Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Virtual Humans for Team Training in Virtual Reality

This paper describes the use of virtual humans and distributed virtual reality to support team training, where students must learn their individual role in the team as well as how to coordinate their actions with their teammates. Students, instructors, and virtual humans cohabit a 3d, simulated mock-up of their work environment, where they can practice together in realistic situations. The virtual humans can serve as instructors for individual students, and they can sub-stitute for missing team members, allowing students to practice team tasks when some or all human instructors and teammates are unavailable. The paper describes our learning environment, the issues that arise in developing virtual humans for team training, and our design for the virtual humans, which is an extension of our Steve agent previously used for one-on-one tutoring.
Persistent Localized Broadcasting in VANETs

We present a communication protocol, called LINGER, for persistent dissemination of delay-tolerant information to vehicular users, within a geographical area of interest. The goal of LINGER is to dispatch and confine information in localized areas of a mobile network with minimal protocol overhead and without requiring knowledge of the vehicles' routes or destinations. LINGER does not require roadside infrastructure support: it selects mobile nodes in a distributed, cooperative way and lets them act as "information bearers", providing uninterrupted information availability within a desired region. We analyze the performance of our dissemination mechanism through extensive simulations, in complex vehicular scenarios with realistic node mobility. The results demonstrate that LINGER represents a viable, appealing alternative to infrastructure-based solutions, as it can successfully drive the information toward a region of interest from a far away source and keep it local with negligible overhead. We show the effectiveness of such an approach in the support of localized broadcasting, in terms of both percentage of informed vehicles and information delivery delay, and we compare its performance to that of a dedicated, state-of-the-art protocol.
Rapid whole blood analysis of virus-specific CD4 and CD8 T cell responses in persistent HIV infection

ObjectivesUpon HIV infection, strong antiviral cytotoxic and helper T cell responses are generated. They are considered to be an important component in the control of HIV viral load. A simple and rapid whole blood assay was established to quantify and simultaneously characterize HIV-reactive CD4 and CD8 cells. The assay was applied to evaluate the effect of antiretroviral therapy on HIV-specific T cell responses. MethodsWhole blood of 33 HIV-infected individuals was specifically stimulated by HIV-1 Pr55gag, and activation-induced intracellular cytokine expression in CD4 and CD8 T cells was analysed by flow cytometry. ResultsHIV-1-specific CD8 and CD4 T cells can be quantified simultaneously. As specific antigen, HIV-1 Pr55gag virus-like particles were superior to soluble protein, especially for the activation of CD8 T cells. In untreated individuals, a high frequency of HIV-specific T cells was observed. The frequency of CD8 T cells was consistently higher than the respective CD4 T cell response, thus demonstrating a dominance in CD8 T cell expansion in persistent HIV infection. Patients on antiretroviral therapy showed a significant reduction in HIV-specific CD4 and, even more strikingly, CD8 T cells. ConclusionThe whole blood assay provides a rapid estimate of the total antiviral T cell resources, and is highly suited for a clinical setting. It may thus have widespread applications for the evaluation of vaccination strategies and immunotherapy. Because antiretroviral therapy significantly reduces both HIV-specific cytotoxic and helper T cell responses, future therapeutic strategies should aim at improving cellular antiviral immunity.
Chromatinization of the KSHV Genome During the KSHV Life Cycle

Kaposi’s sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) belongs to the gamma herpesvirus family and is the causative agent of various lymphoproliferative diseases in humans. KSHV, like other herpesviruses, establishes life-long latent infection with the expression of a limited number of viral genes. Expression of these genes is tightly regulated by both the viral and cellular factors. Recent advancements in identifying the expression profiles of viral transcripts, using tilling arrays and next generation sequencing have identified additional coding and non-coding transcripts in the KSHV genome. Determining the functions of these transcripts will provide a better understanding of the mechanisms utilized by KSHV in altering cellular pathways involved in promoting cell growth and tumorigenesis. Replication of the viral genome is critical in maintaining the existing copies of the viral episomes during both latent and lytic phases of the viral life cycle. The replication of the viral episome is facilitated by viral components responsible for recruiting chromatin modifying enzymes and replication factors for altering the chromatin complexity and replication initiation functions, respectively. Importantly, chromatin modification of the viral genome plays a crucial role in determining whether the viral genome will persist as latent episome or undergo lytic reactivation. Additionally, chromatinization of the incoming virion DNA, which lacks chromatin structure, in the target cells during primary infection, helps in establishing latent infection. Here, we discuss the recent advancements on our understating of KSHV genome chromatinization and the consequences of chromatin modifications on viral life cycle.
Early child health in Lahore, Pakistan: XIII. Primary teeth emergence

