Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Agenda setting and micro-blog use: An analysis of the relationship between Sina Weibo and newspaper agendas in China

The present study investigates the influence of micro-blogs on the major agenda-setting media in China in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophic railway accident. Study findings are based on a content analysis of micro-blog messages and traditional mainstream media reports that were published in the nine days subsequent to the July 23, 2011 bullet train crash accident. Results suggest that, in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophic train wreck, alternative online media played a decisive role in setting mainstream media agendas and providing a citizen forum on a sensitive issue that their conventional counterparts downplayed, ignored, or missed altogether. In particular, the traditional media’s agenda setting power is no longer universal nor singular within micro-blogging outlets. Instead, traditional media—once a monolithic establishment—are now just one of the role players among many competing influences.
Control of stratified systems with robotic applications

Many interesting and important control systems evolve on stratified configuration spaces. Roughly speaking, a configuration manifold is called "stratified" if it contains subspaces (submanifolds) upon which the system had different equations of motion. Robotic systems, in particular, are of this nature. For example, a legged robot has discontinuous equations of motion near points in the configuration space where each of its "feet" comes into contact with the ground. In such a case, when the system moves from one submanifold to another, the equations of motion change in a non-smooth, or even discontinuous manner. In such cases, traditional nonlinear control methodologies are inapplicable because they generally rely upon some form of differentiation. Yet, it is precisely the discontinuous nature of such systems that is often their most important characteristic. This dissertation presents methods which consider the intrinsic physical geometric structure present in such problems to address nonlinear controllability and motion planning for stratified systems. For both problems, by exploiting this geometric structure of stratified systems, we can extend standard nonlinear control results and methodologies to the stratified case. A related problem addressed by this dissertation is that of controllability of systems where some control inputs are constrained to be non-negative. This problem arises in stratified systems which arise by way of physical contact because the normal force between contacting systems must be nonnegative. For all the results, a basic goal is to generate results which are general. For example, for robotics applications, these results are independent of a particular robot's number of legs, fingers or morphology.
Noninvasive surface imaging of breast cancer in humans using a hand-held optical imager

X-ray mammography, the current gold standard for breast cancer detection, has a 20% false-negative rate (cancer is undetected) and increases in younger women with denser breast tissue. Diffuse optical imaging is a safe (nonionizing), and relatively inexpensive method for noninvasive imaging of breast cancer in human subjects (including dense breast tissues) by providing physiological information (e.g. oxy- and deoxy- hemoglobin concentration). At the Optical Imaging Laboratory, a hand-held optical imager has been developed which employs a breast contourable probe head to perform simultaneous illumination and detection of large surfaces towards near real-time imaging of human breast cancer. First generation (gen-1) and second generation (gen-2) versions of the hand-held optical imager have been developed and previously demonstrated imaging in tissue phantoms and healthy human subjects. Herein, the hand-held optical imagers are applied towards in vivo imaging of breast cancer subjects in an attempt to determine the ability of the imager to detect breast tumors. Five female human subjects (ages 51–74) diagnosed with breast cancer were imaged with the gen-1 optical imager prior to surgical intervention. One of the subjects was also imaged with the gen-2 optical imager. Both imagers use 785 nm laser diode sources and intensified charge-coupled device camera detectors to generate 2D surface maps of total hemoglobin absorption. The subjects lay in supine position and images were collected at various locations on both the ipsilateral (tumor-containing) and contralateral (non-tumor containing) breasts. The optical images (2D surface maps of optical absorption due to total hemoglobin concentration) show regions of higher intensity at the tumor location, which is indicative of increased vasculature and higher blood content due to the presence of the tumor. Additionally, a preliminary result indicates the potential to image lymphatic spread. This study demonstrates the potential of the hand-held optical devices to noninvasively image breast cancer in human subjects.
Development of virtual reality exercise of hand motion assist robot for rehabilitation therapy by patient self-motion control

This paper presents a virtual reality-enhanced hand rehabilitation support system with a symmetric master-slave motion assistant for independent rehabilitation therapies. Our aim is to provide fine motion exercise for a hand and fingers, which allows the impaired hand of a patient to be driven by his or her healthy hand on the opposite side. Since most disabilities caused by cerebral vascular accidents or bone fractures are hemiplegic, we adopted a symmetric master-slave motion assistant system in which the impaired hand is driven by the healthy hand on the opposite side. A VR environment displaying an effective exercise was created in consideration of system's characteristic. To verify the effectiveness of this system, a clinical test was executed by applying to six patients.
Infant Pain Detection with Homomorphic Filter and Fuzzy k-NN Classifier

