADIAN RHYTHM IN NEUROSPORA CRASSA.

SUMMARY: A new isolate of Neurospora crassa displays a rhythm in its growth pattern. As the mycelium grows along the surface of the medium it begins, after the 12th hr, to form aerial hyphae at the growing front. This aerial growth continues until the 24th hr of growth and then stops. Surface growth continues until about the 32nd hr, when aerial hyphae are again formed. This alternation of surface and aerial hyphae results in a colony with zones or bands of mycelia of different densities. The rhythm is circadian, about 24 hr, and is perpetuated under conditions of constant light, temperature and humidity. The rhythm has remained steady in continuous darkness for over 2 months. Banding can be somewhat influenced by temperature and light but is not synchronized by these factors. A heat sensitive factor can be isolated from the growth medium which will eliminate the rhythm.
New silver nanoparticles induce apoptosis-like process in E. coli and interfere with mammalian copper metabolism

Silver nanoparticles (SNPs) are new functional materials that are widely used in biomedical and industrial technologies. Two main features that make SNPs valuable are their strong antibacterial effects and low toxicity to eukaryotes. In this study, SNPs were synthesized using a modified method of reducing the metal ions to their atomic state followed by crystallization. SNPs were characterized by UV/vis spectroscopy, X-ray diffractometry, atomic force microscopy, and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The SNPs were spherically shaped with an average linear dimension of 20 nm. In aqueous solution, the SNPs were beige-yellow in color, and they formed a black color in bacteria-rich growth media. The toxicity and bioavailability of the SNPs were tested using Escherichia coli cells and C57Bl/6 mice. Although the SNPs displayed bactericidal activity, an E. coli cell strain transformed with an expression plasmid carrying a human CTR1 ectodomain with three motives that bind Cu(II), Cu(I), and Ag(I) demonstrated increased resistance to treatment with SNPs. TEM showed that the SNPs were absorbed by the E. coli cell, and flow cytometry showed that the SNPs induced apoptosis-like death. In mice treated with SNPs (daily intraperitoneal injection of 10 μg SNPs/g body weight over 4 days), the ceruloplasmin (Cp) oxidase activity in the blood serum decreased. However, level of Cp gene expression, the relative contents of the Cp protein in the Golgi complex and in the serum did not change. Treatment with SNPs did not influence the activity of superoxide dismutase 1 in the liver and had no apparent toxic effects in mice. These findings expand the scope of application for the use of new SNPs. The data are discussed in a paradigm, in which the effects of SNPs are caused by the interference of silver ions with copper metabolism.
Idiopathic CD4 lymphocytopenia presenting as refractory cryptococcal meningitis

Idiopathic CD4 T-lymphocytopenia (ICL) is a syndrome characterized by depletion of CD4 T-cells without evidence of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection. There are a few reported cases of ICL associated with different diseases and clinical conditions, most commonly the opportunistic infections like Tuberculosis, fungal and parasitic diseases which are also seen in HIV-positive patients. We report a case without risk factors or laboratory evidence of HIV infection who presented with refractory cryptococcal meningitis and was found to have ICL.
Neurofeedback Training for Rifle Shooters to Improve Cognitive Ability

Neurofeedback training is one type of the biofeedback training that allows the subject do self-regulation during the training according to his/her real-time brain activities recognized from Electroencephalogram (EEG) and given to him/her through visual, audio or haptic feedback. The Neurofeedback training has been proved to be helpful in improvement of cognitive abilities not only for patients with mental illnesses but also for healthy subjects including athletes. In this paper, we proposed an experiment in which we recruited elite shooters and conducted a novel individual beta-1/theta based neurofeedback training to confirm the usage of neurofeedback training in boosting the performance of rifle shooters. The efficiency of the neurofeedback training was examined by comparing the shooting scores and results of DAUF test assessing the ability of sustained attention of the shooters before and after neurofeedback training.
Optimized succinct data structures for massive data

Succinct data structures provide the same functionality as their corresponding traditional data structure in compact space. We improve on functions rank and select, which are the basic building blocks of FM‐indexes and other succinct data structures. First, we present a cache‐optimal, uncompressed bitvector representation that outperforms all existing approaches. Next, we improve, in both space and time, on a recent result by Navarro and Providel on compressed bitvectors. Last, we show techniques to perform rank and select on 64‐bit words that are up to three times faster than existing methods. In our experimental evaluation, we first show how our improvements affect cache and runtime performance of both operations on data sets larger than commonly used in the evaluation of succinct data structures. Our experiments show that our improvements to these basic operations significantly improve the runtime performance and compression effectiveness of FM‐indexes on small and large data sets. To our knowledge, our improvements result in FM‐indexes that are either smaller or faster than all current state of the art implementations. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Overview of chicken embryo genes related to sex differentiation

