Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Trend Time–Series Modeling and Forecasting With Neural Networks

Despite its great importance, there has been no general consensus on how to model the trends in time-series data. Compared to traditional approaches, neural networks (NNs) have shown some promise in time-series forecasting. This paper investigates how to best model trend time series using NNs. Four different strategies (raw data, raw data with time index, detrending, and differencing) are used to model various trend patterns (linear, nonlinear, deterministic, stochastic, and breaking trend). We find that with NNs differencing often gives meritorious results regardless of the underlying data generating processes (DGPs). This finding is also confirmed by the real gross national product (GNP) series.
Topographic mapping of Mars: From hectometer to micrometer scales

We describe USGS topomapping of Mars at resolutions from 100 m to 30 μm with data from the latest spacecraft missions. Analysis of NASA 2001 Mars Odyssey Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) data combining daytime visible reflected, daytime IR emitted, and nighttime IR emitted images allows us to isolate the physical effects of topography, albedo, and thermal inertia. To a good approximation these physical influences interact linearly so that maps showing topographic shading, albedo, and relative thermal inertia can be produced by simple algebraic manipulation of the coregistered images. The shading map resembles an airbrush shaded relief portrayal of the surface, and can be used as the input for quantitative reconstruction of topography by photoclinometry (PC) at 100-m resolution over most of the planet. The High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) of the ESA Mars Express orbiter includes a 9-line scanner for color and stereo imaging and a Super-Resolution Channel (SRC). We analyze these images with a combination of USGS ISIS cartographic software and commercial photogrammetric software, providing an independent check on the stereo processing pipeline developed by the HRSC team. In particular, we are producing very high resolution digital elevation models (DEMs) from the SRC images by photoclinometry and by stereoanalysis, using Mars Orbiter Camera images to complete the stereopair. The NASA Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) carry a diverse set of cameras: two wide-angle hazard camera pairs, panoramic stereo imagers (Pancam and Navcam), and a Microscopic Imager (MI) that images a 3-cm-square area at 30 μm/pixel resolution. Our work emphasizes MI data and includes geometric calibration, bundle-adjustment, mosaicking, generation of DEMs by stereoanalysis and focal sectioning, and combination of MI images with color data from Pancam. The software being developed to support these analyses can also be used to produce high-precision controlled mosaics, DEMs, and other products from the Pancam and Navcam images. * Corresponding author.
ATTITUDE OF STUDENTS TO ADULT EDUCATION AS A COURSE OF STUDY: A CASE STUDY OF THE EKITI STATE UNIVERSITY, ADO EKITI

The paper examined the attitudes of Students to Adult Education as a course of Study. The population consisted of students from the Faculty of Arts and Education out of which 366 samples were chosen for the study. One hypothesis was generated for the study which sought to examine the difference in attitude of students to adult education at entry point and their attitude after exposure to adult education as a course of study. A self designed questionnaire was used to elicit responses from the respondents (one at entry point and another after exposure to adult education as a course of study. The mean scores and standard deviation of the responses were determined and later subjected to t-test statistical tool. The findings reveal that because students were ignorant of what adult education is all about, students are lethargic to it as a course of study. The study among others recommended that adult education should be made a prerequisite course for students as adult education is a course for all time personal as well as national development.
Time Course of Inflammatory Gene Expression Following Crush Injury in Murine Skeletal Muscle