Newborn pain is a non-stationary made by babies in reaction to certain circumstances. This infant facial expression can be used to recognize physical or psychology condition of newborn. The goal of this study is to evaluate the performance of illumination levels for infant pain classification. Local Binary Pattern (LBP) features are computed at Fuzzy k-NN classifier. Eight different performance measurements such as Sensitivity, Specificity, Accuracy, Area under Curve (AUC), Cohen's kappa (k), Precession, F-Measure and Time Consumption are performed. Fuzzy k-NN classifier is employed to classify the newborn pain. The outcomes accentuated that the suggested features and classification algorithms can be employed to assist the medical professionals for diagnosing pathological condition of newborn pain.
Improved Localization Algorithms in Indoor Wireless Environment

Localization has been considered as an important precondition for the location-dependent applications such as mobile tracking and navigation.To obtain specific location information, we usually make use of Global Positioning System(GPS), which is the most common platform to acquire localization information in outdoor environments. When targets are in indoor environment, however, the GPS signal is usually blocked, so we also consider other assisted positioning techniques in order to obtain accurate position of targets. In this thesis, three different schemes in indoor environment are proposed to minimize localization error by placing reference nodes in optimum locations, combining the localization information from accelerometer sensor in smartphone with Received Signal Strength (RSS) from reference nodes, and utilizing frequency diversity in Wireless Fidelity (WiFi) environment. Deployments of reference nodes are vital for locating nearby targets since they are used to estimate the distances from them to the targets. A reference nodes’ placement scheme based on minimizing the average mean square error of localization over a certain region is proposed in this thesis first and is applied in different localization regions which are circular, square and hexagonal for illustration of the flexibility of the proposed scheme. Equipped with accelerometer sensor, smartphone provides useful information which outputs accelerations in three different directions. Combining acceleration information from smartphones and signal strength information from reference nodes to prevent the accumulated error from accelerometer is studied in this thesis. The combined locating error is narrowed by assigning different weights to localization information from accelerometer and reference nodes. In indoor environment, RSS technology based localization is the most common way to imply since it require less additional hardware compared to other localization technologies. However, RSS can be affected greatly by complex circumstance as well as carrier frequency. Utilization of diverse frequencies to improve localization performance is proposed in the end of this thesis along with some experiments applied on Software Defined Platform (SDR).
Clonal Interference and the Periodic Selection of New Beneficial Mutations in Escherichia coli

The conventional model of adaptation in asexual populations implies sequential fixation of new beneficial mutations via rare selective sweeps that purge all variation and preserve the clonal genotype. However, in large populations multiple beneficial mutations may co-occur, causing competition among them, a phenomenon called “clonal interference. ” Clonal interference is thus expected to lead to longer fixation times and larger fitness effects of mutations that ultimately become fixed, as well as to a genetically more diverse population. Here, we study the significance of clonal interference in populations consisting of mixtures of differently marked wild-type and mutator strains of Escherichia coli that adapt to a minimal-glucose environment for 400 generations. We monitored marker frequencies during evolution and measured the competitive fitness of random clones from each marker state after evolution. The results demonstrate the presence of multiple beneficial mutations in these populations and slower and more erratic invasion of mutants than expected by the conventional model, showing the signature of clonal interference. We found that a consequence of clonal interference is that fitness estimates derived from invasion trajectories were less than half the magnitude of direct estimates from competition experiments, thus revealing fundamental problems with this fitness measure. These results force a reevaluation of the conventional model of periodic selection for asexual microbes.
Diagnostic and therapeutic consequences of repeat brain imaging and follow-up vascular imaging in stroke patients.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Recently, the diagnostic and therapeutic importance of repeat radiologic imaging in stroke patients has been questioned. The aim of this study was to show the therapeutic and diagnostic consequences of both repeat brain imaging and follow-up vascular imaging in this group of patients. METHODS Neuroradiologic images and reports as well as clinical records of 317 patients (209 men and 108 women; mean age, 63 years) were reviewed retrospectively to determine the number of modifications made to the diagnosis and therapeutic regimen and to the classification of neuroradiologic findings. RESULTS Two hundred thirty-eight repeat imaging procedures were performed in 171 patients. Of these, 76 were vascular imaging examinations (11 CT angiograms, 13 MR angiograms, 52 digital subtraction angiograms) and 162 were cross-sectional brain imaging studies (54 MR images, 108 CT scans). Forty of the 76 vascular imaging procedures and 77 of the 162 repeat cross-sectional brain imaging studies led to important diagnostic modifications with consequences for the patients' therapy and prognosis. CONCLUSION Our study establishes that vascular imaging methods as well as cross-sectional brain imaging used as repeat imaging procedures in stroke patients can have important diagnostic and therapeutic consequences. We believe that repeat imaging in selected subgroups will be cost-effective.
Evidence of the Importance of Nox4 in Production of Hypertension in Dahl Salt-Sensitive Rats