Sex determination in chickens at an early embryonic stage has been a longstanding challenge in poultry production due to the unique ZZ:ZW sex chromosome system and various influencing factors. This review has summarized the genes related to the sex differentiation of chicken early embryos (mainly Dmrt1, Sox9, Amh, Cyp19a1, Foxl2, Tle4z1, Jun, Hintw, Ube2i, Spin1z, Hmgcs1, Foxd1, Tox3, Ddx4, cHemgn and Serpinb11 in this article), and has found that these contributions enhance our understanding of the genetic basis of sex determination in chickens, while identifying potential gene targets for future research. This knowledge may inform and guide the development of sex screening technologies for hatching eggs and support advancements in gene-editing approaches for chicken embryos. Moreover, these insights offer hope for enhancing animal welfare and promoting conservation efforts in poultry production.
Sim-X: parallel system software for interactive multi-experiment computational studies

Advances in high-performance computing have led to the broad use of computational studies in everyday engineering and scientific applications. A single study may require thousands of computational experiments, each corresponding to individual runs of simulation software with different parameter settings; in complex studies, the pattern of parameter changes is complex and may have to be adjusted by the user based on partial simulation results. Unfortunately, existing tools have limited high-level support for managing large ensembles of simultaneous computational experiments. In this paper, we present a system architecture for interactive computational studies targeting two goals. The first is to provide a framework for high-level user interaction with computational studies, rather than individual experiments; the second is to maximize the size of the studies that can be performed at close to interactive rates. We describe a prototype implementation of the system and demonstrate performance improvements obtained using our approach for a simple model problem
Graph Convolutional Networks for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

: Aspect-based sentiment analysis, as an important fine-grained sentiment analysis problem, aims to analyze and understand the emotions at the aspect level in sentences. However, existing models often overlook the syntactic relationship between words and fail to extract specific semantic information.We propose a graph convolutional network model to extract aspectual word features from local context. This paper also proposes a model to address the problem of under-use of explicit syntactic dependency in aspect category emotion analysis, based on a graph convolutional network and incorporating external knowledge to extract deep and surface structure information from the dependency graph, using the aspect item as a reference point. Both models are superior to existing models.
Foundations of Typestate-Oriented Programming

Typestate reflects how the legal operations on imperative objects can change at runtime as their internal state changes. A typestate checker can statically ensure, for instance, that an object method is only called when the object is in a state for which the operation is well defined. Prior work has shown how modular typestate checking can be achieved thanks to access permissions and state guarantees. However, typestate was not treated as a primitive language concept: typestate checkers are an additional verification layer on top of an existing language. In contrast, a typestate-oriented programming (TSOP) language directly supports expressing typestates. For example, in the Plaid programming language, the typestate of an object directly corresponds to its class, and that class can change dynamically. Plaid objects have not only typestate-dependent interfaces but also typestate-dependent behaviors and runtime representations. This article lays foundations for TSOP by formalizing a nominal object-oriented language with mutable state that integrates typestate change and typestate checking as primitive concepts. We first describe a statically typed language—Featherweight Typestate (FT)—where the types of object references are augmented with access permissions and state guarantees. We describe a novel flow-sensitive permission-based type system for FT. Because static typestate checking is still too rigid for some applications, we then extend this language into a gradually typed language—Gradual Featherweight Typestate (GFT). This language extends the notion of gradual typing to account for typestate: gradual typestate checking seamlessly combines static and dynamic checking by automatically inserting runtime checks into programs. The gradual type system of GFT allows programmers to write dynamically safe code even when the static type checker can only partly verify it.
Development of a Simple Latex Agglutination Assay for Detection of Shiga Toxin-Producing Escherichia coli (STEC) by Using Polyclonal Antibody against STEC

ABSTRACT Rabbit antiserum raised against the whole-cell antigen of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) strain VT3 (stx1+stx2+eae+) was repeatedly adsorbed with heat-killed cells of different non-STEC strains and other enteric bacteria. Thus, the antiserum obtained was designated VT3 antiserum. VT3 antiserum reacted with intimin type γ. We assessed the reactivity of VT3 antiserum to whole-cell lysates of 87 strains of E. coli and other enteric bacteria by immunoblotting. The antiserum recognized the 97-kDa protein in whole-cell lysate from strain VT3, and 36 (83.7%) of the 43 STEC strains were positive for the STEC antigen. None of the non-STEC strains or strains of other species examined tested positive by immunoblotting. Based on this result, we developed a latex agglutination assay for the detection of STEC strains. Thirty-five (81.4%) of the 43 STEC strains tested positive for the STEC antigen by the latex agglutination assay. One (3.3%) of the 30 non-STEC strains and none of the strains of the other enteric bacteria included in this study tested positive by the latex agglutination assay. The corresponding specificity of the latex agglutination assay was approximately 98%. Results of this study showed the production of STEC antiserum and the generation of a simple, cost-effective, sensitive, and specific latex agglutination assay for establishing an etiological diagnosis of STEC.
Flujo digital en ortodoncia, ¿estamos preparados?