Background Early inflammation and secretion of proinflammatory cytokines such as IL-1&bgr;, IL-6, and TNF-&agr; act as the key drivers to regulate inflammation after muscle injury. However, the effects of these key proinflammatory drivers in a noninvasive crush injury model are not well known. Understanding these effects is important for treating crush injuries that occur during natural disasters and military conflicts. Purpose We studied the timed mRNA expression of IL-1&bgr;, IL-6, and TNF-&agr; in a noninvasive murine crush injury model to further understand their impact on proinflammatory cytokine pathways that are activated within the first 48 hours after a crush muscle injury. Methods A total of 25 mice were anesthetized and placed on a crush injury apparatus platform with the apparatus piston situated in direct contact with intact skin overlying the right gastrocnemius muscle. Pressure at 45 psi was applied to the piston for 30 seconds for two applications. The mice recovered for either 4, 8, 24, or 48 hours postinjury, after which we harvested the gastrocnemius muscle of both legs. Microarray, confirmatory real-time polymerase chain reaction, and immunolabeling experiments were followed by a microarray time-course analysis. Results Muscle IL-1&bgr; mRNA rose 270-fold within 4 hours and declined rapidly at 8 hours to 196-fold, 24 hours to 96-fold, and 48 hours to 10-fold. Muscle IL-6 followed the same pattern, with a 34-fold increase at 4 hours, 29-fold increase at 8 hours, 10-fold increase at 24 hours, and 5-fold increase at 48 hours. Ingenuity Pathway Analysis of IL-6 identified activation of two major downstream signaling pathways (IL-6/Stat3 and IL-1&bgr;/Egr1) as key activators of inflammation, regeneration, and fibrosis. Discussion Closed crush muscle injury produced robust muscle cytokine expression levels, and the microarray findings allowed us to generate our most novel hypothesis: that high expression of IL-1&bgr;, IL-6, and TNF-&agr; may be related to the downregulation of mitochondrial genes early after injury and triggers activation of genes in the repair and fibrosis machinery. The significance of these findings and the identified expression pathways of IL1-&bgr;, IL-6, and TNF-&agr; and their downstream targets in skeletal muscle will allow us to further investigate targets for improved muscle recovery and limb-saving interventions.
Intracellular transport and localization of major histocompatibility complex class II molecules and associated invariant chain

The intracellular transport and location of major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class II molecules and associated invariant chain (Ii) were investigated in a human melanoma cell line. In contrast to the class II molecules, which remain stable for greater than 4 h after synthesis, the associated Ii is proteolytically processed within 2 h. During or shortly after synthesis the NH2-terminal cytoplasmic and membrane-spanning segment is in some of the Ii molecules cleaved off; during intracellular transport, class II associated and membrane integrated Ii is processed from its COOH terminus in distinct steps in endocytic compartments. Immunocytochemical studies at the light and electron microscopic level revealed the presence of class II molecules, but not of Ii on the cell surface. Intracellularly both Ii and class II molecules were localized in three morphologically and kinetically distinct compartments, early endosomes, multivesicular bodies, and prelysosomes. This localization in several distinct endosomal compartments contrasts with the localization of class II molecules in mainly one endocytic compartment in B lymphoblastoid cell lines. As in these lymphoblastoid cell lines Ii is known to be rapidly degraded it is conceivable that the rate of proteolysis of the class II associated Ii and its dissociation from class II molecules modulates the retention of the oligomeric complex in endocytic compartments, and as a consequence the steady-state distribution of these molecules within the endosomal system.
RBTA: A Multivariate Time-Series Method for City Incidents Mining and Forecasting

Mining and forecasting time-series incidents in large cities is very useful for the administration. However, most of the existing time-series prediction methods use univariate models which ignore the relationship among different city incidents. This paper proposes RBTA, a multivariate time-series model, to find the patterns including basic trend, seasonality, irregular components and relationship among different incidents. We evaluate our model on the real dataset from the downtown area of Shanghai, one the biggest metropolitan of the world. The average forecasting root mean squared error(RMSE) is 0.15, which decreases 4.9% comparing to the best one of the existing methods.
Fountain Codes Over GF(q)

Binary fountain codes such as Luby transform codes are a class of erasure codes which have demonstrated an asymptotic performance close to the Shannon limit when decoded with the belief propagation algorithm. When these codes are generalized to GF(q) for q > 2, their performance approaches the Shannon limit much faster than the usual binary fountain codes. In this paper, we extend binary fountain codes to GF(q). In particular, we generalize binary Luby transform codes to GF(q) to develop a low complexity maximum likelihood decoder. The proposed codes have numerous advantages, including low coding overhead, low encoding and decoding complexity, and good performance over various message block lengths, making them practical for real-time applications. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The Percentage Occupancy Hit or Miss Transform

