Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A comparative study on Kapur's and Tsallis entropy for multilevel thresholding of MR images via particle swarm optimisation technique

The present paper explores both the Kapur's and Tsallis entropy for a three level thresholding of brain MR images. The optimal thresholds are obtained by the maximisation of these entropies using a population-based search technique called as particle swarm optimisation (PSO). The algorithm is implemented for the segregation of various tissue constituents, i.e., cerebral spinal fluid (CSF), white matter (WM) and grey matter (GM) region from the simulated images obtained from the brain web database. The efficacy of the thresholding methods was evaluated by the measure of the spatial overlap, i.e., the Dice coefficient (Dice). The experimental results show that: 1) for both the WM and CSF the Tsallis entropy outperforms the Kapur's entropy by achieving an average value of 0.967279 and 0.878031 respectively; 2) for the GM, the Kapur's entropy is more beneficial which is duly justified by the mean value of Dice which was 0.851025 for this case.
Explorer Accelerated Long-Term Forgetting Can Become Apparent Within 3-8 Hours of Wakefulness in Patients With Transient Epileptic Amnesia

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Outcome of patients with acute coronary syndromes and moderate coronary lesions undergoing deferral of revascularization based on fractional flow reserve assessment

Objectives: To determine the outcome of consecutive patients with and without acute coronary syndromes (ACS) in whom revascularization was deferred on the basis of fractional flow reserve (FFR). Background: FFR < 0.75 correlates with ischemia on noninvasive tests and deferral of treatment on the basis of FFR is associated with low event rates in selected populations. Whether these low event rates apply to patients undergoing assessment of moderate stenoses in association with an ACS is not known and is an important clinical question. Methods: Retrospective analysis and 12 month follow‐up of consecutive, moderate (50–70%) de novo coronary lesions assessed with FFR. Results: Revascularization was deferred in 120 lesions (111 patients) with FFR ≥ 0.75. ACS was present in 35 patients (40 lesions). The clinical, angiographic and coronary hemodynamic characteristics of patients with and without ACS were similar. Among the 35 patients with ACS, there were 3 deaths, 1 MI, and 6 target vessel revascularizations (TVRs) (15% of lesions). Among the 76 patients without ACS, there were 5 deaths, 1 MI, and 7 TVR's (9% of lesions). Conclusions: Deferral of revascularization based on FFR in patients with ACS and moderate coronary stenoses is associated with acceptable and low event rates at 1 year. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Temperature Controllability in Cross-FLow Heat Exchangers and Long Ducts.

by Sorour Abdulhadi Alotaibi The performance of thermal control systems has, in recent years, improved in numerous ways due to developments in control theory and information technology. However, our understanding of controllability and related questions remain rudimentary. The main characteristics of thermal systems that we are interested in are their distributed nature and delay due to fluid advection from one point to another. Two basic systems, heat exchangers and long ducts, are investigated, and the following issues are addressed. (a) The first is controllability for which conductiveconvective systems and cross-flow heat exchangers are examined in detail. In the heat exchanger, controllability results for different choices of the manipulated variable are presented. (b) The second is the control methodology for the outlet temperature in cross-flow heat exchangers. A transient model is developed and tested. The response of this system to control strategies is studied and the performance of a Proportional-Integral (PI) controller to disturbances in the system is presented. (c) The third is the effect of delay in heating or cooling in long ducts in which the flow velocity is the manipulated variable. The governing first-order partial differential equation is transformed to a nonlinear dynamical system represented by an integrodifferential equation in the residence time of the fluid in the duct. Both Eulerian and Lagrangian versions of the equation are numerically solved. A PI-based controller Sorour Abdulhadi Alotaibi is used to control the duct outlet temperature. Investigation of the linear stability of the system leads to a transcendental equation for which Pontryagin’s Theorem can be applied. The stability map for the controller parameters is obtained and the effect of the residence time on the system stability is determined. Simple as well as suband super-critical Hopf bifurcations are found.
Dyonic black holes in the theory of two electromagnetic potentials. II

