Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
RGB Plots as a Tool for the Simultaneous Visualization of Multiple Data Layers in a Two Dimensional Space

Visualization of multidimensional data helps in understanding complex systems and environments. We present here a red, green, blue (RGB) visualization method that can serve to display environmental properties. The saturation of each color is used to represent the concentration of a given property. The implementation of that figure is illustrated through visualization of three dissolved inorganic nutrient concentrations along a vertical transect of the Mediterranean, as well as through a vertical time series of three phytoplankton group cell numbers. The RGB figures show well known properties of the water column. In addition, they reveal some lesser-known properties, such as regions in shallow water in which the ratio of phosphorus and silica to nitrogen is high, and a deep eukariotic phytoplankton community. Visualization of such data is usually performed with three separate contour or surface plots, and occasionally two properties are presented as an overlay in a single figure. The RGB figure offers a better way to visualize the interactions among the three separate plots than is commonly available.
Literature Survey on Detection of Brain Tumor from MRI Images

Today’s recent medical imaging research faces the challenge of detecting brain tumor through Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI). Broadly, to produce images of soft tissue of human body, MRI images are used by experts. For brain tumor detection, image segmentation is required. Mechanizing this process is a tricky task because of the high diversity in the appearance of tumor tissues among different patients and in many cases similarity with the usual tissues.Physical segmentation of medical image by the radiologist is a monotonous and prolonged process. MRI is a highly developed medical imaging method providing rich information about the person soft-tissue structure. There are varied brain tumor recognition and segmentation methods to detect and segment a brain tumor from MRI images. This is well thought-out to be one of the most significant but tricky part of the process of detecting brain tumor. A variety of algorithms were developed for segmentation of MRI images by using different tools and methods. Alternatively this paper presents a comprehensive review of the methods and techniques used to detect brain tumor through MRI image.
Inhibition of interferon secretion by vinblastine

The plant alkaloids vinblastine and colchicine are known to arrest cells in mitosis by virtue of their binding to spindle protein. These drugs are also capable of binding to microtubule protein and causing these structures to disaggregate into nonfunctional subunits (1, 2). Microtubular structures are thought to be involved in the secretory process of a number of proteins including insulin (7), collagen (4), and thyroid hormone (12). In this report we present our findings on the effects of these two drugs on the synthesis and secretion of interferon in a high producing human foreskin fibroblast strain (FS-4) (11).
Situations de gestion, formes de complexité et explicitabilité des connaissances tacites. Les dimensions de la connaissance tacite

Toutes les formes de recherche en gestion se heurtent au probleme de l'explicitation des connaissances produites. Dans les approches qualitatives, un deuxieme probleme apparait plus specifiquement en raison de l'importance des connaissances d'arriereplan dans la demarche methodologique tant pour le recueil que pour l'interpretation des donnees. En partant d'une experience pratique de codification des savoirs dans le cadre de deux recherche-action nous avons tente de relier la dimension tacite de la connaissance aux modalites de gestion de l'ignorance et aux formes de la complexite dans les systemes avec acteurs humains afin de proposer une grille de lecture de l'instrumentation de la connaissance par le chercheur.
Climate and the distribution of cooperative breeding in mammals

Cooperative breeding systems, in which non-breeding individuals provide care for the offspring of dominant group members, occur in less than 1% of mammals and are associated with social monogamy and the production of multiple offspring per birth (polytocy). Here, we show that the distribution of alloparental care by non-breeding subordinates is associated with habitats where annual rainfall is low. A possible reason for this association is that the females of species found in arid environments are usually polytocous and this may have facilitated the evolution of alloparental care.
Microsatellite polymorphism in the Mediterranean fruit fly, Ceratitis capitata

A total of forty‐three simple sequence repeats (SSRs) were identified in the Mediterranean fruit fly (medfly) Ceratitis capitata. The most common SSR was the dinucleotide (TG)n/(CA)n occurring in thirty of the forty‐three microsatellite loci. Polymorphism at ten dinucleotide markers was investigated in 122 flies from six natural populations sampled in the native and colonized areas. A very high level of allelic diversity was detected in the species range. An average of 13.6 alleles was found over all the ten loci indicating the informativeness of SSRs as genetic markers for the medfly. The distribution of microsatellite polymorphism in the species range reflects the medfly colonization history.
An interactive system of stereoscopic video conversion

With the recent booming of 3DTV industry, more and more stereoscopic videos are demanded by the market. This paper presents a system of converting conventional monocular videos to stereoscopic ones. In this system, an input video is firstly segmented into shots to reduce operations on similar frames. Then, automatic depth estimation and interactive image segmentation are integrated to obtain depth maps and foreground/background segments on selected key frames. Within each video shot, such results are propagated from key frames to non-key frames. Combined with a depth-to-disparity conversion method, the system synthesizes the counterpart (either left or right) view for stereoscopic display by warping the original frame according to disparity maps. For evaluation, we use human labeled depth map as the reference and compute both the mean opinion score (MOS) and Peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) to valuate the converted video quality. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed conversion system and methods achieves encouraging performance.
Embedded agents: a paradigm for mobile services