The Hit or Miss Transform (HMT) is a well known morphological technique which can be used for shape and object recognition in digital image processing. The standard HMT is a particularly powerful tool for locating objects which are noise free in both the background and foreground regions, do not exhibit internal texture and where objects have well defined edges. Often for various reasons, objects of interest do not exhibit such qualities and as a result may not be detected by the standard HMT. This paper proposes a percentage occupancy based Hit or Miss Transform for the detection of objects subject to noisy edges, internal texture, holes and non homogeneous intensity.
Host Specificity And Co-Speciation In Avian Haemosporidia In The Western Cape, South Africa

Host and pathogen ecology are often closely linked, with evolutionary processes often leading to the development of host specificity traits in some pathogens. Host specificity may range from ‘generalist’, where pathogens infect any available competent host; to ‘specialist’, where pathogens repeatedly infect specific host species or families. Avian malaria ecology in the region remains largely unexplored, despite the presence of vulnerable endemic avian species. We analysed the expression of host specificity in avian haemosporidia, by applying a previously developed host specificity index to lineages isolated from wetland passerines in the Western Cape, South Africa. Parasite lineages were isolated using PCR and identified when possible using matching lineages deposited in GenBank and in MalAvi. Parasitic clades were constructed from phylogenetic trees consisting of Plasmodium and Haemoproteus lineages. Isolated lineages matched some strains of Plasmodium relictum, P. elongatum, Haemoproteus sylvae and H. lanii. Plasmodium lineages infected a wide range of hosts from several avian families in a generalist pattern of infection. Plasmodium spp. also exhibited an infection trend according to host abundance rather than host species. By contrast, Haemoproteus lineages were typically restricted to one or two host species or families, and displayed higher host fidelity than Plasmodium spp. The findings confirm that a range of host specificity traits are exhibited by avian haemosporidia in the region. The traits show the potential to not only impact infection prevalence within specific host species, but also to affect patterns of infection at the community level.
Nerve growth factors (NGF, BDNF) enhance axonal regeneration but are not required for survival of adult sensory neurons

Largely on the basis of studies with nerve growth factor (NGF), it is now widely accepted that development of the peripheral nervous system of vertebrates is dependent in part on the interaction of immature sensory and autonomic neurons with specific survival factors that are derived from peripheral target fields. I have found, in marked contrast to an absolute requirement for NGF during development, that adult rat dorsal root ganglion sensory neurons are not dependent on NGF or other survival factors for long-term (3-4 weeks) maintenance in vitro. When dissociated and enriched, at least 70-80% of adult DRG neurons survived and extended long processes either in the absence of exogenously added NGF or upon the removal of any possible source of endogenous NGF or other neurotrophic activity (i.e., nonneuronal cells, in chemically defined culture medium, in the presence of an excess of anti-NGF antibodies, or when cultured as single neurons in microwells). Although not required for survival or expression of a range of complex morphologies, both NGF and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) were found to stimulate the regeneration of axons from adult DRG neurons.
Risk of Gastrointestinal Disease Associated with Exposure to Pathogens in the Sediments of the Lower Passaic River

