Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Rapid Update of Road Surface Databases Using Mobile LiDAR: Road-Markings

Road surface markings are used on paved roadways to provide guidance and information to drivers and pedestrians, which are a critical feature in the traffic management systems. This paper presents an automated approach to detection and extraction of road markings from mobile laser scanning (MLS) point clouds by taking advantages of multiple data features. To improve computational efficiency, the raw MLS point cloud data are first converted to geo-referenced images, based on elevation, intensity and point density, using inverse distance weighted interpolation, respectively. Afterwards, three filters are designed to extract road markings step-by-step: (1) the elevation filter is used to generate an elevation mask to remove high objects from the geo-referenced intensity image, (2) the point density filter is implemented to extract road surfaces in the geo-referenced intensity image, (3) the filtered geo-referenced intensity image is processed by thresholding and point density to obtain road markings, followed by a Canny detector and Hough transform used to extract straight-lines of road markings. Two RIEGL VMX-450 datasets demonstrate that the proposed multi-feature road marking extraction method has a good performance of road marking extraction from a large volume of mobile laser scanning data.
Analysis of the impact of trap-neuter-return programs on populations of feral cats.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate 2 county trap-neuter-return (TNR) programs for feral cat population management via mathematical modeling. DESIGN Theoretical population model. ANIMALS Feral cats assessed from 1992 to 2003 in San Diego County, California (n = 14,452), and from 1998 to 2004 in Alachua County, Florida (11,822). PROCEDURE Data were analyzed with a mathematical Ricker model to describe population dynamics of the feral cats and modifications to the dynamics that occurred as a result of the TNR programs. RESULTS In both counties, results of analyses did not indicate a consistent reduction in per capita growth, the population multiplier, or the proportion of female cats that were pregnant. CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE Success of feral cat management programs that use TNR can be monitored with an easily collected set of data and statistical analyses facilitated by population modeling techniques. Results may be used to suggest possible future monitoring and modification of TNR programs, which could result in greater success controlling and reducing feral cat populations.
Individualized pharmacotherapy with paclitaxel

Purpose of review More than two decades of clinical experience with paclitaxel as an anticancer drug have contributed significantly to the optimization of today's application schemes and patients' safety. Recent knowledge about interindividual pharmacokinetic variability and population modeling provides a novel scientific basis for an improved and individualized therapeutic approach. Recent findings Age, gender and bilirubin levels were shown to be associated with an altered pharmacokinetic profile. Prolonged exposure to paclitaxel concentrations exceeding the thresholds of 0.05 or 0.1 μmol/l were predictive for neutropenia, peripheral neuropathy and survival. Due to substantial interindividual diversity observed in paclitaxel pharmacokinetics actual research focuses on common single nucleotide polymorphisms in genes encoding metabolizing enzymes and drug transporters such as CYP450, P-glycoprotein and the organic anion transporting polypeptide OATP1B3. Polymorphisms of ABCB1 encoding P-glycoprotein were found to be associated with neutropenia and neurotoxicity. A haplotype of CYP3A4 was associated with paclitaxel pharmacokinetics. Summary Several demographic, pharmacokinetic and genetic covariables that have been identified to influence toxicity and tumor responses following chemotherapy with paclitaxel are discussed with regard to their transferability into a bedside approach.
Childhood Emotional and Behavioral Problems and Educational Attainment

Do childhood emotional and behavioral problems diminish the probability of graduating from high school and attending college? If so, are their effects primarily attributable to the persistence of those problems over time, to continuities in social environments, or to the cumulative effects of early academic failures? We provide answers to these questions using data from the Children of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth data set (1986-2000). Internalizing and externalizing problems at ages 6-8 significantly and strongly diminish the probability of receiving a high school degree. Among youth who receive a high school degree, externalizing problems also diminish the probability of subsequent college enrollment. In the case of high school degree receipt, the educational disadvantages associated with child emotional and behavioral problems result from the association of those problems with academic failures in middle and high school. In contrast, the association of childhood behavior problems with college enrollment appears to reflect the persisting effects of early behavioral and academic predispositions. Our results add to a growing body of research that demonstrates that social selection processes contribute to socioeconomic disparities. They also suggest new directions for research concerned with socially-structured, transactional, person-environment interactions.
Assistance dogs provide a useful behavioral model to enrich communicative skills of assistance robots

