Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A trajectory clustering approach to crowd flow segmentation in videos

This work proposes a trajectory clustering-based approach for segmenting flow patterns in high density crowd videos. The goal is to produce a pixel-wise segmentation of a video sequence (static camera), where each segment corresponds to a different motion pattern. Unlike previous studies that use only motion vectors, we extract full trajectories so as to capture the complete temporal evolution of each region (block) in a video sequence. The extracted trajectories are dense, complex and often overlapping. A novel clustering algorithm is developed to group these trajectories that takes into account the information about the trajectories' shape, location, and the density of trajectory patterns in a spatial neighborhood. Once the trajectories are clustered, final motion segments are obtained by grouping of the resulting trajectory clusters on the basis of their area of overlap, and average flow direction. The proposed method is validated on a set of crowd videos that are commonly used in this field. On comparison with several state-of-the-art techniques, our method achieves better overall accuracy.
The Association Between Metabolic Syndrome and Colorectal Neoplasm: Systemic Review and Meta-analysis

Background: There has been constant speculation about the association between metabolic syndrome (MetS) and colorectal neoplasia (CN); however, the published results are conflicting. The aims of this study are to conduct a systematic search, and assess the literature to determine the available evidence on the association between these two conditions. Methods: Meta-analysis was conducted based on relevant studies identified through a systematic literature review from PubMed, OvidSP, and Cochrane database during January 1980 to July 2011. A combined analysis was performed, followed by a subgroup analyses stratified by the study design, type of colorectal lesions, and sex. Publication bias was assessed using the Begg and Egger tests and visual inspection of funnel plot. Results: Eighteen studies were included in the final analysis. Overall, MetS was associated with 34% increase in the risk of CN [summary relative risk (RR), 1.34; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.24-1.44]. The association between MetS and CN was found to be statistically significant in separate analysis for both case-control studies (summary RR, 1.58; 95% CI, 1.44-1.73) and cohort studies (summary RR, 1.21; 95% CI, 1.13-1.29). The association remained significant when analyses were restricted by type of colorectal lesions (colorectal cancer: RR, 1.30; 95% CI, 1.18-1.43; colorectal adenoma: RR, 1.37; 95% CI, 1.26-1.49). Further subgroup analysis by sex showed significant association between MetS and CN in both male and female population. Conclusions: Our meta-analysis showed significant association between presence of MetS and CN. These results may help in identifying high-risk individuals at early stage, who might benefit from targeted colorectal cancer screening intervention.
Relationships among Hand Dominance, Competition Success Rankings and Isometric Elbow and Knee Strength in Prepubertal Novice Wrestlers

ABSTRACT This study aims to investigate relationships between hand dominance, competition success rankings and isometric elbow and knee strength in 12 years old male novice wrestlers. For this study, body height, body weight, right and left elbow and knees' isometric flexion and extension strength measurements were taken from 379 voluntary subjects during the talent identification scouting for the Wrestling Education Centers of Turkey in 2002. A lateralization inventory was also applied to determine hand preference of novice wrestlers. To investigate the differences among variables, two-way ANOVA and t-tests were performed while correlation coefficients were also calculated between variables. Results of this study showed that finalists were taller, heavier and stronger than others. Significant strength differences were observed between right and left of elbow and knee joints regardless of handedness. Wrestling success ranking were well correlated with all strength variables not handedness. Right knee flexion strength of right handers was significantly higher than left handers while left handers had a smaller strength differences between right and left side in elbow extension and knee flexion. Although left and right handers had a very similar physical size, left handers had a symmetric strength between right and left side except knee extension while right handers had an asymmetry in all strength variables. In the selection of talented wrestlers, it is impossible to find the successful wrestlers of future by overemphasizing strength instead of psychological predisposition to wrestling and trainability in developmental stages. In sports where both of right and left arm strength have equal importance it seems very important to improve training programs for preventing asymmetric strength development in novice wrestlers.
Modeling Dynamic Role-based Access Constraints using UML