Mobile computing radically challenges some of the traditional assumptions associated with the software development life cycle, and end-user behaviour. Successfully meeting these challenges is of fundamental importance if mobile computing is to fulfil its considerable potential. One approach to this concerns the prudent and selective adoption of intelligent techniques. However, reconciling the conflicting demands of deploying sophisticated resource-intensive computational algorithms on devices that are inherently resource-poor raises significant difficulties. Recent developments in intelligent agent technologies offer one viable approach to resolving this conflict. This paper explores the state of the art in mobile computing and intelligent agents. In particular, issues pertinent to the deployment of agents on mobile devices are considered in detail. To illuminate this discussion, the implementation of one such framework is described.
Absence and mixed forms of epilepsy in WAG/RIJ RATS. Characteristics and brain aminergic modulations

The neuroanatomical substrates of absence seizures and convulsive seizures differ; absence seizures are generated in the cortico-thalamic loop, whereas the brain stem and limbic structures are involved in audiogenic convulsive seizures. In spite of this difference, the two seizure types share a major precipitating factor: emotional stress, although absence seizures are more likely to be provoked by stress than other types of epileptic seizures. This implies that mechanisms of stress vulnerability are at least partly different in brains with convulsive and non-convulsive seizures. The response of an organism to stressors greatly depends on its brain aminergic functions. Therefore, it is hypothesized that the tone of the brain aminergic system in absence epileptic subjects is different from that of non-epileptic controls. This could lead to a poor ability of coping with stress. In the presented studies, genetic animal models to investigate putative impacts of the seizure type and severity on behavioral traits and brain aminergic indices were used. WAG/Rij rats (genetically prone to absence seizures) and Wistar rats (more resistant to absence epilepsy), both with and without susceptibility to audiogenic convulsions, were compared. Absence and audiogenic seizures were scored, in order to unmask putative effects of seizures' severity on behavioural traits and brain aminergic neurochemistry. In additional experiments, the distribution of several types of brain amine receptors (dopamine, histamine) were studied and effects of drugs affecting the aminergic neurotransmission (haloperidol, pyrilamine) were assessed in WAG/Rij rats. The major outcome of the experiments described in the thesis is that absence seizures affect the brain aminergic indices outside the thalamocortical loops, and/or that strength of the brain aminergic tone might suppress or facilitate the occurrence of absence seizures. It is also proposed that the seizure-related changes in neurochemistry of the limbic system might underlie an enhanced stress vulnerability of absence epileptic patients and rats.
Analysis and implementation of a bidirectional converter with high conversion ratio

A bidirectional dc converter with high conversion ratio is presented in this paper to have the capability of bidirectional power flow. Two boost conversion stages are adopted in the converter to achieve high voltage step-up conversion. The other power flow direction can also be achieved in the proposed converter with low voltage step-down conversion. Comparison with the conventional boost converter with narrow turn-off period, the proposed converter has wide conversion ratio so that the higher or lower output voltage can be achieved. To reduce the switching losses and limit the voltage stress on the power switch, the boost type of active snubber is used in the converter. The resonance based on the output capacitance of power switch and resonant inductance at the transition interval will make the power switches to turn on at zero voltage switching (ZVS). The circuit configuration, principle operation, system analysis, and design consideration of the proposed converter are presented. Finally, experiments conducted on a laboratory prototype are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed converter.
Spirit and community at Southwest Airlines:: An investigation of a spiritual values‐based model

One important issue is whether spirituality in the workplace can be used only to benefit employees or can it be developed also to the advantage of organizations? The purpose of this article is to articulate a model of how spiritual values can be integrated into organizations and then assess how this model predicts organizational behavior in one company, Southwest Airlines (SWA). The application of this model provides insights into how and under what specific conditions spiritual values can positively impact both profitability and employee attitudes in organizations. Implications for both research and practice are discussed.
Towards bottom-up continuous phone recognition

We present a novel approach to designing bottom-up automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. The key component of the proposed approach is a bank of articulatory attribute detectors implemented using a set of feed-forward artificial neural networks (ANNs). Each detector computes a score describing an activation level of the specified speech attributes that the current frame exhibits. These cues are first combined by an event merger that provides some evidence about the presence of a higher level feature which is then verified by an evidence verifier to produce hypotheses at the phone or word level. We evaluate several configurations of our proposed system on a continuous phone recognition task. Experimental results on the TIMIT database show that the system achieves a phone error rate of 25% which is superior to results obtained with either hidden Markov model (HMM) or conditional random field (CRF) based recognizers. We believe the system's inherent flexibility and the ease of adding new detectors may provide further improvements.
Discrimination of redundant auditory stimuli in pigeons (視覚・聴覚・音声)

