Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Experimental Evaluation of Impulsive Ultrasonic Intra-Body Communications for Implantable Biomedical Devices

Biomedical systems of miniaturized implantable sensors and actuators interconnected in an intra-body area network could enable revolutionary clinical applications. Given the well-understood limitations of radio frequency (RF) propagation in the human body, in our previous work we investigated the use of ultrasonic waves as an alternative physical carrier of information, and proposed Ultrasonic WideBand (UsWB), an ultrasonic multipath-resilient integrated physical and medium access control (MAC) layer protocol. In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of a software-defined testbed architecture for ultrasonic intra-body area networks, and propose the first experimental demonstration of the feasibility of ultrasonic communications in tissue mimicking materials. We first discuss in detail our FPGA-based prototype implementation of UsWB. We then demonstrate how the prototype can flexibly trade performance off for power consumption, and achieve, for bit error rates (BER) no higher than <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$10^{-6}$</tex-math><alternatives><inline-graphic xlink:href="santagati-ieq1-2561277.gif"/> </alternatives></inline-formula>, either (i) high-data rate transmissions up to <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$700\mathrm{kbit/s}$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:href="santagati-ieq2-2561277.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> at a transmit power of <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$-14\mathrm{dBm}$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:href="santagati-ieq3-2561277.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\approx 40\mathrm{\mu W}$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:href="santagati-ieq4-2561277.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>), or (ii) low-data rate and lower-power transmissions down to <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$-21\mathrm{dBm}$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:href="santagati-ieq5-2561277.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\approx 8\mathrm{\mu W}$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:href="santagati-ieq6-2561277.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>) at <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$70\mathrm{kbit/s}$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:href="santagati-ieq7-2561277.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>. We demonstrate that the UsWB MAC protocol allows multiple transmitter-receiver pairs to coexist and dynamically adapt the transmission rate according to channel and interference conditions to maximize throughput while satisfying predefined reliability constraints. We also show how UsWB can be used to enable a video monitoring medical application for implantable devices. Finally, we propose (and validate through experiments) a statistical model of small-scale fading for the ultrasonic intra-body channel.
beta-peptide immunization: a possible new treatment for Alzheimer disease.

Research on the pathophysiological characteristics of Alzheimer disease (AD) over the past decade has been directed toward the ultimate goal of developing a disease-modifying treatment to control or prevent the disease. A report recently published in Nature 1 describes for the first time a treatment that may both prevent and treat the progression of Alzheimer disease. The treatment ironically involves immunization with the pathological β-amyloid peptide itself to generate an immune response targeted against the amyloid plaques in the brain. These findings have raised a number of scientific and clinical questions that are discussed below.
ALTERED RESPONSE TO GRAVITY Is a Peripheral Membrane Protein That Modulates Gravity-Induced Cytoplasmic Alkalinization and Lateral Auxin Transport in Plant Statocytes Article, publication date, and citation information can be found at www.plantcell.org/cgi/doi/10.1105/tpc.015560.

ARG1 (ALTERED RESPONSE TO GRAVITY) is required for normal root and hypocotyl gravitropism. Here, we show that targeting ARG1 to the gravity-perceiving cells of roots or hypocotyls is sufficient to rescue the gravitropic defects in the corresponding organs of arg1-2 null mutants. The cytosolic alkalinization of root cap columella cells that normally occurs very rapidly upon gravistimulation is lacking in arg1-2 mutants. Additionally, vertically grown arg1-2 roots appear to accumulate a greater amount of auxin in an expanded domain of the root cap compared with the wild type, and no detectable lateral auxin gradient develops across mutant root caps in response to gravistimulation. We also demonstrate that ARG1 is a peripheral membrane protein that may share some subcellular compartments in the vesicular trafficking pathway with PIN auxin efflux carriers. These data support our hypothesis that ARG1 is involved early in gravitropic signal transduction within the gravity-perceiving cells, where it influences pH changes and auxin distribution. We propose that ARG1 affects the localization and/or activity of PIN or other proteins involved in lateral auxin transport.
MULTIPHASE DEBRIS FLOW SIMULATIONS WITH THE DISCRETE ELEMENT METHOD COUPLED WITH A LATTICE-BOLTZMANN FLUID