Recently, intraoral scanners and 3D printers have revolutionized many aspects of general dentistry, including orthodontics. Some examples of this progress have been the possibility of immediate printing of digital intraoral records, the pre-visualization of treatment objectives, the preparation of indirect bonding guides for braces, the development of aligner systems through companies and the possibility of in-office manufacture and, the adaptation and design of orthodontic appliances with resin and metal alloy direct printing. The objective of this scientific note is to describe some advances of the digital flow in orthodontics.
Evolving a CUDA kernel from an nVidia template

Rather than attempting to evolve a complete program from scratch we demonstrate genetic interface programming (GIP) by automatically generating a parallel CUDA kernel with identical functionality to existing highly optimised ancient sequential C code (gzip). Generic GPGPU nVidia kernel C++ code is converted into a BNF grammar. Strongly typed genetic programming uses the BNF to generate compilable and executable graphics card kernels. Their fitness is given by running the population on a GPU with randomised subsets of training data itself derived from gzip's SIR test suite. Back-to-back validation uses the original code as a test oracle.
Deep-sea coral taxa in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico: depth and geographical distribution

This annex to the U.S. Gulf of Mexico chapter in “The State of Deep-Sea Coral Ecosystems of the United States” provides a revised and updated list of deep-sea coral taxa in the Phylum Cnidaria, Classes Anthozoa and Hydrozoa, known to occur in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico (Figure 1). Deep-sea corals are defined here as azooxanthellate, heterotrophic coral species occurring in waters 50 meters deep or more. Details are provided on the vertical and geographic extent of each species (Table 1). This list is an update of the peer-reviewed 2017 list by Etnoyer & Cairns (2017) and includes new taxa recognized through 2020. Depth ranges were revised based upon a review of literature and an assessment of data maintained by NOAA (2020) and the Department of Invertebrate Zoology Collections at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (2020).
On the Determination of the Public Debt

A public debt theory is constructed in which the Ricardian invariance theorem is valid as a first-order proposition but where the dependence excess burden on the timing of taxation implies an optimal time path of debt issue. A central proposition is that deficits are varied in order to maintain expected constancy in tax rates. This behavior implies a positive effect on debt issue of temporary increases in government spending (as in wartime), a countercyclical response of debt to temporary income movements, and a one-to-one effect of expected inflation on nominal debt growth. Debt issue would be invariant with the outstanding debt-income ratio and, except for a mirror effect, with the level of government spending. Hypotheses are tested on U.S. data since World War I. Results are basically in accord with the theory. It also turns out that a small set of explanatory variables can account for the principal movements in interest-bearing federal debt since the 1920s.
Unveiling the Paradox of Selflessness: Exploring Perceptions of Hypocrisy and Priority Outgroup in Intergroup Moral Dilemmas

Purpose This study examines the impact of prioritizing the out-group in intergroup moral dilemmas. The research aims to achieve three primary objectives: 1) investigating the relationship between out-group prioritization and perceptions of hypocrisy, 2) exploring the influence of perceived hypocrisy and negative emotions on moral judgments, and 3) uncovering the underlying reasons for perceiving outgroup prioritization as hypocritical. Methods Experiments 1, 2 and 3 involved presenting Chinese participants with out-group rescuers and in-group rescuers and asking them to rate the two on three dimensions: level of hypocrisy, level of morality, and negative emotions toward the rescuers. In Experiment 3, the degree of similarity between participants and rescuers was manipulated to control for the level at which participants projected their own intrinsic motivations (ie, self-interest) onto the rescuers. Results Experiments 1 and 2 jointly showed that participants perceived the out-group rescuer as more hypocritical and immoral compared to the in-group rescuer, and that participants had stronger negative emotions toward the out-group rescuer. Mediation analysis also demonstrated that the perception of hypocrisy and negative emotions largely mediated the relationship between the different rescuers and participants’ evaluation of the rescuers’ morality. In Experiment 3, participants gave higher hypocrisy ratings to high projection out-group rescuers compared to low projection out-group rescuers. Conclusion In intergroup dilemmas, choosing to sacrifice the in-group to rescue the outgroup is perceived as more hypocritical, immoral, and objectionable. Perceived hypocrisy arises from an incongruity between individuals’ subjective judgments of the rescuers’ self-interest motives and the altruistic choice made by the rescuers to rescue the out-group.
Increasing feasibility of the field-programmable gate array implementation of an iterative image registration using a kernel-warping algorithm

