Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Devnagari Handwriting Recognition System using Dynamic Time Warping Algorithm

Online handwriting recognition is gaining renewed interest owing to the increase of pen computing applications and new pen input devices. The recognition of Devnagari characters is different from western handwriting recognition and poses a special challenge. This paper is an overview of the technical status and the development in online Devnagari recognition system which starts few years back. The objective of this paper is to develop a system which can recognize a handwritten Devnagari character, written with the help of stylus or a digital pen. To develop the system, dynamic time warping (DTW) technique is considered. In dynamic time warping the entered character is processed in terms of time sequences x and y as a function of time. The time sequence of the character to be recognized is compared with that of all the characters stored in a code file. The distance between them is calculated. The character from the code file which gives minimum distance is considered as the recognized character. In order to improve the recognition rate, along with DTW algorithm, additional feature vectors can be used. In this paper, line extraction algorithm is developed.
Understanding passive and active service discovery

Increasingly, network operators do not directly operate computers on their network, yet are responsible for assessing network vulnerabilities to ensure compliance with policies about information disclosure, and tracking services that affect provisioning. Thus, with decentralized network management, service discovery becomes an important part of maintaining and protecting computer networks. We explore two approaches to service discovery: active probing and passive monitoring. Active probing finds all services currently on the network, except services temporarily unavailable or hidden by firewalls; however, it is often too invasive, especially if used across administrative boundaries. Passive monitoring can find transient services, but misses services that are idle. We compare the accuracy of passive and active approaches to service discovery and show that they are complimentary, highlighting the need for multiple active scans coupled with long-duration passive monitoring. We find passive monitoring is well suited for quickly finding popular services, finding servers responsible for 99% of incoming connections within minutes. Active scanning is better suited to rapidly finding all servers, which is important for vulnerability detection - one scan finds 98% of services in two hours, missing only a handful. External scans are an unexpected ally to passive monitoring, speeding service discovery by the equivalent of 9-15 days of additional observation. Finally, we show how the use of static or dynamic addresses changes the effectiveness of service discovery, both due to address reuse and VPN effects.
Dynamics of the Toxoplasma gondii inner membrane complex

ABSTRACT Unlike most cells, protozoa in the phylum Apicomplexa divide by a distinctive process in which multiple daughters are assembled within the mother (schizogony or endodyogeny), using scaffolding known as the inner membrane complex (IMC). The IMC underlies the plasma membrane during interphase, but new daughters develop in the cytoplasm, as cytoskeletal filaments associate with flattened membrane cisternae (alveolae), which elongate rapidly to encapsulate subcellular organelles. Newly assembled daughters acquire their plasma membrane as they emerge from the mother, leaving behind vestiges of the maternal cell. Although the maternal plasma membrane remains intact throughout this process, the maternal IMC disappears – is it degraded, or recycled to form the daughter IMC? Exploiting fluorescently tagged IMC markers, we have used live-cell imaging, fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP) and mEos2 photoactivation to monitor the dynamics of IMC biogenesis and turnover during the replication of Toxoplasma gondii tachyzoites. These studies reveal that the formation of the T. gondii IMC involves two distinct steps – de novo assembly during daughter IMC elongation within the mother cell, followed by recycling of maternal IMC membranes after the emergence of daughters from the mother cell.
Comparative Study of the Reduction Process of Different Ring Structured Nitroxyl Spin Probes: An Electron Spin Resonance Study

