Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Daily activity level improvement with antidepressant medications predicts long-term clinical outcomes in outpatients with major depressive disorder

Background Major depressive disorder (MDD) significantly impacts performance of both work- and nonwork-related routine daily activities. We have shown that work productivity is significantly impaired in employed MDD patients, but the extent of impairments in nonwork-related routine activities and its association with antidepressant treatment outcomes has not been established. Materials and methods Activity impairment was measured using the sixth item of Work Productivity and Activity Impairment Scale in the Combining Medications to Enhance Depression Outcomes (CO-MED) trial (n=665). Published norms were used to define activity impairment levels. The relationship between activity impairment and baseline sociodemographic and clinical characteristics was evaluated along with changes in activity impairment and its relationship with other clinical outcomes such as symptom severity, function, and side effect burden. Remission status at 3 and 7 months was predicted based on week 6 activity impairment level. Results Higher psychosocial and cognitive impairments and greater number of comorbid medical conditions were associated with greater activity impairment at baseline. Proportion of participants with severe activity impairment declined from 47.6% at baseline to 18.7% at 3 months, while mean activity impairment decreased from 57.1 at baseline to 32.8 at 3 months. During course of treatment, levels of activity impairment correlated most strongly with psychosocial function among measures of symptom severity, function, quality of life, and side effect burden. No or minimal activity impairment at week 6 was associated with two to three times higher rates of remission at 3 and 7 months as compared to moderate or severe activity impairment levels even after controlling for remission status at week 6 and select baseline variables. Conclusion Depressed patients have high levels of nonwork-related activity impairment at baseline that improves significantly with treatment and independently predicts long-term clinical outcomes. Brief systematic assessment of activity impairment during the course of antidepressant treatment can help inform clinical decision-making.
Pollination and seed predation by moths on Silene and allied Caryophyllaceae: evaluating a model system to study the evolution of mutualisms.

Nursery pollinators, and the plants they use as hosts for offspring development, function as exemplary models of coevolutionary mutualism. The two pre-eminent examples--fig wasps and yucca moths--show little variation in the interaction: the primary pollinator is an obligate mutualist. By contrast, nursery pollination of certain Caryophyllaceae, including Silene spp. , by two nocturnal moth genera, Hadena and Perizoma, ranges from antagonistic to potentially mutualistic, offering an opportunity to test hypotheses about the factors that promote or discourage the evolution of mutualism. Here, we review nursery pollination and host-plant interactions in over 30 caryophyllaceous plants, based on published studies and a survey of researchers investigating pollination, seed predation, and moth morphology and behavior. We detected little direct evidence of mutualism in these moth-plant interactions, but found traits and patterns in both that are nonetheless consistent with the evolution of mutualism and merit further attention.
Data isolation and protection in online social networks

Online social networks such as Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter have experienced exponential growth in recent years. These OSNs offer attractive means of online social interactions and communications, but also raise privacy and security concerns. In this the design issues for the security and privacy of OSNs are discussed. There are inherent design conflicts between these and the traditional design goals of OSNs such as usability and sociability. One of the most commonly used anti phishing algorithm is the DPIS algorithm which is being implemented in this project. Therefore, in order to stop this, a new module called the profile blocker can be included to block these profiles from the network. If the user denies that the profile is not a fake, then the member has to send ID verification to the admin, and the admin can decide the fate of the profile.
Gender and Age in Media Education.

Nowadays mass media shape the perception of social values and roles. Thus, aspects of media education that deal with various kinds of inequalities influence general sensitivity to diversity and its consequences. In this respect media and intercultural competences interrelate. Not only minorities’ rights have to be secured, but also majorities rights have to considered if it happens that majorities are discriminated. Widely accepted gender and age inequalities presented on the media in stereotypes and safely-looking conservatist behaviours may lead to harassment and even violence. That is why understanding media messages and identifying overt and covert forms of discrimination are of special interest of educators. In this article several activities for class teachers are presented to encourage them to introduce the touchy topic of gender and age inequalities into their school practice.
Update on Development Photoreceptors and Regulation of Flowering Time