The aim of this study was to investigate the number of emerged primary teeth at various ages from 6 to 24 months in 1347 longitudinally followed Pakistan infants sampled from four socio‐economically different areas in Lahore, Pakistan; from a very poor periurban slum to a privileged upper middle class group. The emergence of the primary teeth was found to be little, or not all related to sex or to the area of living. However, in comparison with studies conducted in other continents, the Indo‐Pak subcontinent population lags behind in primary teeth emergence, especially in early life. This genetic difference makes it necessary to create specific standards of primary teeth emergence for this population.
Salient object detection via multi-scale local-global superpixel contrast

The goal of salient object detection is to estimate the regions which are most likely to attract human's visual attention. As an important image preprocessing procedure to reduce the computational complexity, salient object detection is still a challenging problem in computer vision. In this paper, we proposed a salient object detection model by integrating local and global superpixel contrast at multiple scales. Three features are computed to estimate the saliency of superpixel. Two optimization measures are utilized to refine the resulting saliency map. Extensive experiments with the state-of-the-art saliency models on three public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.
The control of root, vegetative shoot and flower morphogenesis in tobacco thin cell-layer explants (TCLs).

Thin cell-layer explants (TCLs) have been proposed as favorable tissues for the study of root, vegetative shoot and flower formation. We tested the effects of pH, light quality, light quantity, and IBA and kinetin concentrations on the morphogenesis of TCLs cultured individually on a liquid medium. Alterations of the amounts of exogenously supplied IBA and kinetin were sufficient to induce the formation of roots, vegetative shoots and flowers on TCLs cultured on otherwise identical media. The type and number of organs formed were sensitive to the intensity of light (55, 75, 100 and 120 muEinsteins m-2 sec-1) under which TCLs were grown. Evidence was obtained that the effects of light on TCL morphogenesis were associated with photochemical degradation of IBA in the medium. Evaluation of the organogenesis that occurred in TCLs cultured on a medium containing a range of IBA and kinetin concentrations showed that the number and type of organs formed, and overall growth, were dependent upon the initial concentrations of auxin and cytokinin. We have developed the TCL culture system into a sensitive and reproducible bioassay for the study of morphogenesis. The advantages of using the TCL morphogenesis bioassay for the identification and study of molecules (e.g. cell wall oligosaccharides) that may regulate morphogenesis are discussed.
Estimates for jacobi—sobolev type orthogonal polynomials

Let the Sobolev-type inner product " where w is the Jacobi weight, c is either 1 or -1 and M, N ≥ 0. We obtain estimates and asymptotic properties on [-1, 1] for the polynomials orthonormal with respect to (.,.) and their kernels. We also compare these polynomials with Jacobi orthonormal polynomials; as a consequence, a result about the convergence acceleration to c of the zeros is given.
Biomechanical approaches to identify and quantify injury mechanisms and risk factors in women's artistic gymnastics

Targeted injury prevention strategies, based on biomechanical analyses, have the potential to help reduce the incidence and severity of gymnastics injuries. This review outlines the potential benefits of biomechanics research to contribute to injury prevention strategies for women's artistic gymnastics by identification of mechanisms of injury and quantification of the effects of injury risk factors. One hundred and twenty-three articles were retained for review after searching electronic databases using key words, including ‘gymnastic’, ‘biomech*’, and ‘inj*’, and delimiting by language and relevance to the paper aim. Impact load can be measured biomechanically by the use of instrumented equipment (e.g. beatboard), instrumentation on the gymnast (accelerometers), or by landings on force plates. We need further information on injury mechanisms and risk factors in gymnastics and practical methods of monitoring training loads. We have not yet shown, beyond a theoretical approach, how biomechanical analysis of gymnastics can help reduce injury risk through injury prevention interventions. Given the high magnitude of impact load, both acute and accumulative, coaches should monitor impact loads per training session, taking into consideration training quality and quantity such as the control of rotation and the height from which the landings are executed.
Anthracycline cardiotoxicity in children.