Electron spin resonance spectroscopy (ESR) studies on the reduction process of nitroxyl spin probes were carried out for 1mM concentration of 14N-labeled pyrrolidine nitroxyl spin probes, 3-carbamoyl-2,2,5,5-tetramethyl-pyrrolidine-1-oxyl (carbamoyl-PROXYL) and 3-carboxy-2,2,5,5-tetramethyl-pyrrolidine -1-oxyl (carboxy-PROXYL), 14N-labeled piperidine nitroxyl spin probes, 4-methoxy-2,2,6,6-tetramethyl-piperidine-1-oxyl (methoxy-TEMPO) and 4-acetamido-2,2,6,6-tetramethyl-piperidine-1-oxyl (acetamido-TEMPO) in 1 mM concentration of ascorbic acid as a function of time. The half-life time and decay rate were estimated. The piperidine nitroxyl spin probes show a short half-life time compared with that of pyrrolidine nitroxyl spin probes. This result indicates that the higher stability of pyrrolidine nitroxyl spin probes. The ESR was also recorded for 1mM concentration of pyrrolidine nitroxyl spin probes and piperidine nitroxyl spin probes in pure water using X-band ESR spectrometer. The ESR parameters such as line width, hyperfine coupling constant, g-factor, signal intensity ratio and rotational correlation time were determined. These results indicate that the pyrrolidine nitroxyl spin probes have narrow line width and fast tumbling compared with the piperidine nitroxyl spin probes. Therefore, this study reveals that the pyrrolidine nitroxyl spin probes can act as good redox sensitive spin probes for free radical imaging.
What determines the selection of undergraduate medical students to the specialty of their future careers?

Background: It is important to understand the factors that influence the undergraduate medical students’ specialties choice for the post-graduation. Objectives: To identify the number of undergraduate medical students who decided their post-graduate specialty career, factors that may influence their decision to select a particular specialty, and their career specialties preference. Methods: A self-administered questionnaire was used to achieve the objectives. Results: Less than half of the students (40.2%) showed a future specialty preference. Senior students and having background about specialties were the significant factors for career choices. General Surgery (27.4%), ENT-Ophthalmology (24.6%) and Internal Medicine (22%) were preferred specialties. Male students preferred General Surgery (15.7%), Internal Medicine (15%), ENT-Ophthalmology (12%) and Orthopedics (9.1%). Female students showed interest in ENT-Ophthalmology (12.1%), Surgery (11.7%), Pediatrics (10.8%) and Dermatology (8.2%). The least popular specialties were Community Medicine, (6.6%), Anesthesia, (6%) and Forensic Medicine (4.6%). Obstetrics and Gynecology (Ob/Gyne) was a less popular branch even in female students. Conclusions: General Surgery, ENT-Ophthalmology and Internal Medicine were the most preferred specialties, while Community Medicine, Forensic and Ob/Gyne, even for female students were least selected specialties. Proper information and counseling should be offered to students about the challenges and opportunities to select their future careers.
A Brain Tumor Molecular Imaging Strategy Using A New Triple-Modality MRI-Photoacoustic-Raman Nanoparticle

The difficulty in delineating brain tumor margins is a major obstacle in the path toward better outcomes for patients with brain tumors. Current imaging methods are often limited by inadequate sensitivity, specificity and spatial resolution. Here we show that a unique triple-modality magnetic resonance imaging–photoacoustic imaging–Raman imaging nanoparticle (termed here MPR nanoparticle) can accurately help delineate the margins of brain tumors in living mice both preoperatively and intraoperatively. The MPRs were detected by all three modalities with at least a picomolar sensitivity both in vitro and in living mice. Intravenous injection of MPRs into glioblastoma-bearing mice led to MPR accumulation and retention by the tumors, with no MPR accumulation in the surrounding healthy tissue, allowing for a noninvasive tumor delineation using all three modalities through the intact skull. Raman imaging allowed for guidance of intraoperative tumor resection, and a histological correlation validated that Raman imaging was accurately delineating the brain tumor margins. This new triple-modality–nanoparticle approach has promise for enabling more accurate brain tumor imaging and resection.
1 Enhancing TCP Congestion Control Via Connection Bandwidth Estimation , A Performance Study