One of the most important environmental factors affecting flowering time is the daily duration of light, the photoperiod, which was first discovered by Garner and Allard in the 1920s (Thomas and Vince-Prue, 1997, and refs. therein). Plants in which flowering occurs or is accelerated in short days (SD) or long days (LD) are known as SD plants or LD plants, respectively. LD plants often flower in later spring or early summer (when the daylength becomes longer) to set seeds in a favorable season. SD plants generally flower in fall (when photoperiods are getting shorter) to finish reproduction before the cold winter arrives. Synchronization of flowering time with a reliable environmental cue such as the photoperiod also increases the chance of out-breeding and genetic recombination. The photoperiodic control of flowering is brought about by the interactions of genes involved in the developmental control of floral initiation, the regulation of the circadian clock, and the signal transduction of photoreceptors (Thomas and Vince-Prue, 1997). Recent molecular genetic studies in a facultative LD plant, Arabidopsis, have made notable progress in identifying genetic pathways and molecular components associated with the control of flowering time and the function of the circadian clock, which have been discussed in two recent Updates (Pineiro and Coupland, 1998; Somers, 1999). This Update focuses on the recent advances in our understanding of plant photoreceptors phytochromes and cryptochromes, and their roles in the regulation of flowering time.
Digital Forensics and Crime Investigation: Legal Issues in Prosecution at National Level

Abstract: Revolution in Internet and ease in use of latest technology is significantly increasing the use of latest technology worldwide, day by day. Advancement in digital devices such as computers and cell phones also helped the people to work both from home and offices. The indispensable nature of information technology, however, has also attracted cyber terrorist to target our strategic critical information resources like banks, defense installations, vital telecommunication hubs, means of transportation, and other infrastructures linked with our national security. Similarly, internet and related technologies also helped terrorists as well as cyber and organized criminals to carry out their criminal activities while maintaining the anonymity and stealth. Currently, prosecution and conviction of criminals is completely based on evidence collected from digital devices based on the standard forensics models developed during last two decades. This paper presents a new national model that combines digital forensics and related laws at national level to investigate and prosecute cases which involves digital evidence based on legal system and cyber laws. The paper also discusses a real life case of Hawala as well as issues related to cross border prosecution and different obstacles to investigate such cases due to transnational prosecution and legal issues.
Element Distinctness, Frequency Moments, and Sliding Windows

We derive new time-space tradeoff lower bounds and algorithms for exactly computing statistics of input data, including frequency moments, element distinctness, and order statistics, that are simple to calculate for sorted data. We develop a randomized algorithm for the element distinctness problem whose time T and space S satisfy T ∈ Õ (n3/2/S1/2), smaller than previous lower bounds for comparison-based algorithms, showing that element distinctness is strictly easier than sorting for randomized branching programs. This algorithm is based on a new time and space efficient algorithm for finding all collisions of a function f from a finite set to itself that are reachable by iterating f from a given set of starting points. We further show that our element distinctness algorithm can be extended at only a polylogarithmic factor cost to solve the element distinctness problem over sliding windows, where the task is to take an input of length 2n-1 and produce an output for each window of length n, giving n outputs in total. In contrast, we show a time-space tradeoff lower bound of T ∈ Ω(n2/S) for randomized branching programs to compute the number of distinct elements over sliding windows. The same lower bound holds for computing the low-order bit of F0 and computing any frequency moment Fk, ≠ 1. This shows that those frequency moments and the decision problem F0 mod 2 are strictly harder than element distinctness. We complement this lower bound with a T ∈ Õ(n2/S) comparison-based deterministic RAM algorithm for exactly computing Fk over sliding windows, nearly matching both our lower bound for the sliding-window version and the comparison-based lower bounds for the single-window version. We further exhibit a quantum algorithm for F0 over sliding windows with T ∈ O(n3/2/S1/2). Finally, we consider the computations of order statistics over sliding windows.
Pharmacokinetics of atorvastatin and its metabolites after single and multiple dosing in hypercholesterolaemic haemodialysis patients.