More than 70 percent of children who are treated for childhood cancer can be cured. For long-term survivors, possible late effects of treatment and their consequences for the quality of life are a major concern. Cardiotoxic effects of anthracyclines are among the most frequent and serious adverse effects of the treatment of childhood cancer. Anthracyclines such as daunorubicin, epirubicin, and doxorubicin have been used for more than 30 years, and nearly 60 percent of children with cancer are currently being treated with such agents. The mechanisms behind cardiotoxic effects are not fully understood, but lipid peroxidation and the generation of .
The Effectiveness of Adjunctive Hypnosis with Surgical Patients: A Meta-Analysis

Hypnosis is a nonpharmacologic means for managing adverse surgical side effects. Typically, reviews of the hypnosis literature have been narrative in nature, focused on specific outcome domains (e.g., patients’ self-reported pain), and rarely address the impact of different modes of the hypnosis administration. Therefore, it is important to take a quantitative approach to assessing the beneficial impact of adjunctive hypnosis for surgical patients, as well as to examine whether the beneficial impact of hypnosis goes beyond patients’ pain and method of the administration. We conducted meta-analyses of published controlled studies (n = 20) that used hypnosis with surgical patients to determine: 1) overall, whether hypnosis has a significant beneficial impact, 2) whether there are outcomes for which hypnosis is relatively more effective, and 3) whether the method of hypnotic induction (live versus audiotape) affects hypnosis efficacy. Our results revealed a significant effect size (D = 1.20), indicating that surgical patients in hypnosis treatment groups had better outcomes than 89% of patients in control groups. No significant differences were found between clinical outcome categories or between methods of the induction of hypnosis. These results support the position that hypnosis is an effective adjunctive procedure for a wide variety of surgical patients.
Type-aware Web-search

Keyword-search engines (e.g. Web-search) usually can be outperformed by a specialized system optimized for a spe- cic domain, type of data, or queries (8, 2, 12, 5, 11, 9). For example, Halevy et. al. in (13) demonstrate how a special- ized Google Fusion Tables spatial search can outperform the general-purpose Google Web-search on bike trails search in San Francisco Bay Area. At the same time, Web content providers usually exhibit a specic focus for their postings. For example, information at http://www.csail. mit.edu is devoted to Computer Science research and education, Han- nah Montana is mostly tweeting about music, and the same is true for most sources. This paper describes the work in progress on a new Type- aware Web-search system that uses topical focus of informa- tion sources to process a large class of queries better than a regular Web search-engine. It leverages semantic proles similar to (10, 6, 7) and a new Type-aware Locality-Sensiti Hashing (TLSH) scheme to accomplish it.
Carbon dioxide sources from Alaska driven by increasing early winter respiration from Arctic tundra

Significance Rising arctic temperatures could mobilize reservoirs of soil organic carbon trapped in permafrost. We present the first quantitative evidence for large, regional-scale early winter respiration flux, which more than offsets carbon uptake in summer in the Arctic. Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Barrow station indicate that October through December emissions of CO2 from surrounding tundra increased by 73% since 1975, supporting the view that rising temperatures have made Arctic ecosystems a net source of CO2. It has been known for over 50 y that tundra soils remain unfrozen and biologically active in early winter, yet many Earth System Models do not correctly represent this phenomenon or the associated CO2 emissions, and hence they underestimate current, and likely future, CO2 emissions under climate change. High-latitude ecosystems have the capacity to release large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere in response to increasing temperatures, representing a potentially significant positive feedback within the climate system. Here, we combine aircraft and tower observations of atmospheric CO2 with remote sensing data and meteorological products to derive temporally and spatially resolved year-round CO2 fluxes across Alaska during 2012–2014. We find that tundra ecosystems were a net source of CO2 to the atmosphere annually, with especially high rates of respiration during early winter (October through December). Long-term records at Barrow, AK, suggest that CO2 emission rates from North Slope tundra have increased during the October through December period by 73% ± 11% since 1975, and are correlated with rising summer temperatures. Together, these results imply increasing early winter respiration and net annual emission of CO2 in Alaska, in response to climate warming. Our results provide evidence that the decadal-scale increase in the amplitude of the CO2 seasonal cycle may be linked with increasing biogenic emissions in the Arctic, following the growing season. Early winter respiration was not well simulated by the Earth System Models used to forecast future carbon fluxes in recent climate assessments. Therefore, these assessments may underestimate the carbon release from Arctic soils in response to a warming climate.
Search Engine Optimization through Spanning Forest Generation Algorithm