These studies are part of a project aiming to reveal relevant aspects of human–dog interactions, which could serve as a model to design successful human-robot interactions. Presently there are no successfully commercialized assistance robots, however, assistance dogs work efficiently as partners for persons with disabilities. In Study 1, we analyzed the cooperation of 32 assistance dog–owner dyads performing a carrying task. We revealed typical behavior sequences and also differences depending on the dyads' experiences and on whether the owner was a wheelchair user. In Study 2, we investigated dogs' responses to unforeseen difficulties during a retrieving task in two contexts. Dogs displayed specific communicative and displacement behaviors, and a strong commitment to execute the insoluble task. Questionnaire data from Study 3 confirmed that these behaviors could successfully attenuate owners' disappointment. Although owners anticipated the technical competence of future assistance robots to be moderate/high, they could not imagine robots as emotional companions, which negatively affected their acceptance ratings of future robotic assistants. We propose that assistance dogs' cooperative behaviors and problem solving strategies should inspire the development of the relevant functions and social behaviors of assistance robots with limited manual and verbal skills.
Submillimeter Array Observation of the Proto-Planetary Nebula CRL 618 in the CO J = 6-5 Line

We report on the results of a Submillimeter Array (SMA) interferometric observation of the proto-planetary nebula CRL 618 in the 12CO J = 6-5 line. With the new capability of the SMA enabling us to use two receivers at a time, we also observed simultaneously in the 12CO J = 2-1 and 13CO J = 2-1 lines. The 12CO J = 6-5 and 13CO J = 2-1 lines were interferometrically observed for the first time toward CRL 618. The flux of the high-velocity component of the 12CO J = 6-5 line is almost fully recovered, while roughly 80% of the flux of the low-velocity component is resolved out. The low recovery rate suggests that the emission region of the low-velocity component of the 12CO J = 6-5 line is largely extended. Continuum emission is detected at both 230 and 690 GHz. The flux of the 690 GHz continuum emission seems to be partially resolved out, suggesting that dust emission partly contaminates the 690 GHz continuum flux. The cavity structure, which has been confirmed in a previous observation in the 12CO J = 2-1 line, is not clearly detected in the 12CO J = 6-5 line, and only the south wall of the cavity is detected. This result suggests that the physical condition of the molecular envelope of CRL 618 is not exactly axially symmetric.
A multi-class pattern recognition method for motor imagery EEG data

The Common Spatial Patterns (CSP) algorithm is useful for calculating spatial filters for detecting event-related desynchronization (ERD) for use in ERD-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). However, basic CSP is a supervised algorithm suited only to two-class discrimination; it is unable to solve multiclass discrimination problems. This paper proposes a new method named the binary common spatial patterns (BCSP) algorithm to extend the basic CSP method to multi-class recognition. Our method arranges the spatial filters and Fisher classifiers in the form of a binary tree whereby N - 1 spatial filters and N - 1 Fisher classifiers are calculated for N class recognition. This is fewer than must be calculated in other methods (e.g. one-versus-rest, OVR). This makes the overall classification procedure less redundant. Simulation results show that BCSP has better performance than the OVR scheme and outperforms the three best teams in the 2008 BCI-competition.
Multifunctional Liposomes for Image‐Guided Intratumoral Chemo‐Phototherapy