Systematic development of security sensitive software requires that there be a sufficiently expressive linguistic extension to modeling languages. We propose an extension to the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to satisfy this need. Our extensions are to the UML metamodel with a security policy constraint specification and enforcement module, business tasks and a history log for method calls. Using these extensions we show how dynamic access control requirements of an application can be modeled during the design phase.
A cell surface receptor complex for collagen type I recognizes the Arg- Gly-Asp sequence

To isolate collagen-binding cell surface proteins, detergent extracts of surface-iodinated MG-63 human osteosarcoma cells were chromatographed on affinity matrices of either type I collagen- Sepharose or Sepharose carrying a collagen-like triple-helical peptide. The peptide was designed to be triple helical and to contain the sequence Arg-Gly-Asp, which has been implicated as the cell attachment site of fibronectin, vitronectin, fibrinogen, and von Willebrand factor, and is also present in type I collagen. Three radioactive polypeptides having apparent molecular masses of 250 kD, 70 kD, and 30 kD were distinguishable in that they showed affinity toward the collagen and collagen-like peptide affinity columns, and could be specifically eluted from these columns with a solution of an Arg-Gly- Asp-containing peptide, Gly-Arg-Gly-Asp-Thr-Pro. These collagen-binding polypeptides associated with phosphatidylcholine liposomes, and the resulting liposomes bound specifically to type I collagen or the collagen-like peptide but not to fibronectin or vitronectin or heat- denatured collagen. The binding of these liposomes to type I collagen could be inhibited with the peptide Gly-Arg-Gly-Asp-Thr-Pro and with EDTA, but not with a variant peptide Gly-Arg-Gly-Glu-Ser-Pro. We conclude from these data that these three polypeptides are membrane molecules that behave as a cell surface receptor (or receptor complex) for type I collagen by interacting with it through the Arg-Gly-Asp tripeptide adhesion signal. The lack of binding to denatured collagen suggests that the conformation of the Arg-Gly-Asp sequence is important in the recognition of collagen by the receptor complex.
Increasing confidence of protein interactomes using network topological metrics

MOTIVATION Experimental limitations in high-throughput protein-protein interaction detection methods have resulted in low quality interaction datasets that contained sizable fractions of false positives and false negatives. Small-scale, focused experiments are then needed to complement the high-throughput methods to extract true protein interactions. However, the naturally vast interactomes would require much more scalable approaches. RESULTS We describe a novel method called IRAP* as a computational complement for repurification of the highly erroneous experimentally derived protein interactomes. Our method involves an iterative process of removing interactions that are confidently identified as false positives and adding interactions detected as false negatives into the interactomes. Identification of both false positives and false negatives are performed in IRAP* using interaction confidence measures based on network topological metrics. Potential false positives are identified amongst the detected interactions as those with very low computed confidence values, while potential false negatives are discovered as the undetected interactions with high computed confidence values. Our results from applying IRAP* on large-scale interaction datasets generated by the popular yeast-two-hybrid assays for yeast, fruit fly and worm showed that the computationally repurified interaction datasets contained potentially lower fractions of false positive and false negative errors based on functional homogeneity. AVAILABILITY The confidence indices for PPIs in yeast, fruit fly and worm as computed by our method can be found at our website http://www.comp.nus.edu. sg/~chenjin/fpfn.
Exploring the Use of Local Binary Patterns as Focus Measure

In this work local binary patterns based focus measures are presented. Local binary patterns (LBP) have been introduced in computer vision tasks like texture classification or face recognition. In applications where recognition is based on LBP, a computational saving can be achieved with the use of LBP in the focus measures. The behavior of the proposed measures is studied to test if they fulfill the properties of the focus measures and then a comparison with some well know focus measures is carried out in different scenarios.
Japanese Named Entity Recognition Using Structural Natural Language Processing