The results obtained in our previous paper are now extended to the case of stationary axially symmetric dyonic black boles within the theory of two electromagnetic potentials. We slightly enlarge the classical Ernst formalism by introducing, with the aid of the $t$- and $\varphi$-components of the dual potential $B_\mu$, the magnetic potential $\Phi_m$ which, similar to the known electric potential $\Phi_e$, also takes constant value on the black hole horizon. We analyze in detail the case of the dyonic Kerr-Newman black hole and show how the Komar mass must be evaluated correctly in this stationary dyonic model. In particular, we rigorously prove the validity of the standard Tomimatsu mass formula and point out that attempts to"improve"it made in recent years are explained by misunderstanding of the auxiliary role that singular potentials play in the description of magnetic charges. Our approach is symmetrical with respect to electric and magnetic charges and, like in the static case considered earlier, Dirac strings of all kind are excluded from the physical picture of the stationary black hole dyonic spacetimes.
The cytoplasmic tail of fibrocystin contains a ciliary targeting sequence

The primary cilium is a ubiquitous eukaryotic organelle that plays vital roles in the development of mammals and in the etiology of diseases such as polycystic kidney disease and blindness. It is thought that primary cilia function as cellular antennae to monitor the extracellular environment and report this information back to the cell. This small organelle is composed of hundreds of proteins assembled onto a microtubule-based cytoskeleton that projects from the surface of the cell and is surrounded by an extension of the plasma membrane. Although contiguous with the plasma membrane, the ciliary membrane is unique, as cells have the ability to localize receptors and other membrane proteins specifically to this domain. This polarized distribution of proteins is required for the cilium to carry out its sensory function, but little is known about how the cell achieves this distribution. To learn more about the mechanism of ciliary targeting of membrane proteins, we characterized the ciliary targeting sequence (CTS) in fibrocystin. Fibrocystin is the gene product of the human autosomal recessive polycystic kidney disease gene, PKHD1 (Onuchic et al., 2002; Ward et al., 2002). Patients with defects in this gene develop severe cystic kidney disease along with defects in the lung, pancreas, and liver. Fibrocystin is a large (>4,000 residues), single-pass transmembrane protein that is predicted to be entirely extracellular except for a short 190 residue C-terminal tail. Fibrocystin has been localized to cilia and centrosomes in mammalian cells (Ward et al., 2003, 2006; Menezes et al., 2004; Wang et al., 2004; Zhang et al., 2004), and a Chlamydomonas reinhardtii homologue was found in cilia (Pazour et al., 2005).
Normal estimation of point cloud based on sub-neighborhood clustering

In this paper, we propose a method to estimate normal vectors based on neighborhood clustering segmentation, which improves the accuracy of normal-vector estimation for sharp features. The proposed method adjusts the neighborhood through Gauss mapping and clustering segmentation to solve the problem of inaccurate estimation of the normal vector in the sharp-feature region. First, the normal vectors of the point cloud are initially estimated by principal component analysis (PCA). Next, the neighborhood of points from different patches, which are close to the sharp feature, are mapped to a unit Gauss sphere, and the point cloud on the unit sphere is clustered. All points of the cluster belonging to the target point are divided into sub-neighborhoods. Finally, with this sub-neighborhood as input, the normal vector of the point is accurately calculated by PCA. Experiments show that, even for noise and non-uniform sampling, the method proposed herein outperforms previous methods in terms of quality of results and running time.
On the Brun spectral sequence for topological Hochschild homology