This study reports the consequences of knocking out NADPH (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate) oxidase 4 (Nox4) on the development of hypertension and kidney injury in the Dahl salt-sensitive (SS) rat. Zinc finger nuclease injection of single-cell SS embryos was used to create an 8 base-pair frame-shift deletion of Nox4, resulting in a loss of the ≈68 kDa band in Western blot analysis of renal cortical tissue of the knock out of Nox4 in the SS rat (SSNox4−/−) rats. SSNox4−/− rats exhibited a significant reduction of salt-induced hypertension compared with SS rats after 21 days of 4.0% NaCl diet (134±5 versus 151±3 mm Hg in SS) and a significant reduction of albuminuria, tubular casts, and glomerular injury. Optical fluorescence 3-dimensional cryoimaging revealed significantly higher redox ratios (NADH/FAD [reduced nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide/flavin adenine dinucleotide]) in the kidneys of SSNox4−/− rats even when fed the 0.4% NaCl diet, indicating greater levels of mitochondrial electron transport chain metabolic activity and reduced oxidative stress compared with SS rats. Before the development of hypertension, RNA expression levels of Nox subunits Nox2, p67phox, and p22phox were found to be significantly lower (P<0.05) in SSNox4−/− compared with SS rats in the renal cortex. Thus, the mutation of Nox4 seems to modify transcription of several genes in ways that contribute to the protective effects observed in the SSNox4−/− rats. We conclude that the reduced renal injury and attenuated blood pressure response to high salt in the SSNox4−/− rat could be the result of multiple pathways, including gene transcription, mitochondrial energetics, oxidative stress, and protein matrix production impacted by the knock out of Nox4.
Fabrication and Characterization of Mesoscopic Perovskite Photodiodes

Mesoscopic photodiodes were fabricated with hybrid organic/inorganic perovskite as absorber layer and Spiro-OMeTAD as hole transport Layer. The perovskite layer was grown using a two-step deposition technique. Our photodiode in addition to a good rectification behavior (three orders of magnitude, range -1 to 1 V) shows a small noise current (<; 1 pA/(Hz)1/2), a high responsivity value (0.35 A/W) at 500 nanometers, and a good spectral response in the entire visible range. The Bode analysis shows a bandwidth of 108 KHz.
Epidemics of two Victoria and Yamagata influenza B lineages in Yamagata, Japan

We attempted to predict epidemics of influenza B, focusing on B/Victoria/2/87-like (V) and B/Yamagata/16/88-like (Y) lineages, in Yamagata, Japan. We collected 9624 nasopharyngeal swabs for virus isolation from patients with respiratory infections between 1996 and 2003 and 237 sera for seroepidemiological analysis by haemagglutination–inhibition test in 2001. We isolated 424 V-lineage and 246 Y-lineage viruses during the study period. Three herald viruses in the 2000–2001 season enabled us to predict a V-lineage epidemic in the following season. However, another V-lineage epidemic occurred in the 2002–2003 season, although we caught four herald Y-lineage viruses, whose antigenic drift was suggested by seroepidemiological study, at the end of the previous season. Since the epidemiology of the two influenza B lineages remains unclear, a careful watch should be kept on these lineages in order to provide effective public-health strategies against future epidemics.
Voluntary and evoked behavioral correlates in neuropathic pain states under different social housing conditions

Background There is an urgent need to develop and incorporate novel behavioral tests in classically used preclinical pain models. Most rodent studies are based upon stimulus-evoked hindpaw measurements even though chronic pain is usually a day and night experience. Chronic pain is indeed a debilitating condition that influences the sociability and the ability for voluntary tasks, but the relevant behavioral readouts for these aspects are mostly under-represented in the literature. Moreover, we lack standardization in most behavioral paradigms to guarantee reproducibility and ensure adequate discussion between different studies. This concerns not only the combination, application, and duration of particular behavioral tasks but also the effects of different housing conditions implicating social isolation. Results Our aim was to thoroughly characterize the classically used spared nerve injury model for 12 weeks following surgery. We used a portfolio of classical stimulus-evoked response measurements, detailed gait analysis with two different measuring systems (Dynamic weight bearing (DWB) system and CatWalk), as well as observer-independent voluntary wheel running and home cage monitoring (Laboras system). Additionally, we analyzed the effects of social isolation in all behavioral tasks. We found that evoked hypersensitivity temporally matched changes in static gait parameters, whereas some dynamic gait parameters were changed in a time-dependent manner. Interestingly, voluntary wheel running behavior was not affected in spared nerve injury mice but by social isolation. Besides a reduced climbing activity, spared nerve injury mice did not showed tremendous alterations in the home cage activity. Conclusion This is the first longitudinal study providing detailed insights into various voluntary behavioral parameters related to pain and highlights the importance of social environment on spontaneous non-evoked behaviors in a mouse model of chronic neuropathy. Our results provide fundamental considerations for future experimental planning and discussion of pain-related behavioral changes.
Area/delay estimation for digital signal processor cores