ABSTRACT High levels of pathogenic microorganisms have been documented previously in waters of the Lower Passaic River in northern New Jersey. The purpose of this study was to characterize the microbial contamination of river sediments near combined sewer overflows (CSOs), a known source of pathogens. Concentrations of fecal coliform, total coliform, fecal Streptococcus, fecal Enterococcus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus aureus, Giardia lamblia, and Cryptosporidium parvum organisms were measured in 16 samples from three mudflat locations along the Lower Passaic River, as well as from an upstream location. Selected samples were also analyzed for antibiotic resistance. All of the samples contained high concentrations of total coliform, fecal coliform, fecal Streptococcus, and fecal Enterococcus organisms. Analysis of isolates of Staphylococcus aureus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Escherichia coli from several samples indicated that each strain was resistant to at least one antibiotic typically used in clinical settings. Eight of 16 samples contained Giardia, and one sample contained Cryptosporidium. With these sampling data, a quantitative microbial risk assessment was conducted to evaluate the probability of infection or illness resulting from incidental ingestion of contaminated sediments over a 1-year period. Three potential exposure scenarios were considered: visitor, recreator, and homeless person. Single-event risk was first evaluated for the three individual exposure scenarios; overall risk was then determined over a 1-year period using Monte Carlo techniques to characterize uncertainty. For fecal Streptococcus and Enterococcus, annualized risk estimates for gastrointestinal illness ranged from approximately 0.42 to 0.53 for recreators, 0.07 to 0.10 for visitors, and 0.62 to 0.72 for homeless individuals across the three sampling locations. Annualized risk of Giardia infection ranged from 0.14 to 0.64 for recreators, 0.01 to 0.1 for visitors, and 0.30 to 0.87 for homeless individuals, across all locations where detected. Cryptosporidium was detected at one location, and the corresponding annualized risk of infection was 0.32, 0.05, and 0.51 for recreators, visitors, and homeless individuals, respectively. This risk assessment suggests that pathogen-contaminated sediments near areas of CSO discharge in the Lower Passaic River could pose a health risk to individuals coming into contact with sediments in the mudflat areas.
International Journal of Video& Image Processing and Netwo Rk Security Blind Separation of Nonlinear Mixing Signals Using Kernel with Slow Feature Analysis

This paper describes a hybrid blind source separation approach (HBS S A) for nonlinear mixing model (NL-BS S). The proposed hybrid scheme combines simply the kernel-feature spaces separation technique (KTDS EP) and the principle of the slow feature analysis (S FA). The nonlinear mixed data is mapped to high dimensional feature space using kernel-based method. Then, the linear blind source separation (BS S) based on the slow feature analysis (S FA) is used to extract the most slowness vectors among the independent data vectors. The proposed scheme is based on the following four key features: 1) estimating an orthonormal bases, 2) mapping the data into the subspace using this orthonormal bases, 3) applying linear BS S on the mapping data to make the data vectors in the feature spaces are independent, 4) Applying the principle of slow feature analysis on the mapping data to select the desired signals. The S FA provides the dimension reduction according to the most independent and slowing variable signals. Moreover, the orthonormal bases estimation in the wavelet domain is introduced in this work to reduce the complexity of the KTDS EP algorithm. The motivation of using the wavelet transform, in estimating the orthonormal bases, is based on the fact that the low frequency band in the wavelet domain contains the significant power of the signal. The advantages of the proposed method are the fast estimation of the orthonormal bases and the dimension reduction of the estimating data vectors. Performed computer simulations have shown the effectiveness of the idea, even in presence of strong nonlinearities and synthetic mixture of real world data. Our extensive experiments have confirmed that the proposed procedure provides promising results. I. INTRODUCTION The problem of blind source separation (BSS) consists on the recovery of independent sources from their mixture. This is important in several applications like speech enhancement, telecommunication, biomedical signal processing, etc. Most of the work on BSS mainly addresses the cases of instantaneous linear mixture [1]-[5]. Let A is a real or complex rectangular (n×m; n≥m) matrix, the data model for linear mixture can be expressed as follows:
Antibody responses in postsplenectomy trauma patients receiving the 23-valent pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine at 14 versus 28 days postoperatively.