Debris flows are dangerous natural hazards that occur mainly in mountainous terrains after heavy rainfall, responsible for casualties and damages reported yearly worldwide. Their heterogeneous composition, with a viscoplastic fluid and the presence of a relevant granular solid phase, leads to a non-trivial behaviour making them a challenging problem both for the physical description of the phenomena and for the design of effective protection measures. A numerical model is developed, fully coupling the two phases. A Discrete Element approach is used for the description of the solid phase, with a realistic particle size distribution, while the fluid phase is solved with a Lattice-Boltzmann Method. The effect of shape on the rolling mechanism is included with a simplified model, as well as the effects of non-Newtonian rheology and the presence of a free surface. The numerical results provide insight into complex segregation, transportation and sedimentation phenomena, essential for understanding and predicting the run-out mechanism of debris avalanches and their interaction with obstacles and retaining structures.
Identifying Prominent Life Events on Twitter

Social media is a common place for people to post and share digital reflections of their life events, including major events such as getting married, having children, graduating, etc. Although the creation of such posts is straightforward, the identification of events on online media remains a challenge. Much research in recent years focused on extracting major events from Twitter, such as earthquakes, storms, and floods. This paper however, targets the automatic detection of personal life events, focusing on five events that psychologists found to be the most prominent in people lives. We define a variety of features (user, content, semantic and interaction) to capture the characteristics of those life events and present the results of several classification methods to automatically identify these events in Twitter. Our proposed classification methods obtain results between 0.84 and 0.92 F1-measure for the different types of life events. A novel contribution of this work also lies in a new corpus of tweets, which has been annotated by using crowdsourcing and that constitutes, to the best of our knowledge, the first publicly available dataset for the automatic identification of personal life events from Twitter.
Clinical Profile of Cognitive Decline in Patients with Parkinson's Disease, Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, and Multiple System Atrophy

ABSTRACT Background: There are very less data on the comparison between the cognitive profile in Parkinson's disease (PD) and Parkinson's-plus groups, especially in India. Aims: The aim of this study is to compare the cognitive profile across PD, progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), and multiple system atrophy (MSA) groups and compare them using Mini–Mental State Examination (MMSE), frontal assessment battery (FAB), and verbal fluency tests. Settings and Design: This was a cross-sectional study. Materials and Methods: MMSE, FAB, and verbal fluency tests were administered in a total of 73 patients constituting 22 patients in MSA, 26 patients in PD, and 25 patients in PSP group, respectively. Twenty-six participants both age- and gender-matched were enrolled in control group. Statistical Analysis: Statistical analysis was done using SPSS Version 20.0. Descriptive statistics were done to find out the mean and standard deviation of different variables. ANOVA was done for followed by post hoc Bonferroni test to assess the cognitive function in three groups. Results: ANOVA showed that there is a significant difference for MMSE scores (P = 0.038) being worse scores for PSP and maximum for MSA. A significant difference was found for FAB scores within three groups. There is a significant difference for FAB scores (P = 0.00003) being worse scores for PSP and highest scores obtained for PD. All the subtests of FAB test differed significantly except motor programming across MSA, PSP, and PD groups. Conclusions: Our data suggest that global cognitive impairment and executive dysfunction are worst in PSP among the three groups. Patients with MSA had significant cognitive decline as opposed to previous experience. FAB scores and verbal fluency tests are good tests to assess cognitive impairment in these diseases. Subsets of FAB score have significant differences but cannot help differentiating conclusively between these three diseases.
Active Cost-Sensitive Learning