We present performance studies of TCP Westwood (TCPW), a sender-side modification of the congestion window control scheme in TCP. TCP Westwood relies on end-to-end rate estimation. The key innovative idea is to continuously measure at the TCP sender the packet rate of the connection by monitoring the rate of returning ACKs. The estimate is then used to compute congestion window and slow start threshold after a congestion episode, that is, after three duplicate acknowledgments or a timeout. The rationale of this strategy is simple: in contrast with TCP Reno, which “blindly” halves the congestion window after three duplicate ACKs, TCP Westwood attempts to select a slow start threshold and a congestion window which are consistent with the effective connection rate at the time congestion is experienced. The proposed faster recovery mechanism is particularly effective over wireless links where sporadic losses due to radio link problems are often misinterpreted as a symptom of congestion by current TCP schemes, and thus lead to unnecessary window reduction. Experimental studies reveal improvements in throughput performance, as well as in fairness. In addition, friendliness with TCP Reno was confirmed in a set of experiments. TCP Reno connections are not starved by TCPW connections; on the contrary, the TCP Reno connections continue to make satisfactory progress. TCPW is shown here to be extremely effective in mixed wired and wireless networks and in high speed networks. Throughput improvements of up to 615 % are observed. Internet measurements using a Linux TCPW implementation are also reported in this paper, providing further evidence of the gains achievable via TCPW.
Responsabilidad social de las empresas y beneficios privados: el impacto de la orientación estratégica en empresas grandes ubicadas en México

In this article we analyse new theoretical proposals about three main lines regarding the expenditure on corporative social responsibility (CSR) and construct indices by type of expense in CSR, as well as a competitiveness index. In order to do this, we have employed regression models to find what kind of expense in CSR directly affects the expected return. The new theoretical proposal puts into question a great deal of the empirical evidence of the relationship between CSR expenditure and the profitability of the companies that apply it.
Antelope : une plate-forme industrielle de traitement linguistique [Antelop : an industrial platform for linguistic processing]

The Antelope linguistic platform, inspired by Mea ning-Text Theory, targets the syntactic and semantic analysis of texts, and can h andle large corpora. Antelope integrates several pre-existing (parsing) components as well a s broad-coverage linguistic data originating from various sources. Efforts towards i ntegration of all components nonetheless make for a homogeneous platform. Our direct contrib ution deals with components for semantic analysis, and the formalization of a unifi ed text analysis model. This paper introduces the platform and compares it with state- of-the-art projects. It offers to the NLP community a feedback from a software company, by un derlining the architectural measures that should be taken to ensure that such complex so ftware remains maintainable. MOTS-CLES : traitement de corpus, analyse syntaxique et seman tique, lexique semantique, desambiguisation lexicale, resolution d'anaphores ecoreferences, Theorie Sens-Texte.
Mouse Zp1 Encodes a Zona Pellucida Protein Homologous to Egg Envelope Proteins in Mammals and Fish (*)

Zp1 encodes one of the three major glycoproteins of the zona pellucida, an extracellular matrix that surrounds growing oocytes, ovulated eggs, and preimplantation embryos. The mouse gene is composed of 12 exons ranging in size from 82 to 364 base pairs and spans 6.5 kilobase pairs on chromosome 19 (2.13 ± 1.5 centimorgans distal to D19Bir1). The Zp1 exon map is similar to ZPB, a human orthologue, and an E-box (CANNTG), implicated in oocyte-specific gene expression of mouse Zp2 and Zp3, is similarly located upstream of the transcription start site. The single copy Zp1 gene encodes a 623-amino acid protein, the carboxyl-terminal half of which is significantly similar to a corresponding region of mouse ZP2. The conservation of this same region in a fish egg envelope protein suggests that not only has this protein domain been duplicated in mammals but that it has been conserved and used as an egg envelope protein in species that diverged 650 million years ago.
Evidence for N-Glycan Shielding of Antigenic Sites during Evolution of Human Influenza A Virus Hemagglutinin