BACKGROUND Patients with chronic renal failure commonly suffer from a secondary form of complex dyslipidaemia, and may benefit from lipid-lowering treatment. Atorvastatin has been shown to reduce efficiently the levels of atherogenic lipoproteins also in patients with renal failure, but pharmacokinetic data in haemodialysis patients are lacking. METHODS In this study, hypercholesterolaemic haemodialysis patients received 40 mg (n=12) or 80 mg (n=11) atorvastatin once daily, first as a single dose and then continuously for 2 weeks. Plasma levels of atorvastatin and its active and inactive metabolites were measured by LC/MS/MS, and pharmacokinetic parameters (C(max), t(max), AUC, t(1/2)) compared between single and multiple dosing, and between the different doses. RESULTS The pharmacokinetic parameters of the parent drug atorvastatin acid were not significantly different after single and 2-week multiple dosing; they showed dose-proportionality between the 40 and 80 mg dose, and were comparable to findings in healthy volunteers. Dose-proportionality and absence of accumulation was also observed for the major active metabolite ortho-hydroxy-atorvastatin and the inactive metabolites atorvastatin lactone and ortho-hydroxy-atorvastatin lactone, but the levels of the active metabolite were relatively lower, and the inactive metabolites higher, compared with healthy volunteers. The para-hydroxy-metabolites constituted only a minor pathway in atorvastatin's metabolic elimination. Haemodialysis did not cause enhanced clearance of atorvastatin or its metabolites, the drug was well tolerated and there were no serious adverse events. CONCLUSION While subtle differences may exist in the metabolic processing of atorvastatin in haemodialysis patients, active drug did not accumulate nor did it show enhanced elimination, and levels were comparable to those measured in healthy volunteers. Therefore there is no need to adapt atorvastatin dosage in this particular patient population.
Author ' s personal copy Shape ultimate attribute opening ☆

In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier's archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: a b s t r a c t a r t i c l e i n f o The ultimate opening (UO) is a powerful segmentation operator recently introduced by Beucher [1]. It automatically selects the most contrasted regions of an image. However, in the presence of nested structures (e.g. text in a signboard or windows in a contrasted facade), interesting structures may be masked by the containing region. In this paper we focus on ultimate attribute openings and we propose a method that improves the results by favoring regions with a predefined shape via a similarity function. An efficient implementation using a max-tree representation of the image is proposed. The method is validated in the framework of three applications: facade analysis, scene-text detection and cell segmentation. Experimental results show that the proposed method yields better segmentation results than UO. Segmentation is a fundamental problem in image analysis to distinguish between objects of interest and " the rest ". It creates a partition of the image into disjoint and uniform regions, according to some features such as gray value, color, or texture [2]. In literature, deformable models [3] and level sets [4] have become the most studied techniques for shape segmentation, due to their ability to adapt to the specific shape of the object of interest. These methods generally are too sensitive to the initial contour position and to the stop criterion. More robust algorithms have been proposed [5,6] in order to deal with those drawbacks, at the expense of a higher computational complexity. In this paper, an extended version of [7], we describe a fast morphological segmentation approach that combines gray-scale information and prior shape knowledge. The method is easily parameterizable because it uses simple shape features. An overview of morphological segmentation is presented by Meyer in [8] where a unified framework for supervised or unsupervised, multi-scale or single scale, color or gray-scale and 2D or 3D images is introduced. Shape information has been used in mathematical morphology as attribute operators (connected filters [9]). Attribute operators compute criteria describing the shape or size of each connected component and then decide which components are preserved or discarded. Firstly, Vincent …
The Capacity of a MIMO Ricean Channel Is Monotonic in the Singular Values of the Mean

We consider a discrete-time memoryless Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) fading channel where the fading matrix can be written as the sum of a deterministic (line-of-sight) matrix D and a random matrix̃H whose entries are IID zero-mean unit-variance complex circularly-symmetric Gaussian random variables. It is demonstrated that if the realization of the fading matrix is known at the receiver but not at the transmitter, then the capacity of this channel under an average power constraint is monotonically non-decreasing in the singular values of D. This complements a recent result of Kim and Lapidoth [1] demonstrating the monotonicity of the mutual information corresponding to isotropically distributed Gaussian input vectors. We also show that the optimal covariance matrix of the Gaussian input vector has the same eigenvectors as D†D.
Influence of the Historical Discourse Record on Language Processing in Dialogue

Speakers typically design definite referring expressions to uniquely identify the intended referent with respect to the alternatives in the referential context, and addressees interpret these expressions with respect to the contextual alternatives. Although it is clear that the relevant context includes entities in the immediate context, less clear is how the historical discourse context affects language interpretation in the moment. This article presents the results of two experiments that examine interpretation of definite referring expressions in cases where the local context has recently changed. In Experiment 1 eye-tracked participants followed an experimenter's instructions to click on objects multiple times each. When expressions were over-modified for the immediate context (e.g., the striped shirt, when the shirt would suffice), referential interpretation was significantly facilitated when that expression had been previously used in a supporting context. By contrast, interpretation of nonmodified expressions that were appropriate for the local context (e.g., the shirt) was somewhat impaired when a modified term had been used previously. Experiment 2 replicated these findings with a more sensitive, cohort-competitor design. These findings demonstrate that both the local and the historical context influence the online interpretation of referring expressions.
A robust license-plate extraction method under complex image conditions