We generalize a spectral sequence of Brun for the computation of topological Hochschild homology. The generalized version computes the $E$-homology of $THH(A;B)$, where $E$ is a ring spectrum, $A$ is a commutative $S$-algebra and $B$ is a connective commutative $A$-algebra. The input of the spectral sequence are the topological Hochschild homology groups of $B$ with coefficients in the $E$-homology groups of $B \wedge_A B$. The mod $p$ and $v_1$ topological Hochschild homology of connective complex $K$-theory has been computed by Ausoni and later again by Rognes, Sagave and Schlichtkrull. We present an alternative, short computation using the generalized Brun spectral sequence.
Scanning X-ray microscopy with large solid angle X-ray fluorescence detection at the XUV beamline P04, DESY

The presented scanning transmission X-ray microscope (STXM), built on top of a modular platform, combines soft X-ray transmission and fluorescence microscopy with high detection efficiency and high spatial resolution. The setups user concept as well as the large solid angle (> 1 sr) of the integrated Silicon-drift-detector are unique characteristics of this endstation. In combination with the soft X-ray beamline P04 at PETRA III (DESY), it delivers a new type of nanoscope, providing a high flexibility and very low acquisition times.
WHO TEACHES MATH FOR TEACHERS

Math for Teachers courses are specialised mathematics content courses whose nominal aim is to build conceptual mathematics understanding in prospective elementary school teachers. But who teaches these courses? This paper offers some insights into this question, exploring the views of two particular instructors whose interview responses reveal very different perspectives on their goals for this course with respect to knowledge-for-teaching, beliefs about mathematics, and the attitudes/emotions of their students.
Factors associated with self-rated health in primary care

Abstract Background: Self-rated health (SRH) measures one’s current general health and is a widely used health indicator. Sleep problems, somatic health complaints, and unmet needs in interpersonal relationships are suspected to influence SRH, but studies in primary health care settings are sparse. Objective: To examine the associations between patients’ self-rated health and their sleep problems, somatic health complaints, and unmet needs in interpersonal relationships. Design: We collected data via questionnaires for this cross-sectional study from general practice. Setting: Primary health care in Norway. Subjects: 1302 consecutive patients participated. Main outcome measures: The questionnaire included a single question about SRH, the Bergen Insomnia Scale (BIS), five questions on somatic health complaints, and three questions from the Basic Psychological Needs Scale (BPNS) pertaining to the relationships domain. We analyzed our data using ordinal logistic regression models. Results: Our response rate was 74%. The prevalence of fair/poor SRH was 26%, with no gender differences. We revealed a significant association between increasing age and reduced SRH. The study showed that sleep problems and somatic health complaints were strongly associated with SRH, and unmet needs in relationships were also significantly and independently associated with reduced SRH in a full model analysis. Conclusion: Sleep problems, somatic health complaints, and unmet needs in interpersonal relationships were all associated with reduced SRH. These factors are all modifiable and could be managed both within and outside a primary care setting in order to improve SRH. Key Points There was a high prevalence of reduced SRH in clinical general practice Sleep problems, somatic health complaints, and unmet needs in interpersonal relationships were all associated with reduced SRH These predictors are all modifiable with a potential to improve SRH
Attentive Context Normalization for Robust Permutation-Equivariant Learning

Many problems in computer vision require dealing with sparse, unstructured data in the form of point clouds. Permutation-equivariant networks have become a popular solution - they operate on individual data points with simple perceptrons and extract contextual information with global pooling strategies. In this paper, we propose Attentive Context Normalization (ACN), a simple yet effective technique to build permutation-equivariant networks robust to outliers. Specifically, we show how to normalize the feature maps with weights that are estimated within the network so that outliers are excluded from the normalization. We use this mechanism to leverage two types of attention: local and global - by combining them, our method is able to find the essential data points in high-dimensional space in order to solve a given task. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that our approach, which we call Attentive Context Networks (ACNe), provides a significant leap in performance compared to the state-of-the-art on camera pose estimation, robust fitting, and point cloud classification under the presence of noise and outliers.
A Ketogenic Diet in Combination with Gemcitabine Increases Survival in Pancreatic Cancer KPC Mice