This paper presents an approach that uses structural information for Japanese named entity recognition (NER). Our NER system is based on Support Vector Machine (SVM), and utilizes four types of structural information: cache features, coreference relations, syntactic features and caseframe features, which are obtained from structural analyses. We evaluated our approach on CRL NE data and obtained a higher F-measure than existing approaches that do not use structural information. We also conducted experiments on IREX NE data and an NE-annotated web corpus and confirmed that structural information improves the performance of NER.
Downregulation of Dendritic HCN Channel Gating in Epilepsy Is Mediated by Altered Phosphorylation Signaling

The onset of spontaneous seizures in the pilocarpine model of epilepsy causes a hyperpolarized shift in the voltage-dependent activation of hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated (HCN) channel-mediated current (Ih) in CA1 hippocampal pyramidal neuron dendrites, contributing to neuronal hyperexcitability and possibly to epileptogenesis. However, the specific mechanisms by which spontaneous seizures cause downregulation of HCN channel gating are yet unknown. We asked whether the seizure-dependent downregulation of HCN channel gating was due to altered phosphorylation signaling mediated by the phosphatase calcineurin (CaN) or the kinase p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (p38 MAPK). We first found that CaN inhibition upregulated HCN channel gating and reduced neuronal excitability under normal conditions, showing that CaN is a strong modulator of HCN channels. We then found that an in vitro model of seizures (1 h in 0 Mg2+ and 50 μm bicuculline at 35–37°C) reproduced the HCN channel gating change seen in vivo. Pharmacological inhibition of CaN or activation of p38 MAPK partially reversed the in vitro seizure-induced hyperpolarized shift in HCN channel gating, and the shift was fully reversed by the combination of CaN inhibition and p38 MAPK activation. We then demonstrated enhanced CaN activity as well as reduced p38 MAPK activity in vivo in the CA1 hippocampal area of chronically epileptic animals. Pharmacological reversal of these phosphorylation changes restored HCN channel gating downregulation and neuronal hyperexcitability in epileptic tissue to control levels. Together, these results suggest that alteration of two different phosphorylation pathways in epilepsy contributes to the downregulation of HCN channel gating, which consequently produces neuronal hyperexcitability and thus may be a target for novel antiepileptic therapies.
We Can Decide What to Play! Children's Perception of Quality in an Icelandic Playschool

The study was conducted with a group of 5 and 6 year old children in one playschool in Reykjavík, Iceland. The purpose of the study was to shed light on what life in an Icelandic playschool is like for the children attending the program, finding out their views on why they attend playschool, what they do and learn in playschool, what the adults do there, what they enjoy and what they don't like, and what they can or cannot decide in playschool. The study used varied research methods, such as group interviews, children's photographs, children's pictures, and a questionnaire using a cardboard game, to discover children's perceptions and opinions. The results of the study revealed that the children had strong opinions about their playschool life and expressed them clearly.
Collection Methods for Salivary Oxytocin Estimation in Autism Spectrum Disorders

Oxytocin participates in the development of normal social bonds and aberrations in this neuroendocrine system have been hypothesized to contribute to behavioral abnormalities associated with autism. Salivary oxytocin level estimation is now gaining popularity in autism research. Multiple collection techniques have been tried in both high as well as low functioning children with autism. In this paper, we discuss the various techniques which have been standardized for salivary sample collection to estimate oxytocin. It will probably help augment the current research findings for use of exogenous oxytocin therapy in children with autism spectrum disorders while downplaying the ethical issues of invasive sample collection techniques for blood and cerebrospinal fluid.
ECIR 2015 Workshop on Gamification for Information Retrieval (GamifIR'15)