For many classification tasks a large number of instances available for training are unlabeled and the cost associated with the labeling process varies over the input space. Meanwhile, virtually all these problems require classifiers that minimize a nonuniform loss function associated with the classification decisions (rather than the accuracy or number of errors). For example, to train pattern classification models for a network intrusion detection task, experts need to analyze network events and assign them labels. This can be a very costly procedure if the instances to be labeled are selected at random. In the meantime, the loss associated with mislabeling an intrusion is much higher than the loss associated with the opposite error (i.e., labeling a legal event as being an intrusion). As a result, to address these types of tasks, practitioners need tools that minimize the total cost computed as a sum of the cost of labeling and the loss associated with the decisions. This paper describes an approach for addressing this problem.
Phospholipid environment alters hormone-sensitivity of the purified insulin receptor kinase.

Insulin receptor kinase, affinity-purified by adsorption and elution from immobilized insulin, is stimulated 2-3-fold by insulin in detergent solution. Reconstitution of the receptor kinase into leaky vesicles containing phosphatidylcholine and phosphatidylethanolamine (1:1, w/w) by detergent removal on Sephadex G-50 results in the complete loss of receptor kinase sensitivity to activation by insulin. Insulin receptors in these vesicles also exhibit an increase in their apparent affinity for 125I-insulin (Kd = 0.12 nM versus 0.76 nM). Inclusion of 8.3-16.7% phosphatidylserine into the reconstituted vesicles restores 40-50% of the insulin-sensitivity to the receptor kinase. An elevated apparent affinity for 125I-insulin of insulin receptors in vesicles containing phosphatidylcholine and phosphatidylethanolamine is also restored to the value observed in detergent solution by the inclusion of phosphatidylserine in the reconstituted system. The effect of phosphatidylserine on insulin receptor kinase appears specific, because cholesterol, phosphatidylinositol and phosphatidic acid are all unable to restore insulin-sensitivity to the receptor kinase. Autophosphorylation sites on the insulin receptor as analysed by h.p.l.c. of tryptic 32P-labelled receptor phosphopeptides are not different for insulin receptors autophosphorylated in detergent solution or for the reconstituted vesicles in the presence or absence of phosphatidylserine. These data indicate that the phospholipid environment of insulin receptors can modulate its binding and kinase activity, and phosphatidylserine acts to restore insulin-sensitivity to the receptor kinase incorporated into phosphatidylcholine/phosphatidylethanolamine vesicles.
The Metapsychology of Pleasure

FEUD’S THEORIES OF PLEASURE have ‘been criticized more persistently, and perhaps with more justification, than any other F segment of his metapsychology. In a representative statement, Szasz maintains that Freud’s account of unpleasurable affects is more mature than his theory of pleasure, because the former have been explained in terms of “ego functions, signals, and communications,” whereas “our understanding of pleasure has remained rooted in physiological and id-oriented concepts” (1957, pp. 206207). Although this criticism has some validity when it is applied to the systematized assertions of early psychoanalytic theory, it is not entirely accurate to state that the psychoanalytic conception of pleasure “has remained rooted” in Freud’s early speculations. Not only did Freud himself offer compelling theories to account for the various manifestations of the experience of pleasure, but the psychoanalytic ego and id psychologists also have supplemented and provided a balance for Freud’s views with theoretically consistent conceptualizations of pleasure, often derived from unsystematized suggestions made by Freud himself. The main contention of criticisms of the psychoanalytic theory of pleasure is that it explains only entropic or homeostatic pleasure (tension reduction) and cannot account for “effectance” or “selfactualizing” pleasure (tension maintenance or increase). We shall attempt to demonstrate that the phenomenon of effectance or “stimulatory” pleasure constitutes no contradiction of the theory, but can be explained within the conceptual framework proposed by Rapaport and Gill (1959), according to which psychoanalytic
Detecting the violation of variance homogeneity in mixed models