ABSTRACT After the emergence of influenza A viruses in the human population, the number of N-glycosylation sites (NGS) in the globular head region of hemagglutinin (HA) has increased continuously for several decades. It has been speculated that the addition of NGS to the globular head region of HA has conferred selective advantages to the virus by preventing the binding of antibodies (Ab) to antigenic sites (AS). Here, the effect of N-glycosylation on the binding of Ab to AS in human influenza A virus subtype H3N2 (A/H3N2) was examined by inferring natural selection at AS and other sites (NAS) that are located close to and distantly from the NGS in the three-dimensional structure of HA through a comparison of the rates of synonymous (d S) and nonsynonymous (d N) substitutions. When positions 63, 122, 126, 133, 144, and 246 in the globular head region of HA were non-NGS, the d N/d S was >1 and positive selection was detected at the AS located near these positions. However, the d N/d S value decreased and the evidence of positive selection disappeared when these positions became NGS. In contrast, d N/d S at the AS distantly located from the positions mentioned above and at the NAS of any location were generally <1 and did not decrease when these positions changed from non-NGS to NGS. These results suggest that the attachment of N-glycans to the NGS in the globular head region of HA prevented the binding of Ab to AS in the evolutionary history of human A/H3N2 virus.
A comparative study of social network classifiers for predicting churn in the telecommunication industry

Relational learning in networked data has been shown to be effective in a number of studies. Relational learners, composed of relational classifiers and collective inference methods, enable the inference of nodes in a network given the existence and strength of links to other nodes. These methods have been adapted to predict customer churn in telecommunication companies showing that incorporating them may give more accurate predictions. In this research, the performance of a variety of relational learners is compared by applying them to a number of CDR datasets originating from the telecommunication industry, with the goal to rank them as a whole and investigate the effects of relational classifiers and collective inference methods separately. Our results show that collective inference methods do not improve the performance of relational classifiers and the best performing relational classifier is the network-only link-based classifier, which builds a logistic model using link-based measures for the nodes in the network.
Prevalence of Cognitive and Functional Impairment in a Community Sample from São Paulo, Brazil

Aims: To present the prevalence of cognitive and functional impairment (CFI) in community-dwelling elderly subjects from the city of São Paulo. Methods: The population was aged 60 years and older (n = 1,563; 68.7% women and 31.3% men) and lived in different socioeconomic areas. The following instruments were administered to the elderly: the Mini Mental State Examination and the Fuld Object Memory Evaluation. The Informant Questionnaire on Cognitive Decline in the Elderly and the Bayer-Activities of Daily Living scale were administered to an informant. Results: The prevalence of CFI (n = 250) was 16% (95% confidence interval, CI: 14.2–17.8%) or 15.8% (95% CI: 13.8–17.8%). In regression models, the increase in the odds ratio (OR) of CFI was associated with age, for elderly individuals aged 75 years or older, illiterates or with 1–4 years of schooling, and with a history of stroke and diabetes mellitus. On the other hand, for subjects with a tumor history, the OR of CFI was significantly reduced. Conclusion: CFI was high and increased at older ages and in subjects with low education. Potentially changeable factors were identified (stroke and diabetes), and the possible ‘protective effect’ of tumor/cancer against CFI should be further investigated by longitudinal studies.
Understanding Resource Provisioning for ClimatePrediction.net

Peer-to-peer computing, involving the participation of thousands of general purpose, public computers, has established itself as a viable paradigm for executing loosely-coupled, complex scientific applications requiring significant computational resources. ClimatePrediction.net is an excellent demonstrator of this technology, having attracted hundreds of thousands of users from more than 200 countries for the efficient and effective execution of complex climate prediction models. This paper is concerned with understanding the underlying compute resources on which ClimatePrediction.net commonly executes. Such a study is advantageous to three different stakeholders, namely the application developers, the project participants and the project administrators. This is the first study of this kind, and while offering general conclusions with specific reference to ClimatePrediction.net, it also illustrates the benefits of such work to scalability analysis of other peer-to-peer projects.
Evaluation of a PTSD psychoeducational program for psychiatric inpatients