The second workshop on Gamification for Information Retrieval took place at ECIR 2015 in Vienna, Austria on the 29th of March. The workshop program included two invited keynote presentations, seven oral presentations of refereed papers, lots of mini discussion sessions and a fishbowl session. The presentations covered diverse topics from playing around with an eye tracker to a game with IR papers and even a game of scientific hangman, generating lively and fun discussions. The workshop was a crowdpinion experiment itself, gathering participants' momentary opinions via an Android app. One of the main themes of the day was the interplay of gamification aspects and incentives, where the key challenge is to align player motivations with the goal of the task. Any misalignment may lead to gamification as a tool being more damaging than useful with users' focus shifting from the task to gaming the system.
Evaluation of contrast sensitivity and other visual function outcomes in diabetic macular edema patients following treatment switch to aflibercept from ranibizumab

Purpose This study aims to investigate changes in contrast sensitivity (CS), visual acuity (VA), central retinal thickness (CRT), and vision-related quality of life in subjects with recalcitrant diabetic macular edema switched from long-term ranibizumab treatment to aflibercept. Patients and methods In this prospective, investigator-masked, single-center study, 40 patients with persistent fluid, despite previous ranibizumab treatment, were switched to aflibercept with 5 consecutive monthly doses. The primary outcome was mean change from baseline to week 20 in Pelli–Robson CS. Secondary outcomes were mean change from baseline in best-corrected VA (BCVA), CRT, and National Eye Institute 25-Item Visual Function Questionnaire score. Results Fifty eyes (baseline VA >6/30) were evaluated. A median of 21.1±11.9 (range 5–55) ranibizumab injections were administered prior to initiation of aflibercept. Mean CS improved from 1.40±0.14 log units at baseline to 1.46±0.15 log units at week 20 (P<0.001). VA improved with mean logarithm of the minimum angle of resolution BCVA of 0.33±0.19 at baseline compared with logarithm of the minimum angle of resolution BCVA of 0.28±0.16 at week 20 (P=0.0016). Mean CRT decreased from 324±85 to 289±61 µm (P<0.001). Twenty-two (55%) patients experienced an overall improvement in National Eye Institute 25-Item Visual Function Questionnaire score. Interestingly, an association was found between changes in CS and change in CRT (r2=0.385, P<0.001) and between changes in BCVA and change in CRT (r2=0.092, P=0.032). Conclusion Switching from ranibizumab to aflibercept in patients with recalcitrant diabetic macular edema resulted in an improvement in all measured metrics, including CS, VA, and CRT. A majority of patients also indicated an improvement in vision-related quality of life. The finding of a stronger relationship between changes in CRT and CS compared with changes in CRT and BCVA suggests that the inclusion of CS as an endpoint may yield a more complete understanding of visual outcomes than that obtained by using VA alone.
Abstracts & Reviews : Social and Biological Aspects of Ethnicity edited by Malcolm Chapman. 1993. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cloth: $42.95 US, $67.50 CAN, ISBN 0-19-852280-0, 134 pages. Oxford Science Publications, Biosocial Society Series No. 4

Events in the world, ranging from civil war to high profile court cases, keep issues of ethnicity in the headlines. More germane to researchers in medicine and anthropology, however, are persistent questions regarding health, psychological functioning, and ethnicity. A fundamental issue in need of further research and analysis is the extent to which observed ethnic differences reflect enduring patterns of social organization that determine unequal access to resources among ethnic groups, versus enduring differences that are a function of the
The Convolution of Dynamics and Moisture with the Presence of Shortwave Absorbing Aerosols over the Southeast Atlantic

AbstractBiomass burning aerosols seasonally overlie the subtropical southeast Atlantic stratocumulus deck. Previous modeling and observational studies have postulated a semidirect effect whereby shortwave absorption by the aerosol warms and stabilizes the lower troposphere, thickening the low-level clouds. The focus herein is on the dynamical and moisture effects that may be convoluted with the semidirect effect. Almost-daily radiosonde data from remote St. Helena Island (15.9°S, 5.6°W), covering September–October 2000–11, are combined with daily spatial averages (encompassing the island) of the MODIS clear-sky fine-mode aerosol optical depth (). Increases in are associated with increases in 750–500-hPa moisture content. The net maximum longwave cooling by moisture of almost 0.45 K day−1 reduces the aerosol layer warming from shortwave absorption. ERA-Interim spatial composites show that polluted conditions are associated with a strengthening of a deep land-based anticyclone over southern Africa, facilita.
Annexin-Phospholipid Interactions. Functional Implications