Mixed-effects models are increasingly used in many areas of applied science. Despite their popularity, there is virtually no systematic approach for examining the homogeneity of the random-effects covariance structure commonly assumed for such models. We propose two tests for evaluating the homogeneity of the covariance structure assumption across subjects: one is based on the covariance matrices computed from the fitted model and the other is based on the empirical variation computed from the estimated random effects. We used simulation studies to compare performances of the two tests for detecting violations of the homogeneity assumption in the mixed-effects models and showed that they were able to identify abnormal clusters of subjects with dissimilar random-effects covariance structures; in particular, their removal from the fitted model might change the signs and the magnitudes of important predictors in the analysis. In a case study, we applied our proposed tests to a longitudinal cohort study of rheumatoid arthritis patients and compared their abilities to ascertain whether the assumption of covariance homogeneity for subject-specific random effects holds.
Optimal-time adaptive strong renaming, with applications to counting

We give two new randomized algorithms for strong renaming, both of which work against an adaptive adversary in asynchronous shared memory. The first uses repeated sampling over a sequence of arrays of decreasing size to assign unique names to each of n processes with step complexity O(log3 n). The second transforms any sorting network into a strong adaptive renaming protocol, with an expected cost equal to the depth of the sorting network. Using an AKS sorting network, this gives a strong adaptive renaming algorithm with step complexity O(log k), where k is the contention in the current execution. We show this to be optimal based on a classic lower bound of Jayanti. We also show that any such strong renaming protocol can be used to build a monotone-consistent counter with logarithmic step complexity (at the cost of adding a max register) or a linearizable fetch-and-increment register (at the cost of increasing the step complexity by a logarithmic factor).
What health consumers want from online resources.

'. ing with pat ients and consumers . These days, data suggest that heal th care providers who ignore the Internet will, in turn, be ignored by consumers. The Internet is the newest tool for empowering health care consumers. Eighty-six percent of adult American Internet users have gone online in search of health and medical information. More Americans now turn to the Web for health and medical information than for sports scores, investment information, or shopping. With 67 percent of American adults online, the Internet has a tremendous influence on the way people interact with their doctors and hospitals. ' Hospitals today have an incredible opportunity to embrace the online health care movement and provide better service to patients while improving how they operate. To do this, however, health care executives and planners must have a thorough understanding of why consumers arc going online and what to provide at their facility's website. Last November, the Pew Foundation published a groundbreaking study titled 'Yin Online Health Care Revolution: How the Web Helps Americans Take Better Care of Tfjemselves. This report provides a comprehensive look at the interests and issues of those who go online in search of health and medical information and services. Following arc important trends noted in the study in the behaviors of online health consumers. (Unless otherwise noted, all data cited are from the 1'ew Foundation study.)
Speaker Recognition for Multi-Source Single-Channel Recordings

— We have applied speaker recognition algorithms to the problem of speaker classification in multi-source (multiple speakers) of speech signals recorded on a single channel (one microphone). The goal is to separate the speakers in a single-channel recording by classifying short time frames of the recording as one of the speakers. We have evaluated three different supervised learning techniques commonly used in the speaker recognition: non-negative matrix factorization, vector quantization, and Gaussian mixture models. The feature space of the first technique is the spectrogram representation of speech signals, whereas the last two are based on mel-frequency cepstral coefficients. Initially, we compared these techniques based on the classification error rate for a designed recording. Then, we selected the best-performing technique and applied it to noisy recordings of seven speakers in a teleconference meeting.
X-ray and optical characterization of the metal-dielectric structures based on synthetic opals

Composite materials based on dielectrics with metal inclusions are of a great interest for nanoplasmonics, photonics and nonlinear optics. They are also prospective as bio-optical sensors which can amplify weak signals from single molecules. Raman scattering of single molecules placed on metal-dielectric substrate is accompanied by an increase in the scattering cross section in more than 1014 times [1,2]. It is due to the localized surface plasmon resonance in metal nanoparticles. It is well-known as the surface enhanced Raman scattering (abbreviated by SERS) observed with a participation of such metals as gold, silver and copper, as a rule.
Dinitroaniline Activity in Toxoplasma gondii Expressing Wild-Type or Mutant α-Tubulin