Weinvestigated how pigeons use auditory dimensions for discrimination of complex tunes. Six pigeons were trained to match two redundant auditory stimuli varied along two dimensions, “rhythm” and “timbre”, to two colors using a cross-modal symbolic matching-to-sample task. All pigeons learned this discrimination. The subjects matched the novel stimuli having new combination of each dimension's original values and the novel stimuli having the original “rhythms” and new “timbres”, based on the “rhythm” dimension. These results suggest that the pigeons are able to divide complex auditory stimuli into several dimensions, and that they paid more attention to the “rhythm” dimension. However, they matched the stimuli having the original “timbres” and new “rhythms”, to the color associated with the “rhythm” combined with the preserved “timbre” in the baseline discrimination. This result suggests that a dimension combined with a more salient dimension may become a conditional, or contextual cue for the discrimination of complex auditory stimuli in pigeons.
CTGF expression is induced by TGF- beta in cardiac fibroblasts and cardiac myocytes: a potential role in heart fibrosis.

Connective tissue growth factor (CTGF) is a cysteine-rich protein induced by transforming growth factor beta (TGF- beta) in connective tissue cells. CTGF can trigger many of the cellular processes underlying fibrosis, such as cell proliferation, adhesion, migration and the synthesis of extracellular matrix; however, its role in acute and chronic cardiac injury is not fully understood. Here, we show that TGF- beta is a specific inducer of CTGF expression in both cardiac fibroblasts and cardiac myocytes. The activity of a CTGF promoter-based reporter construct correlated with endogenous CTGF expression, suggesting that TGF- beta induces CTGF expression most likely by activating its promoter. Upregulation of CTGF coincided with an increase in fibronectin, collagen type I and plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 production. Forskolin, a stimulator of cyclic AMP, blocked TGF- beta induced CTGF expression and reduced the basal level of CTGF, whereas an inhibitor that blocks the MAP kinase signaling pathway (PD 98059) significantly enhanced TGF- beta induced CTGF expression. Furthermore, we found that both TGF- beta and CTGF mRNAs were significantly elevated in the left ventricles and septa of rat hearts 2-16 weeks following myocardial infarction. This correlated well with concomitant increases in fibronectin, and type I and type III collagen mRNA levels in these animal hearts. Significant upregulation of CTGF was also detected in human heart samples derived from patients diagnosed with cardiac ischemia. Based on these findings, we propose that CTGF is an important mediator of TGF- beta signaling in the heart and abnormal expression of this gene could be used as a diagnostic marker for cardiac fibrosis.
Motor learning and control : concepts and applications

Unit I: Introduction to Motor Skills and Abilities 1 The Classification of Motor Skills 2 The Measurement of Motor Performance 3 Motor Abilities Unit II: Introduction to Motor Control 4 Neuromotor Basis for Motor Control 5 Motor Control Theories 6 Sensory Components of Motor Control 7 Performance and Motor Control Characteristics of Functional Skills 8 Action Preparation Unit III: Attention and Memory 9 Attention as a Limited Capacity Resource 10 Memory Components, Forgetting, and Strategies Unit IV: Introduction to Motor Skill Learning 11 Defining and Assessing Learning 12 The Stages of Learning 13 Transfer of Learning Unit V: Instruction and Augmented Feedback 14 Demonstration and Verbal Instructions 15 Augmented Feedback Unit VI: Practive Conditions 16 Practice Variability and Specificity 17 The Amount and Distribution of Practice 18 Whole and Part Practice 19 Mental Practice
Artemisinin biosynthesis enhancement in transgenic Artemisia annua plants by downregulation of the β-caryophyllene synthase gene.

Artemisinin is an effective antimalarial drug isolated from the medicinal plant Artemisia annua L. Due to its increasing market demand and the low yield in A. annua, there is a great interest in increasing its production. In this paper, in an attempt to increase artemisinin content of A. ANNUA by suppressing the expression of β-caryophyllene synthase, a sesquiterpene synthase competing as a precursor of artemisinin, the antisense fragment (750 bp) of β-caryophyllene synthase cDNA was inserted into the plant expression vector pBI121 and introduced into A. annua by Agrobacterium-mediated transformation. PCR and Southern hybridization confirmed the stable integration of multiple copies of the transgene in 5 different transgenic lines of A. annua. Reverse transcription PCR showed that the expression of endogenous CPS in the transgenic lines was significantly lower than that in the wild-type control A. annua plants, and β-caryophyllene content decreased sharply in the transgenic lines in comparison to the control. The artemisinin content of one of the transgenic lines showed an increase of 54.9 % compared with the wild-type control. The present study demonstrated that the inhibition pathway in the precursor competition for artemisinin biosynthesis by anti-sense technology is an effective means of increasing the artemisinin content of A. annua plants.
Aggregation method with dynamic search direction for multi-objective problems