Intratumoral (IT) drug injections reduce systemic toxicity, but delivered volumes and distribution can be inconsistent. To improve IT delivery paradigms, porphyrin–phospholipid (PoP) liposomes are passively loaded with three hydrophilic cargos: sulforhodamine B, a fluorophore; gadolinium‐gadopentetic acid, a magnetic resonance (MR) agent; and oxaliplatin, a colorectal cancer chemotherapeutic. Liposome composition is optimized so that cargo is retained in serum and storage, but is released in less than 1 min with exposure to near infrared light. Light‐triggered release occurs with PoP‐induced photooxidation of unsaturated lipids and all cargos release concurrently. In subcutaneous murine colorectal tumors, drainage of released cargo is delayed when laser treatment occurs 24 h after IT injection, at doses orders of magnitude lower than systemic ones. Delayed light‐triggering results in substantial tumor shrinkage relative to controls a week following treatment, although regrowth occurs subsequently. MR imaging reveals that over this time frame, pools of liposomes within the tumor migrate to adjacent regions, possibly leading to altered spatial distribution during triggered drug release. Although further characterization of cargo loading and release is required, this proof‐of‐principle study suggests that multimodal theranostic IT delivery approaches hold potential to both guide injections and interpret outcomes, in particular when combined with chemo‐phototherapy.
Inhibition of a model of in vitro granuloma formation by tetracyclines and ciprofloxacin. Involvement of protein kinase C.

BACKGROUND AND DESIGN Granulomatous inflammation is a common component of many diseases. In this study the ability of commonly used antibiotics to inhibit an in vitro model of granuloma formation were studied. The effect of protein kinase C inhibition in this system was also investigated. RESULTS Ampicillin, cephalothin, metronidazole, rifampin, isoniazide, erythromycin, and clindamycin were inactive in inhibiting granuloma formation. Tetracycline, doxycycline, minocycline, and ciprofloxacin produced dose-dependent inhibition of the granuloma model in concentrations between 10(-4) and 10(-6) mol/L. The approximate order of descending potency was doxycycline equals minocycline greater than tetracycline greater than ciprofloxacin. The same drugs were tested for the ability to inhibit protein kinase C. Drugs inactive in the granuloma model had no effect on protein kinase C activity. The tetracyclines and ciprofloxacin all caused a dose-dependent inhibition of protein kinase C activity in the same order of relative potency as was found for inhibition of granuloma formation. CONCLUSIONS These data demonstrate a previously unappreciated activity of the tetracyclines and ciprofloxacin. Inhibition of granuloma formation helps to account for the activity of these drugs in the severest forms of inflammatory acne.
A CADAVERIC STUDY OF NORMAL AND VARIANT LEVELS OF DIVISION OF SCIATIC NERVE AND COUPLED ANOMALIES WITH CLINICAL APPLICATION IN SURGICAL INTERVENTIONS

Address for Correspondence: Dr. Pooja Rani, Assistant Professor, Department of Anatomy, PGIMS, Rohtak, Haryana, India. Phone. +919910148979, +919034048979 and +919811370044 E-Mail: drpooja0912@yahoo.com and net31aug@yahoo.co.in *1 Assistant Professor, Department of Anatomy, PGIMS, Rohtak, Haryana, India. 2 Associate Professor, Department of Anatomy, UCMS & GTB Hospital, Delhi, India. Background: Sciatic nerve, the thickest and the largest nerve of the body, is formed in the pelvis. After passing through the greater sciatic foramen, it enters the gluteal region, and subsequently the nerve passes on the back of thigh to reach the superior angle of popliteal fossa where it bifurcates into tibial and common fibular nerves. It usually divides into its terminal branches outside the pelvis; however it may rarely divide within the pelvis. In such cases, the tibial nerve and the common fibular nerve may leave the pelvis through different routes. The knowledge of different routes of exits of the sciatic nerve is of utmost importance for the surgeons and the interventionists dealing with this region as this is the site of innumerable surgical manipulations as well as nerve injuries during deep intramuscular injections in gluteal region, failed sciatic nerve block in anaesthesia and injury during posterior hip surgeries. These variations may result in non-discogenic sciatica because of the nerve compressions under other adjacent anatomic structures. Purpose of the study: This study is an attempt to analyse the course, distribution and levels of the division of sciatic nerve into tibial nerve and common fibular nerve and their clinical implications. Results: Out of the total 120 lower limbs studied, deviation from the usual described pattern was observed in four limbs. One cadaver showed bilateral variation while other two described unilateral disparity from the standard prototype. Conclusion: This knowledge of variant anatomy of division and course of sciatic nerve and its terminal branches will not only assist surgeons to take care during interventions, but also facilitate to plan accordingly during various surgical procedures and management.
The Mate Workbench - a tool for annotating XML corpora