ABSTRACT The human parasite Toxoplasma gondii is sensitive to dinitroaniline compounds which selectively disrupt microtubules in diverse protozoa but which have no detectable effect on vertebrate host cell microtubules or other functions. Replication of wild-type T. gondii is inhibited by 0.5 to 2.5 μM oryzalin, but mutant parasites harboring amino acid substitutions in the predicted dinitroaniline binding site confer resistance up to 40 μM oryzalin. However, the precise interaction between dinitroanilines and the binding site in α-tubulin remains unclear. We have investigated the activity of 12 dinitroanilines and the related compound amiprophos methyl on wild-type and dinitroaniline-resistant parasite lines that contain proposed binding site mutations. These data indicate that dinitramine is the most effective dinitroaniline to inhibit Toxoplasma growth in wild-type parasites and most resistant lines. Dinitramine has an amine group at the meta position not present in any of the other dinitroanilines tested here that is predicted to form hydrogen bonds with residues Arg2 and Gln133 according to docking data. Remarkably, although the binding site mutation Ile235Val confers increased resistance to most dinitroanilines, it confers increased sensitivity to GB-II-5, a compound optimized for activity against kinetoplastid tubulin. Kinetoplastid parasites have a valine at position 235 of α-tubulin, whereas apicomplexan parasites have an isoleucine at this site. We suggest that this heterogeneity in binding site environment influences relative dinitroaniline sensitivity in distinct protozoan lineages and hypothesize that a mutation that makes the apicomplexan dinitroaniline binding site more like the kinetoplastid site increases sensitivity to a dinitroaniline optimized for activity in the latter parasites.
Towards Integrating Aspects and Components

The integration of AOSD and CBSD is a complex task that can be subdivided into three facets. 1. Facet 1 consists in componentizing aspects. That means representing each aspect as a single reusable component. Basic characteristics of a component include attributes, provided and required services. The challenge is to map these characteristics on aspects. We have also to explore the applicability of related concept such as connector, composite and sub-component on aspects. 2. Facet 2 consists in aspectizing a componentbased software. Nowadays, AOSD is used in conjunction with object oriented or procedural languages. Base code is expressed using either an object oriented language or a procedural one. The second facet allows extending this list with component based languages. Set differently, the second facet consists in defining aspects that act on base code expressed in terms of components and related concepts. In this context, we have to define weaving and join points on execution flow and structure of components and related concepts. It is worth noting that there is a variety of component models. Thus, redefinition of AOSD concepts will certainly vary according to the model used to implement base code. A solution proposed for a flat component model (i.e. a model without composite concept) will probably not be applicable to a hierarchical model (i.e. a model with composite concept). However, we believe that some solutions
Mussel shells of Mytilus edulis as bioarchives of the rare earth elements and yttrium distribution in seawater and the potential impact of pH and temperature on the partitioning behaviour

in seawater. We present a new protocol for sample preparation and determination of REY concentrations in bivalve shells, that includes sample treatment with NaOCl followed by REY separation and preconcentration. The data obtained was further used to calculate REY partition coefficients between shells of M. edulis and ambient seawater, and acquired results were then used in the investigation of the potential effects of pH 10
PEACE. Beispiel einer anwendungsorientierten Βetriebssystemstruktur

PEACE Example of an Application Oriented Operating System Structure The concept of program families, taken as a basis for the operating system PEACE, offers a good foundation to enable application oriented behavior. This word explains the family concept and its usage for PEACE. Besides, the adaptivity of the system is illustrated which realizes the application orientedness, as well as some specialized functionality areas of the operating system.