The job-shop scheduling problem (JSP) is one of the hardest problems (NP-complete problem). In lots of cases, the combination of goals and resources has exponentially increasing search space. The objective of resolution of such a problem is generally, to maximize the production with a lower cost and makespan. In this paper, we explain how to modify the objective function of genetic algorithms to treat the multiobjective problem and to generate a set of diversified "optimal" solutions in order to help decision maker. The solutions proposed by our approach are compared to the lower bound of the cost and makespan in order to prove the qualities and robustness of our proposed approach.
Does T Helper Differentiation Correlate with Resistance or Susceptibility to Infection with L. major? Some Insights From the Murine Model

The murine model of Leishmania major infection has been an invaluable tool in understanding T helper differentiation in vivo. The initial evidence for a role of distinct CD4+ T helper subsets in the outcome of infection was first obtained with this experimental model. The development of CD4+ Th1 cells was associated with resolution of the lesion, control of parasite replication, and resistance to re-infection in most of the mouse strains investigated (i.e., C57BL/6). In contrast, differentiation of CD4+ Th2 cells correlated with the development of unhealing lesions, and failure to control parasite load in a few strains (i.e., BALB/c). Since these first reports, an incredible amount of effort has been devoted to understanding the various parameters involved in the differentiation of these, and more recently discovered T helper subsets such as Th17 and T regulatory cells. The discovery of cross-talk between T helper subsets, as well as their plasticity force us to reevaluate the events driving a protective/deleterious T helper immune response following infection with L. major in mice. In this review, we describe the individual contributions of each of these CD4+ T helper subsets following L. major inoculation, emphasizing recent advances in the field, such as the impact of different substrains of L. major on the pathogenesis of disease.
Hypnosis for Hot Flashes and Associated Symptomsin Women with Breast Cancer

Women with breast cancer experience a host of physical and psychological symptoms, including hot flashes, sleep difficulties, anxiety, and depression. Therefore, treatment for women with breast cancer should target these symptoms and be individualized to patients’ specific presentations. The current article reviews the common symptoms associated with breast cancer in women, then examines clinical hypnosis as a treatment for addressing these symptoms and improving the quality of life of women with breast cancer. Clinical hypnosis is an effective, nonpharmaceutical treatment for hot flashes and addressing many symptoms typically experienced by breast cancer patients. A case example is provided to illustrate the use of clinical hypnosis for the treatment of hot flashes with a patient with breast cancer.
A Synchronous Corpus-Based Study of Verb-Noun Fluidity in Chinese

The problem of verb-noun categorial ambiguity is critical and relatively unique for non-inflectional languages, especially Chinese. We consider the verb-noun categorial fluidity a continuum and any categorial shift a transitional process. A synchronous corpus-based study was conducted to compare the phenomenon with respect to news texts collected from Hong Kong, Beijing, and Taiwan. It was found that about 15% of the verbs in the Hong Kong and Taiwan texts were undergoing the verb-noun categorial shift; whereas Beijing texts had more than 18% of the verbs undergoing this shift. The results also have important implications on various natural language applications, including lexicography, part-of-speech tagging of Chinese, as well as other natural language processing tasks.
NUT midline carcinoma of the larynx: an international series and review of the literature

NUT midline carcinoma (NMC) is a rare undifferentiated and aggressive carcinoma that locates characteristically to the midline of the head and neck, and mediastinum. NMC is characterized by chromosomal rearrangements of the gene NUT, at 15q14. The BRD4 gene on 19q13 is the most common translocation partner forming a fusion oncogene, BRD4–NUT. By the end of 2014, the International NUT Midline Carcinoma Registry had 48 patients treated for NMC. Laryngeal NMC are exceedingly rare, and we report a case series of seven cases.
Postconventional Moral Thinking: A Neo-Kohlbergian Approach

Contents: Preface. Overview of Our Neo-Kohlbergian Approach. Psychological and Philosophical Challenges to Kohlberg's Approach. A Neo-Kohlbergian Approach Based on the DIT. Validity and Reliability Studies of the DIT. New Issues, New Theory, New Findings. Stages or Schemas? Integrating With the Domain Approach. Integrating With the Cultural Psychology Approach. Summary. Appendices: The ATHRI. Services and Materials Available From the Minnesota Center.