A robust approach for extracting car license plate from images with complex background and relatively poor quality is presented. The approach focuses on dealing with images taken under weak lighting condition. The proposed method is divided into two steps: 1) searching candidate areas from the input image using gradient information, and 2) determining the plate area among the candidates and adjusting the boundary of the area by introducing a plate template. A set of experiments has been performed to prove the robustness and accuracy of the approach. For many images collected from a large underground parking place the result shows that 90% of them are correctly segmented.
A New mHealth Communication Framework for Use in Wearable WBANs and Mobile Technologies

Driven by the development of biomedical sensors and the availability of high mobile bandwidth, mobile health (mHealth) systems are now offering a wider range of new services. This revolution makes the idea of in-home health monitoring practical and provides the opportunity for assessment in “real-world” environments producing more ecologically valid data. In the field of insomnia diagnosis, for example, it is now possible to offer patients wearable sleep monitoring systems which can be used in the comfort of their homes over long periods of time. The recorded data collected from body sensors can be sent to a remote clinical back-end system for analysis and assessment. Most of the research on sleep reported in the literature mainly looks into how to automate the analysis of the sleep data and does not address the problem of the efficient encoding and secure transmissions of the collected health data. This article reviews the key enabling communication technologies and research challenges for the design of efficient mHealth systems. An end-to-end mHealth system architecture enabling the remote assessment and monitoring of patient's sleep disorders is then proposed and described as a case study. Finally, various mHealth data serialization formats and machine-to-machine (M2M) communication protocols are evaluated and compared under realistic operating conditions.
Automatic recognition of class variants of Marathi consonants

Marathi is a language spoken predominantly in the state of Maharashtra, India and has close to 70 million native speakers. It is based on the Devanagiri script, which the script used for the mother of all Indic languages, Sanskrit. Devanagiri consists of 46 phonemes and arranges them in a scientific manner based on the process of generation. The consonants are arranged in varnas (classes), and each varna has a unique place of articulation. This work focuses on identifying individual class variants of the first five varnas of the Marathi Devanagiri script.
TCP Traffic Control Evaluation and Reduction over Wireless Networks Using Parallel Sequential Decoding Mechanism

The assumption of TCP-based protocols that packet error (lost or damaged) is due to network congestion is not true for wireless networks. For wireless networks, it is important to reduce the number of retransmissions to improve the effectiveness of TCP-based protocols. In this paper, we consider improvement at the data link layer for systems that use stop-and-wait ARQ as in IEEE 802.11 standard. We show that increasing the buffer size will not solve the actual problem and moreover it is likely to degrade the quality of delivery (QoD). We firstly study a wireless router system model with a sequential convolutional decoder for error detection and correction in order to investigate QoD of flow and error control. To overcome the problems along with high packet error rate, we propose a wireless router system with parallel sequential decoders. We simulate our systems and provide performance in terms of average buffer occupancy, blocking probability, probability of decoding failure, system throughput, and channel throughput. We have studied these performance metrics for different channel conditions, packet arrival rates, decoding time-out limits, system capacities, and the number of sequential decoders. Our results show that parallel sequential decoders have great impact on the system performance and increase QoD significantly.
Understanding integrated care: a comprehensive conceptual framework based on the integrative functions of primary care

Introduction Primary care has a central role in integrating care within a health system. However, conceptual ambiguity regarding integrated care hampers a systematic understanding. This paper proposes a conceptual framework that combines the concepts of primary care and integrated care, in order to understand the complexity of integrated care. Methods The search method involved a combination of electronic database searches, hand searches of reference lists (snowball method) and contacting researchers in the field. The process of synthesizing the literature was iterative, to relate the concepts of primary care and integrated care. First, we identified the general principles of primary care and integrated care. Second, we connected the dimensions of integrated care and the principles of primary care. Finally, to improve content validity we held several meetings with researchers in the field to develop and refine our conceptual framework. Results The conceptual framework combines the functions of primary care with the dimensions of integrated care. Person-focused and population-based care serve as guiding principles for achieving integration across the care continuum. Integration plays complementary roles on the micro (clinical integration), meso (professional and organisational integration) and macro (system integration) level. Functional and normative integration ensure connectivity between the levels. Discussion The presented conceptual framework is a first step to achieve a better understanding of the inter-relationships among the dimensions of integrated care from a primary care perspective.