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) continues to be a major health problem. A ketogenic diet (KD), characterized by a very low carbohydrate and high fat composition, has gained attention for its antitumor potential. We evaluated the effect and mechanisms of feeding a strict KD alone or in combination with gemcitabine in the autochthonous LSL-KrasG12D/+; LSL-Trp53 R172H/+; Pdx1-Cre (KPC) mouse model. For this purpose, both male and female pancreatic tumor-bearing KPC mice were allocated to a control diet (CD; %kcal: 65% carb, 15% protein, 20% fat), a KD (%kcal: 1% carb, 15% protein, 84% fat), a CD + gemcitabine (CG), or a KD + gemcitabine (KG) group. Mice fed a KD alone or in combination with gemcitabine showed significantly increased blood β-hydroxybutyrate levels compared with mice fed a CD or CG. KPC mice fed a KG had a significant increase in overall median survival compared with KPC mice fed a CD (increased overall median survival by 42%). Interestingly, when the data were disaggregated by sex, the effect of a KG was significant in female KPC mice (60% increase in median overall survival), but not in male KPC mice (28% increase in median overall survival). Mechanistically, the enhanced survival response to a KD combined with gemcitabine was multifactorial, including inhibition of ERK and AKT pathways, regulation of fatty acid metabolism and the modulation of the gut microbiota. In summary, a KD in combination with gemcitabine appears beneficial as a treatment strategy in PDAC in KPC mice, deserving further clinical evaluation. Significance: This article is the first preclinical study to comprehensively evaluate the effect of a KD alongside chemotherapy using a standard autochthonous genetically modified mouse model (in both male and female KPC mice).
Sea breeze in the Colombian Caribbean coast

Circulation of sea breeze is a well-known and important mesoscale system, boosted by different properties of reception and storage of solar heat between land and sea during one day, and its effect on waves, currents, and transport of atmospheric contaminants, among others, has been proven. The aim of this work is to characterize sea breeze in three coastal zones of the Colombian Caribbean, in the north of South America: Riohacha, Barranquilla, and Santa Marta, through the analysis of data from the Instituto de Hidrologia, Meteorologia y Estudios Ambientales (Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies Institute) of Colombia during the period 1981-2008, and a detail analysis in the city of Santa Marta with data from the station of the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University of Bogota in the period January 1 st to December 31, 2010. Gustavsson´s method was used to identify the marine breeze cycle, its duration, frequency, and hourly pattern; hodograph representation and spectral analysis were performed according to the periodogram modified by the Welch method. It was established that the marine breeze signal in the Colombian Caribbean coast is stronger during the dry season (December-March), when it reaches the highest gradients of sea-land temperature and with a predominantly diurnal component. In the city of Santa Marta and central Caribbean, the sea breeze is stronger and more defined compared to those of the cities of Riohacha at the northeast, and Barranquilla at the southwest, reaching an estimated medium value of 4 m s –1 in March, and minimum values of 2 m s –1 in August. In Barranquilla, the sea breeze signal reaches 2.5 m s –1 , while in Riohacha it reaches 1.5 m s –1 , both in the dry season (December-March). According to the results, the strong signal in the city of Santa Marta is related to the gradient of 3 oC between the sea-land temperature in the dry season, while in Barranquilla is 1.2 oC, and in Riohacha it is less than 1oC. Despite having observed a sea-land temperature gradient close to 2.5 oC in July in the city of Riohacha, the hodograph is not well defined, and the signal magnitude is not strong, which could be related to the presence of strong synoptic winds almost the whole year, the desert landscape of the zone, and its geographical position. This the first scientific work related to marine breeze in this region of the Caribbean, and its results constitute an important base for studying the effect that such breezes may have on the spectrum of waves, upwelling, and especially in the transport of contaminants, given that Santa Marta is one of the most important harbors of mineral coal in Colombia, and one of the main touristic destinations in the northern Colombian coast.
The WR-HSS Methods for Non-Self-Adjoint Positive Definite Linear Differential Equations and Applications to the Unsteady Discrete Elliptic Problem