This paper describes the design and implementation of the MATE workbench, a program which provides support for ﬂexible display and editing of XML annotations, and complex querying of a set of linked ﬁles. The workbench was designed to support the annotation of XML coded linguistic corpora, but it could be used to annotate any kind of data, as it is not dependent on any particular annotation scheme. Rather than being a general purpose XML-aware editor it is a system for writing specialised editors tailored to a particular annotation task. A particular editor is deﬁned using a transformation language, with suitable display formats and allowable editing operations. The workbench is written in Java, which means that it is platform-independent. This paper outlines the design of the workbench software and compares it with other annotation programs.
Person perception in childhood and adolescence

Prior to the early 1970s little was known about how children viewed others. Previous research had focused on the types of thoughts children had about others, rather than how they arrived at and how to categorize these impressions. Additionally, it was assumed that understanding the development of impression formation in childhood would prove useful for understanding impression formation in adulthood.
An instance selection approach to Multiple instance Learning

Multiple-instance learning (MIL) is a new paradigm of supervised learning that deals with the classification of bags. Each bag is presented as a collection of instances from which features are extracted. In MIL, we have usually confronted with a large instance space for even moderately sized data sets since each bag may contain many instances. Hence it is important to design efficient instance pruning and selection techniques to speed up the learning process without compromising on the performance. In this paper, we address the issue of instance selection in multiple instance learning and propose the IS-MIL, an instance selection framework for MIL, to tackle large-scale MIL problems. IS-MIL is based on an alternative optimisation framework by iteratively repeating the steps of instance selection/updating and classifier learning, which is guaranteed to converge. Experimental results demonstrate the utility and efficiency of the proposed approach compared to the alternatives.
User comments to video instructions : the effects of Kanmaku on usability, motivation and self-efficacy

Purpose:Kanmaku refers to displaying comments in videos, which gives those helpful messages hidden in comments a better chance to be seen by users. The purpose of this research is to find out kanmaku’s influence on usability, motivation and self-efficacy, compared to traditional comments and no comments. Method: Sixty college students volunteered in this study. Participants were divided into three groups, each operated with video instructions with no comments, traditional comments or kanmaku. They were asked to finish a task, a questionnaire and a retention test. Results:Figure indicates that on effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction, no significant difference were found among three groups. However, on self-efficacy, kanmaku yielded significantly better results. And on motivation in general, traditional comments worked better significantly. Conclusion:This research shows that on self-efficacy, kanmaku has the biggest advantage. Meanwhile, on attention, kanmaku performed the worst. Further studies need to beconducted on kanmaku with more other features.
A Systematic Review of Online Deliberation Research

This article takes stock of the growing field of online deliberation research. Our review of the theoretical and empirical findings is guided by a framework encompassing the three relevant components of deliberation: the institutional design that enables and fosters deliberation (institutional input: “design”), the quality of the communication process (communicative throughput: “process”), and the expected results of deliberation (productive outcome: “results”). Our findings show that scholarly attention is unevenly distributed across the different components of the framework. Most research has focused on the quality of the online discussion (process). A fair amount of research has focused on the institutional conditions fostering deliberation (design), while the outcomes of online deliberation processes (results) have mostly been neglected. This picture is repeated in terms of the causal relations between design, process, and results of deliberation: Most studies have dealt with the effects of the platform design on the degree of deliberation (design-process). Much less is known about how the process of deliberation shapes the outcomes of deliberation (process-results). Studies investigating all three aspects of deliberation and their causal links (design-process-results) are particularly rare.
On the role of context and prosody in the interpretation of ‘okay’