Hardware/software partitioning is one of the key processes in a hardware/software cosynthesis system for digital signal processor cores. In hardware/software partitioning, area and delay estimation of a processor core plays an important role since the hardware/software partitioning process must determine which part of a processor core should be realized by hardware units and which part should be realized by a sequence of instructions based on execution time of an input application program and area of a synthesized processor core. This paper proposes area and delay estimation equations for digital signal processor cores. For area estimation, we show that total area for a processor core can be derived from the sum of area for a processor kernel and area for additional hardware units. Area for a processor kernel can be mainly obtained by minimum area for a processor kernel and overheads for adding hardware units and registers. Area for a hardware unit can be mainly obtained by its type and operation bit width. For delay estimation, we show that critical path delay for a processor core can be derived from the delay of a hardware unit which is on the critical path in the processor core. Experimental results demonstrate that errors of area estimation are less than 2% and errors of delay estimation are less than 2ns when comparing estimated area and delay with logic-synthesized area and delay.
Editorial: Variation in Phase II Metabolism of Sex Steroids – Causes and Consequences

Phase II metabolism, usually known as conjugation reactions, generate metabolites that are, in most cases, biologically inactive and subsequently excreted in bile or urine. Androgenic and estrogenic sex steroids are mainly inactivated by sulfation or glucuronidation by the enzyme families’ sulfotransferases (SULTs) or uridine diphospho glucuronosyltransferases (UGTs). Genetic variations in UGTs and SULTs have been implicated to play a role in hormonedependent diseases and in the outcome for doping test results. Moreover, the use of drugs may interact with UGTs and SULTs and hence affect the phase II metabolism. The aim of this research topic forum was to highlight the progress made in this field via review papers and original articles as well as to promote future research with the aim to further understand the consequences of inter-individual difference in phase II metabolism and regulation
Recognition by Linear Combinations of Models

An approach to visual object recognition in which a 3D object is represented by the linear combination of 2D images of the object is proposed. It is shown that for objects with sharp edges as well as with smooth bounding contours, the set of possible images of a given object is embedded in a linear space spanned by a small number of views. For objects with sharp edges, the linear combination representation is exact. For objects with smooth boundaries, it is an approximation that often holds over a wide range of viewing angles. Rigid transformations (with or without scaling) can be distinguished from more general linear transformations of the object by testing certain constraints placed on the coefficients of the linear combinations. Three alternative methods of determining the transformation that matches a model to a given image are proposed. >
Long-Term Exposure to Outdoor Air Pollution and Incidence of Cardiovascular Diseases

Background: Evidence based largely on US cohorts suggests that long-term exposure to fine particulate matter is associated with cardiovascular mortality. There is less evidence for other pollutants and for cardiovascular morbidity. By using a cohort of 836,557 patients age 40 to 89 years registered with 205 English general practices in 2003, we investigated relationships between ambient outdoor air pollution and incident myocardial infarction, stroke, arrhythmia, and heart failure over a 5-year period. Methods: Events were identified from primary care records, hospital admissions, and death certificates. Annual average concentrations in 2002 for particulate matter with a median aerodynamic diameter <10 (PM10) and <2.5 microns, nitrogen dioxide (NO2), ozone, and sulfur dioxide at a 1 × 1 km resolution were derived from emission-based models and linked to residential postcode. Analyses were performed using Cox proportional hazards models adjusting for relevant confounders, including social and economic deprivation and smoking. Results: While evidence was weak for relationships with myocardial infarction, stroke, or arrhythmia, we found consistent associations between pollutant concentrations and incident cases of heart failure. An interquartile range change in PM10 and in NO2 (3.0 and 10.7 µg/m3, respectively) both produced a hazard ratio of 1.06 (95% confidence interval = 1.01–1.11) after adjustment for confounders. There was some evidence that these effects were greater in more affluent areas. Conclusions: This study of an English national cohort found evidence linking long-term exposure to particulate matter and NO2 with the development of heart failure. We did not, however, replicate associations for other cardiovascular outcomes that have been reported elsewhere.
Living interfaces: the impatient toaster

This paper introduces the Impatient Toaster, a kitchen appliance designed to motivate its owners to eat more often and in regular intervals: After not using it for a while, it signalizes hunger through nervous movements. This project sought to explore life-like behaviour as a means of increasing user's sympathy for everyday objects. We present a prototype that was informally tested with six participants in a situated user test. The results indicate that sympathy and perceived cuteness can arise from life-like movements that, as we propose, represent an object's will of its own. This work is part of a larger series of experiments in the Living Interfaces project, exploring ways in which reduced life-like movements can be beneficial for Human-Machine Interaction.