We consider the numerical methods for non-self-adjoint positive definite linear differential equations, L(x) = B _ x + Ax = q; x(0) = x0; (1) with B being Hermitian and A being non-Hermitian positive definite, and their corresponding applications to the unsteady discrete elliptic problem, which is derived from spatial discretization of the unsteady elliptic problem with Dirichlet boundary condition, i.e., ( @u @t r [a(x)ru(x)] + P d j=1 @ @xj (p(x)u(x)) = f(x); u(x; 0) = u0(x); x2
Agriculture and Biology Journal of North America Antibacterial, Cytotoxic and Antioxidant Activity of Chloroform, N-hexane and Ethyl Acetate Extract of Plant Coccinia Cordifolia

The main aim of this study was to find out the antibacterial, cytotoxic and antioxidant activity of chloroform, n-hexane and ethyl acetate extracts of Coccinia cordifolia (Family: Cucurbitaceae). Disc diffusion technique was used for in vitro antibacterial screening against gram positive and gram negative human pathogenic bacteria. Here kanamycin disc (30g/disc) was used as standard. The chloroform extract of Coccinia cordifolia showed good antibacterial activity with the average zone of inhibition 9-12mm. The n-hexane and ethyl acetate extract showed average zone of inhibition 7-10mm and 7-11mm respectively. The Brine shrimp lethality bioassay method was used to determine the cytotoxic activity and vincristine sulphate was used as positive control. The LC 50 values of standard vincristine sulphate, chloroform, n-hexane and ethyl acetate extract were 7. 55µg/ml, 23.96 µg/ml, 14.12 µg/ml & 15.49 µg/ml respectively which indicate the plants extracts compounds are promisingly cytotoxic and they might have antitumer and pesticidal activity. Among the extracts the chloroform extract showed the highest cytotoxic activity with LC 50 23.96 µg/ml. Antioxidant activity test of the crude extracts were assessed by means of DPPH free radical scavenging method where ascorbic acid was used as standard with IC 50 43.22 µg/ml. The ethyl acetate fraction of Coccinia cordifolia showed strongest antioxidant activity with IC 50 value of 50.98 µg/ml.
Modeling and parameter identification of crystalline silicon photovoltaic devices

In this paper the physical correctness of the standard single-exponential (one-diode) model of crystalline-Si photovoltaic devices is examined. In particular, we focus on the shunt current. I-V curves of in situ illuminated polycrystalline-Si photovoltaic modules are measured, and based on these measurements, we extract the shunt current. There is a certain voltage range in which the shunt current shows an Ohmic-like behavior, but the value of the resistance varies with irradiance and the quality of illumination. In addition, the Ohmic behavior takes place at voltages well below the maximum-power point (MPP). At higher voltages, the shunt current drops to negligible values. We conclude that it is physically incorrect to model a crystalline-PV device with a constant value of the shunt resistance.
Delft University of Technology Efficient Optical Flow and Stereo Vision for Velocity Estimation and Obstacle Avoidance on an Autonomous Pocket Drone

Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) are very suitable for flying in indoor environments, but autonomous navigation is challenging due to their strict hardware limitations. This paper presents a highly efficient computer vision algorithm called EdgeFS for the determination of velocity and depth. It runs at 20 Hz on a 4 g stereo camera with an embedded STM32F4 microprocessor (168 MHz, 192 kB) and uses edge distributions to calculate optical flow and stereo disparity. The stereo-based distance estimates are used to scale the optical flow in order to retrieve the drone’s velocity. The velocity and depth measurements are used for fully autonomous flight of a 40 g pocket drone only relying on on-board sensors. This method allows the MAV to control its velocity and avoid obstacles.