We examine the effect of contextual and acoustic cues in the disambiguation of three discourse-pragmatic functions of the word okay. Results of a perception study show that contextual cues are stronger predictors of discourse function than acoustic cues. However, acoustic features capturing the pitch excursion at the right edge of okay feature prominently in disambiguation, whether other contextual cues are present or not.
Negativity Bias in Consumer Price Response to Ethical Information

The increasing debate on corporate ethics raises the question of whether consumers are willing to reward and punish corporate behaviour based on its ethicality. In this context, this article investigates the direct effect on consumers' willingness to pay. Price response to product-related ethical information is explored in an experiment dealing with social issues in sportswear and environmental issues in consumer electronics. It is shown that in both areas, consumers demonstrate an increased willingness to pay for ethically produced goods. However, the response is subject to a negativity bias. In contrast to prior research that used abstract stimulus measures, a ratio for quantifying this bias is suggested based on consumers' willingness to pay and their price expectations. This measure allows us to analyse a consumer's individual bias.
Compartmentation of Redox Metabolism in Malaria Parasites

Malaria, caused by the apicomplexan parasite Plasmodium, still represents a major threat to human health and welfare and leads to about one million human deaths annually. Plasmodium is a rapidly multiplying unicellular organism undergoing a complex developmental cycle in man and mosquito – a life style that requires rapid adaptation to various environments. In order to deal with high fluxes of reactive oxygen species and maintain redox regulatory processes and pathogenicity, Plasmodium depends upon an adequate redox balance. By systematically studying the subcellular localization of the major antioxidant and redox regulatory proteins, we obtained the first complete map of redox compartmentation in Plasmodium falciparum. We demonstrate the targeting of two plasmodial peroxiredoxins and a putative glyoxalase system to the apicoplast, a non-photosynthetic plastid. We furthermore obtained a complete picture of the compartmentation of thioredoxin- and glutaredoxin-like proteins. Notably, for the two major antioxidant redox-enzymes – glutathione reductase and thioredoxin reductase – Plasmodium makes use of alternative-translation-initiation (ATI) to achieve differential targeting. Dual localization of proteins effected by ATI is likely to occur also in other Apicomplexa and might open new avenues for therapeutic intervention.
Effects of long-term adrenalectomy on periovulatory increases in serum gonadotrophins and ovulation in rats.

The effects of chronic adrenalectomy on the oestrous cycle, periovulatory gonadotrophin surges in sera and ovulation in the rat were assessed. Rats which were exposed to a 14 h light : 10 h darkness lighting schedule for at least 3 weeks and those which showed at least two consecutive 4 day oestrous cycles were divided into three groups. One group (controls) was left untreated. The rest were adrenalectomized (ADX) or sham-adrenalectomized (Sham) during oestrus and then placed in a different animal room with the same lighting schedule but with the onset and end of the photoperiod delayed by 4 h. These operations did not interrupt the length of the oestrous cycles. Rats were decapitated for collection of trunk blood on the fifth pro-oestrous or oestrous day after the operation. Both Sham and ADX rats synchronized to the new lighting schedule in terms of the temporal patterns of their periovulatory surges in serum LH and FSH and the timing of ovulation. Neither adrenalectomy nor the sham-operation altered the magnitude of the pro-oestrous or oestrous increases in serum LH or FSH when compared with those in control rats. Body, uterine and ovarian weights as well as the number of ova shed were similar in the ADX and Sham groups. The results indicate that adrenal secretions are not necessary for rats to synchronize the timing of the periovulatory surges in serum LH and FSH or ovulation to a 14 h light : 10 h darkness schedule and the periovulatory surges of LH and FSH are unaltered in chronically adrenalectomized rats.