Search engine technology has had to scale dramatically to keep up with the growth of the web. With the tremendous growth of information available to end users through the Web, search engines come to play ever a more critical role. Determining the user intent of Web searches is a difficult problem due to the sparse data available concerning the searcher. We qualitatively analyze samples of queries from seven transaction logs from three different Web search engines containing more than five million queries. The following are our research objectives: Isolate characteristics of informational, navigational, and transactional for Web searching queries by identifying characteristics of each query type that will lead to real world classification. Validate the taxonomy by automatically classifying a large set of queries from a Web search engine. This paper we deal with now is semantic web search engines is the layered architecture and we use this with relation based page rank algorithm. The search engine has no infrastructure or matching techniques to give correct or a related information for the query raised. Now the semantic web solves this problem. Each page contains meta data with notes, meanings, list of words, definitions, vocabulary for the annotations etc. annotations are based on the classes of concepts and relations among them. For an eg. a query is entered as hotels-hill station, Ooty. The result of the search engine shows several hotels in and around Ooty. The final results are of nothing to do with the selected city. Only two out of seven results satisfy user needs. The list is so ranked that the end user is not furnished with the information that satisfies his or her intention. Of the ten or twelve pages displayed only the first two may be of importance and the other retrieved information must be discarded ones. The user may go through the other pages only if he is interested. But the query he or she has raised would not get the proper result In this paper, we will prove that relations among concepts embedded into semantic annotations can be effectively exploited to define a ranking strategy for Semantic Web search engines. This sort of ranking behaves at an inner level (that is, it exploits more precise information that can be made available within a Web page) and can be used in conjunction with other established ranking strategies to further improve the accuracy of query results. With respect to other ranking strategies for the Semantic Web, our approach only relies on the knowledge of the user query, the Web pages to be ranked, and the underlying ontology. Thus, it allows us to effectively manage the search space and to reduce the complexity associated with the ranking task. We provide an overview of existing strategies for Semantic Web search, the basic idea behind the proposed approach is presented by resorting to practical examples, formal methodology for deriving the general rule is illustrated and concerning the implementation is provided. An analysis of the algorithm complexity is given, and Experimental results are discussed.
How Costly is Diversity? Affirmative Action in Light of Gender Differences in Competitiveness

Affirmative action is often criticized for causing reverse discrimination and lowering the qualifications of those hired under the policy. However, the magnitude of such adverse effects depends on whether the best suited candidate is hired absent the policy. Indeed affirmative action may compensate for the distortion discrimination imposes on the selection of candidates. This paper asks whether affirmative action can have a similar corrective impact when qualified individuals fail to apply for a job. We evaluate the effect of introducing a gender quota in an environment where high-performing women fail to enter competitions they can win. We show that guaranteeing women equal representation among winners increases their entry. The response exceeds that predicted by the change in probability of winning and is in part driven by women being more willing to compete against other women. The consequences are substantial as the boost in supply essentially eliminates the anticipated costs of the policy. This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.
Visualising a Logic of Dependability Arguments

This paper offers general guidelines for the development of effective visual languages. That is, languages for constructing diagrams that can be easily and readily interpreted and manipulated by the human reader. We use these guidelines first to examine classical AND/OR trees as a representation of logical proofs, and second to design and evaluate a visual language for representing proofs in LofA: a Logic of Dependability Arguments, for which we provide a brief motivation and overview.
Relationship between quality of life and mood or depression in patients with severe obstructive sleep apnea syndrome.

STUDY OBJECTIVES To assess the quality of life (QOL) in patients with severe obstructive sleep apnea (OSAS), and the relationship between the QOL and severity of OSAS, excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS), and mood. METHODS Sixty patients with OSAS and 34 normal control subjects were assessed for QOL using the Medical Outcomes Study Short-Form 36 Health Survey questionnaire (SF-36), for EDS using the Epworth sleepiness scale (ESS), and for mood using the Zung self-rated depression scale (SDS). The associations between each domain and the total score on the SF-36 and the baseline characteristics, polysomnographic parameters, ESS score, and SDS score were examined by simple regression analysis and stepwise multiple regression analysis. RESULTS Six of eight domains and the total score on the SF-36 were significantly lower than those in the control subjects. The ESS and SDS scores were also more impaired in the patients than in the control subjects. There was no relationship between each domain on the SF-36 and the severity of OSAS and ESS score. Five of eight domains and the total score on the SF-36 were significantly correlated with the SDS score. Stepwise multiple regression analysis selected three variables, the SDS score (partial R(2) = 0.505), the lowest arterial oxygen saturation during sleep (partial R(2) = 0.064), and ESS score (partial R(2) = 0.053), as independent factors for predicting the total score on the SF-36. These three variables accounted for 62.2% of the total variance in the total score on SF-36 (R(2) = 0.622, p < 0.0001) CONCLUSIONS The QOL of patients with severe OSAS was decreased compared with normal control subjects. The QOL of patients was strongly correlated with the depression scale on simple regression analysis. However, EDS score and oxygen desaturation during sleep also affected the QOL, although the magnitude of its effect was small.