Background: Persons with severe mental illness are at high risk for trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but trauma-focused interventions are rarely delivered. Aim: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of providing a psychoeducational program for individuals with SMI and PTSD in a psychiatric hospital, and to assess gains in knowledge and satisfaction with the program. Method: Seventy inpatient participants who met criteria for PTSD attended three sessions of a psychoeducational program using a group format of video and discussion. The participants completed a “knowledge of PTSD” questionnaire before and after the education programme. Results: Participants demonstrated significant increases in knowledge about trauma and PTSD, and reported high levels of satisfaction with the program. Conclusion: Findings support the use of this intervention as a first step in increasing knowledge about PTSD and stimulating motivation to seek future treatment. Declaration of Interest: None.
Web corpus mining by instance of Wikipedia

In this paper we present an approach to structure learning in the area of web documents. This is done in order to approach the goal of webgenre tagging in the area of web corpus linguistics. A central outcome of the paper is that purely structure oriented approaches to web document classification provide an information gain which may be utilized in combined approaches of web content and structure analysis.
Chandra X-Ray Detection of the Radio Hot Spots of 3C 295

An observation of the radio galaxy 3C 295 during the calibration phase of the Chandra X-Ray Observatory reveals X-ray emission from the core of the galaxy, from each of the two prominent radio hot spots, and from the previously known cluster gas. We discuss the possible emission processes for the hot spots and argue that a synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) model is preferred for most or all of the observed X-ray emission. SSC models with near-equipartition fields thus explain the X-ray emission from the hot spots in the two highest surface brightness FR II radio galaxies, Cygnus A and 3C 295. This lends weight to the assumption of equipartition and suggests that relativistic protons do not dominate the particle energy density.
ELEVEN - Tests needed for a Recommendation 1 EUI Working Paper ECO 2006 - 2

A decision maker has to recommend a treatment, knows that any outcome will be in [0; 1] but only has minimal information about the likelihood of outcomes (there is no prior). The decision maker can design a nite number of experiments in which treatments are tested. For the case of two treatments we present a rule for designing experiments and making a recommendation that attains minimax regret and can thus ensure a given maximal error with the minimal number of tests. 11 tests are needed under the socalled binomial average rule to limit the error to 5%. We also consider the setting where there is covariate information to then identify minimax regret behavior and drastically reduce the number of tests needed to attain a given maximal error as compared to the literature (over 200 to 22 given two covariates). We extend the binomial average rule to more than two treatments and use it to derive a bound on minimax regret.
Programação matemática e imersões métricas para aproximações em problemas de corte

Neste trabalho, apresentamos um estudo teorico sobre problemas de otimizacao NP-dificeis de cortes em grafos e o estado da arte de algoritmos de aproximacao que fazem uso de tecnicas de programacao matematica e de espacos metricos. Tres problemas de cortes em grafos foram modelados por programas matematicos inteiros, sendo esses ultimos relaxados para admitirem solucoes com valores continuos. A solucao desses programas descrevem vetores unitarios, para o problema do corte maximo; pontos sobre um (k − 1)-simplexo, para o problema do corte multisseparador minimo; e uma metrica, para o problema do corte mais disperso. Cada algoritmo apresentado realiza uma tomada de decisao com base na solucao do programa matematico.
Nonpharmacological interventions for insomnia in older adults: A meta-analysis of treatment efficacy.

Specific interventions included in the review The following non-pharmacological interventions were studied: combined behavioural; stimulus control; imagery training; sleep compression; relaxation; sleep restriction; cognitive-behavioural; multicomponent. Control interventions included waiting list, placebo, pre-treatment and unspecified control. Pharmacological treatments were excluded. Therapists included both students and professionals. No details were given of duration of therapy.
On wafer de-embedding for SiGe/BiCMOS/RFCMOS transmission line interconnect characterization

This paper compares different de-embedding techniques for on-wafer transmission line interconnect characterization. The main goal is to contrast and correlate de-embedded S-parameters and extracted electrical characteristics versus industry standard electromagnetic solver results. For the first time the simplified "thru" technique and new "short-open" method are employed for de-embedding on-chip coplanar waveguides over the 0.1-70 GHz frequency bandwidth.