Annexins constitute an evolutionary conserved multigene protein superfamily characterized by their ability to interact with biological membranes in a calcium dependent manner. They are expressed by all living organisms with the exception of certain unicellular organisms. The vertebrate annexin core is composed of four (eight in annexin A6) homologous domains of around 70 amino acids, with the overall shape of a slightly bent ring surrounding a central hydrophilic pore. Calcium- and phospholipid-binding sites are located on the convex side while the N-terminus links domains I and IV on the concave side. The N-terminus region shows great variability in length and amino acid sequence and it greatly influences protein stability and specific functions of annexins. These proteins interact mainly with acidic phospholipids, such as phosphatidylserine, but differences are found regarding their affinity for lipids and calcium requirements for the interaction. Annexins are involved in a wide range of intra- and extracellular biological processes in vitro, most of them directly related with the conserved ability to bind to phospholipid bilayers: membrane trafficking, membrane-cytoskeleton anchorage, ion channel activity and regulation, as well as antiinflammatory and anticoagulant activities. However, the in vivo physiological functions of annexins are just beginning to be established.
Sulfation-dependent recognition of high endothelial venules (HEV)- ligands by L-selectin and MECA 79, and adhesion-blocking monoclonal antibody

L-selectin is a lectin-like receptor that mediates the attachment of lymphocytes to high endothelial venules (HEV) of lymph nodes during the process of lymphocyte recirculation. Two sulfated, mucin-like glycoproteins known as Sgp50/GlyCAM-1 and Sgp90/CD34 have previously been identified as HEV-associated ligands for L-selectin. These proteins were originally detected with an L-selectin/Ig chimera called LEC-IgG. GlyCAM-1 and CD34 are also recognized by an antiperipheral node addressin (PNAd) mAb called MECA 79, which blocks L-selectin- dependent adhesion and selectively stains lymph node HEV. The present study compares the requirements for the binding of MECA 79 and LEC-IgG to HEV-ligands. Whereas desialylation of GlyCAM-1 and CD34 drastically reduced binding to LEC-IgG, this treatment enhanced the binding of GlyCAM-1 to MECA 79. In contrast, the binding of both MECA 79 and LEC- IgG to GlyCAM-1 and CD34 was greatly decreased when the sulfation of these ligands was reduced with chlorate, a metabolic inhibitor of sulfation. Because MECA 79 stains HEV-like vessels at various sites of inflammation, recognition by L-selectin of ligands outside of secondary lymphoid organs may depend on sulfation. In addition to their reactivity with GlyCAM-1 and CD34, both MECA 79 and LEC-IgG recognize an independent molecule of approximately 200 kD in a sulfate-dependent manner. Thus, this molecule, which we designate Sgp200, is an additional ligand for L-selectin.
Prohibiting Employment Discrimination: Ideas and Politics in the Congressional Debate over Equal Employment Opportunity Legislation

Past analyses of the politics of equal employment opportunity (EEO) legislation focus on the circumstances associated with its passage by Congress. This paper, in contrast, considers how Congress came to agree on the content of today's EEO law, how support for EEO legislation increased from the early 1940s to the early 1970s, and why action on EEO subsequently ceased. The data show that although American society changed a great deal during these years, the congressional debate on EEO was organized around ideas proposed in the 1940s. The growth of support for EEO legislation was steady and gradual over the entire period, and congressional action ceased after 1972 because the original agenda had been completed. The implications of the findings for the causal analysis of congressional action are considered.