Abstract. Image registration is a fundamental image processing technique. It is used to spatially align two or more images that have been captured at different times, from different sensors, or from different viewpoints. There have been many algorithms proposed for this task. The most common of these being the well-known Lucas–Kanade (LK) and Horn–Schunck approaches. However, the main limitation of these approaches is the computational complexity required to implement the large number of iterations necessary for successful alignment of the images. Previously, a multi-pass image interpolation algorithm (MP-I2A) was developed to considerably reduce the number of iterations required for successful registration compared with the LK algorithm. This paper develops a kernel-warping algorithm (KWA), a modified version of the MP-I2A, which requires fewer iterations to successfully register two images and less memory space for the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation than the MP-I2A. These reductions increase feasibility of the implementation of the proposed algorithm on FPGAs with very limited memory space and other hardware resources. A two-FPGA system rather than single FPGA system is successfully developed to implement the KWA in order to compensate insufficiency of hardware resources supported by one FPGA, and increase parallel processing ability and scalability of the system.
Polyvascular extracoronary atherosclerotic disease in patients with coronary artery disease.

BACKGROUND Cardiovascular diseases are the number one killer in the developed countries, accounting for approximately half of all deaths, with the leading causes being myocardial infarction and ischaemic stroke. In line with the ageing population, the prevalence of coronary artery disease (CAD), lower extremity peripheral arterial disease (PAD), supra-aortic arterial disease (SAD) and renal stenosis (RAS) is increasing. Polyvascular atherosclerosis (PVA) coexisting in several territories has an adverse effect on cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. AIM To determine prevalence, coexistence and predictors of significant PAD, SAD and RAS in patients with suspected CAD. METHODS Based on angiography, the frequency of coexisting CAD, SAD, PAD and RAS (stenosis > or =50%) was determined in 687 (487 male) consecutive patients, aged 63.5 +/- 9.1 years, referred for coronary angiography. RESULTS Significant CAD was found in 545 (79.3%) patients (1-vessel in 164; 2-vessel in 157; 3-vessel in 224). SAD, RAS and PAD were found in 136 (19.8%), 55 (8%), and 103 (15%) patients, respectively. Of the 545 patients with confirmed CAD, 346 (63.5%) had stenoses limited to coronary arteries. 2-, 3- and 4-level PVA was found in 130 (23.8%), 61 (11.2%) and 8 (1.5%) patients, respectively. Of the 142 patients without CAD, 127 (89.4%) had no significant stenoses elsewhere, 12 (8.5%) had 1 extracoronary territory and 3 (2.1%) had 2-territory involvement. Backward stepwise binary logistic regression analysis showed the following independent predictors of at least 2-level PVA: 2- and 3-vessel CAD (p < 0.001), hyperlipidaemia (p = 0.067), smoking (p < 0.001), creatinine level > or = 1.3 ml/dl (p < 0.001), lower extremities claudication (p < 0.001) and female gender (p = 0.003). The relative risk of having at least 2-territory PVA was 15.7-fold higher in patients with claudication, 2.1-fold in patients with multivessel CAD, 2.8-fold for serum creatinine level > 1.3 mg/dl; and 1.9-fold, 2.4-fold and 2-fold in patients with hyperlipidaemia, smokers and women, respectively. CONCLUSIONS Significant atherosclerosis in extracoronary arterial territories is present in 36% of patients with documented CAD. With advancing PVA, accumulation of atherosclerosis risk factors, previous atherothrombotic events and more severe CAD is observed.
Role of Broca’s Subregions in Syntactic Processing: A Comparative Study of Japanese Patients with Lesions in the Pars Triangularis and Opercularis

Background/Aim: To clarify whether Broca’s subregions, comprising the pars triangularis and pars opercularis, play different roles in syntactic processing, we investigated Japanese infarct patients with selective damage in each subregion. Methods: Four patients participated in this study: 3 showing lesions mostly restricted to the pars opercularis (Op group) and a rare case with a lesion mostly restricted to the pars triangularis (Tr). Using the Object Manipulation Task, scores and error types were compared between the Tr and the Op patients. Results: No marked differences in total score were evident between the Tr and Op patients. However, the Tr patient showed greater difficulty with dative sentences than the Op patients. Conversely, the Tr patient showed rather high scores with relative sentences, whereas the Op patients were rarely able to manipulate items correctly for relative sentences. In addition, the Tr patient tended to posit items in canonical word order incorrectly, whereas the Op group tended to make simplification errors. Conclusion: Broca’s subregions play different roles in syntactic processing. Considering Japanese sentence structure, the results indicate that the pars triangularis is involved in comprehension of semantic relationships among syntactically equivalent nominal phrases assigned thematic roles, while the pars opercularis is involved in thematic role transformation and/or reinterpretation.