BACKGROUND We have previously demonstrated, using functional antibody assays, that patients undergoing splenectomy for trauma exhibit a better response to pneumococcal immunization when vaccinated at 14 days postoperatively versus 1 or 7 days. However, patients immunized at 14 days failed to reach the response of normal controls. This study was conducted to determine whether even later immunization would improve the antibody response. METHODS Forty surviving patients undergoing emergent splenectomy were randomized to receive Pneumovax at 14 or 28 days after splenectomy. Blood samples were drawn at the time of vaccination (prevaccination) and 4 weeks later (postvaccination). A control group of 24 healthy adults was used for comparison. Antibody titers to four of the most common serotypes were determined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay and opsonophagocytic assay (OPA). RESULTS Samples from 38 patient were analyzed. Each serotype and each group tested demonstrated a statistically significant increase in geometric mean enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay immunoglobulin G antibody concentration (microg/mL) and OPA titer (1/dilution) after vaccination. There were no statistically significant differences (p >or= 0.07) in the immunoglobulin G antibody concentrations and OPA titers between the 14-day or the 28-day study groups when compared with normal healthy adults regardless of the serotype tested. In addition, there were no differences in the antibody responses between the 14-day and the 28-day study groups. CONCLUSION Despite our previous study suggesting that delay in vaccination after emergent splenectomy resulted in improved antibody response, antibody response was not improved any further by delaying vaccination to 28 days.
Apes Save Tools for Future Use

Planning for future needs, not just current ones, is one of the most formidable human cognitive achievements. Whether this skill is a uniquely human adaptation is a controversial issue. In a study we conducted, bonobos and orangutans selected, transported, and saved appropriate tools above baseline levels to use them 1 hour later (experiment 1). Experiment 2 extended these results to a 14-hour delay between collecting and using the tools. Experiment 3 showed that seeing the apparatus during tool selection was not necessary to succeed. These findings suggest that the precursor skills for planning for the future evolved in great apes before 14 million years ago, when all extant great ape species shared a common ancestor.
Toward Heisenberg-Limited Spectroscopy with Multiparticle Entangled States

The precision in spectroscopy of any quantum system is fundamentally limited by the Heisenberg uncertainty relation for energy and time. For N systems, this limit requires that they be in a quantum-mechanically entangled state. We describe a scalable method of spectroscopy that can potentially take full advantage of entanglement to reach the Heisenberg limit and has the practical advantage that the spectroscopic information is transferred to states with optimal protection against readout noise. We demonstrate our method experimentally with three beryllium ions. The spectroscopic sensitivity attained is 1.45(2) times as high as that of a perfect experiment with three non-entangled particles.
MusicRainbow: A New User Interface to Discover Artists Using Audio-based Similarity and Web-based Labeling

In this paper we present MusicRainbow which is a simple interface for discovering artists where colors encode different types of music. MusicRainbow is based on a new audiobased approach to compute artist similarity. This approach scores 15 percentage points higher in a genre classification task than the similarity computed on track level. Using a traveling salesman algorithm, similar artists are mapped near each other on a circular rainbow. Furthermore, we present a new approach of combining this audio-based information with information from the web. In particular, we label the rainbow and summarize the artists with words extracted from web pages related to the artists. We use different vocabularies for different hierarchical levels and heuristics to select the most descriptive labels. We conclude with a discussion of the results. The first impressions are very promising.
Lie Detection from Multiple Cues: A Meta‐analysis

Summary Despite the importance of judgments of veracity in many settings, research suggests that it is difficult to detect lies. In this meta-analysis, we assess the detectability of lies from constellations of multiple cues, with a particular focus on whether lie detectability increases as the conditions approach real-life, forensic settings, as some critics of laboratory research have argued. We synthesized 144 samples, including 9380 liars and truth tellers providing a total of 26,866 messages. We examined the accuracy with which deception could be predicted on the basis of multiple behavioral cues and to what extent lie detectability was moderated by the motivation of the sender, the presence of strong emotion, the content of the lie, the context in which the lie was told, and the demographics of the senders. The findings show that lies can be detected with nearly 70% accuracy. This level of detectability is stable across settings. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.